The Last Maga Prisoner

Tina Peters is supposed to spend the next eight years of her life in prison. The former Colorado county clerk was convicted last year of charges tied to tampering with voting equipment under her control in 2020. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for Peters’s release, warning of “harsh measures” if she remains incarcerated. But even a president obsessed with retribution, who granted blanket clemency to people convicted of federal offenses connected to the January 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol, can’t erase Peters’s sentence. Her state-level conviction is beyond the reach of his federal pardon power. And so she sits in a Colorado prison, the most prominent MAGA prisoner still behind bars.

The sprawling campaign to “Free Tina Peters” is testing Colorado’s authority to enforce its own laws without interference from a federal government that wants to undo a conviction handed down by a jury. Trump—aided by the Justice Department, the Bureau of Prisons, White House counsel, and MAGA activists—is seeking to unravel her punishment in multiple ways, with the hope that one might work: a transfer into federal custody, a full pardon, or a release before the end of her sentence. (Her attorney and the Trump ally Steve Bannon recently floated on a podcast the idea of having Trump call in the 101st Airborne Division to set her free. The attorney said he’d “love to see that happen.”)

Trump’s embrace of Peters’s cause threatens to erode the public’s trust in the validity of electoral outcomes and the independence of state criminal-justice systems, constitutional experts told me. Election officials from around the country who have faced years of violent threats and harassment for defending the 2020 presidential vote—and each election since—told me the clamor around Peters signals to those who may seek to interfere in the 2026 midterm elections that they can flout the law with support from the White House.

Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday that he is granting Peters a “full Pardon,” but legal experts said his power doesn’t extend to state charges. The one person who could free Peters—Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat who has issued tepid public statements on the case, seems disinclined to offer Peters, a 70-year-old lung-cancer survivor, any leniency.

“I, like the president, have the values of compassion and mercy, and there’s been times when people are ill and we’ve let them out,” he told me in an interview this month. So far, he said, “the indications I’ve seen are that she’s healthy.” If circumstances change, he added, “I’ve told people publicly, as well as the White House,” that “we would consider doing something.”

In Mesa County, along the state’s snowy western slopes, where Peters once served as the chief election official, most people I spoke with seem to think that she is exactly where she belongs. “There’s not an uprising in Colorado to free Tina Peters,” Scott McInnis, a Republican who served as a congressman and county commissioner, told me.

But far from the state correctional facility where she finds herself, the effort to release Peters continues. Her attorney pursued Trump’s pardon for his client, who once regaled crowds with elaborate election-cheating theories. Peters is deteriorating in prison, even struggling to finish her own sentences, according to friends and attorneys who have seen her.

“Where is everybody,” read part of an “UPDATE FROM TINA PETERS: 364 Days of Injustice” posted on X in October. “The President has demanded my release four times … Why is the DOJ defying Trump’s demands? Get off your asses and get me out!”

Before she was celebrated as a martyr to the MAGA cause, Peters, with a white bob and red lipstick, was seen among supporters as a whistleblower who revealed irregularities in her county’s voting systems. Although Trump overwhelmingly won Mesa County in the 2020 election, he lost Colorado and its nine electoral votes.

In 2021, Peters believed she was in a position to help prove his stolen-election claims. Prosecutors said she deceived colleagues to obtain credentials that allowed an unauthorized person to access the county’s election equipment. Last year, a jury found her guilty of seven counts, including attempting to influence a public servant and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. Before sentencing her to almost nine years in prison, the judge said he was convinced that she would commit her crimes again, if she could.

“You are no hero, you abused your position, and you’re a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again,” Judge Matthew Barrett told her. Her constant undermining of election systems presented an immeasurable danger to democracy, he said.

Peters’s X account has continued to offer dubious election claims. (No one in her circle would say whether Peters, who is being held at a women’s prison in Pueblo, is actually posting the missives or whether someone else is.) She is appealing her conviction. Her legal team, political allies, and grassroots supporters have also spent much of the past year working to get Trump’s attention.

Shortly before the president’s inauguration, Peters’s X account noted that Polis was the only person who could pardon her, and tagged Trump. Soon after, her case was discussed with Trump as he hosted members of Congress at Mar-a-Lago, a person briefed on the discussion told me. Representative Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican who once represented Mesa County, spoke about the need to keep the U.S. Space Command’s headquarters in Colorado. Someone else brought up Peters’s case, the person said, and the president made clear he didn’t think the state should have put her in prison.

Soon after, amid a years-long battle over the future of the command, which is responsible for military operations in space, Boebert spoke with Polis and said that a Peters pardon could help prevent the president from relocating the headquarters, the person said. Polis told me that he talks regularly with Boebert but doesn’t remember “a particular discussion” where Peters “was discussed in the same breath” as the Space Command. (The congresswoman and her team didn’t answer my questions.)

The Justice Department lent its support to a federal habeas corpus petition that Peters brought earlier this year, a move described to me by former federal and state prosecutors as extraordinary. Citing a Trump executive order to address what the president described as the misuse of the government against political foes during the Biden administration, Justice Department lawyers said they were reviewing Peters’s prosecution to determine if it was “oriented more toward inflicting political pain” than pursuing justice. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a Democrat, said in a court filing that the DOJ’s intervention in the case was “unprecedented, highly problematic, and a threat to the rule of law.” A federal judge rejected the petition this week, saying that state court proceedings needed to play out. But the judge wrote that Peters raised “important constitutional questions concerning whether the trial court improperly punished her more severely because of her protected First Amendment speech.”

Trump has taken to Truth Social to argue that Peters was wrongly convicted and to threaten unspecified “harsh measures” if she remained incarcerated. He called her an “innocent Political Prisoner” and directed the DOJ to “take all necessary action” to secure her release. “FREE TINA PETERS, NOW!” he wrote in May.

Beyond Peters, Trump had a long list of complaints about Colorado, including efforts to keep him off the 2024 ballot, his subsequent 11-point election loss, and a portrait in the state capitol he denounced as “purposefully distorted” before its removal. In September, Trump announced he was moving the Space Command’s headquarters to Alabama, which the Department of the Air Force years ago identified as its preferred location. The president said Colorado’s “crooked” vote-by-mail system was a “big factor” in his decision. A White House official noted that Trump had chosen to house the headquarters in Alabama during his first term, before Joe Biden reversed that decision and kept it in Colorado. “POTUS was simply restoring his first term decision,” the official wrote in a statement.

Sitting inside the lobby of a Phoenix hotel during the Democratic Governors Association retreat this month, Polis would not say whether he had talked privately with the president about Peters. “I would just say any conversations have just been consistent,” he told me. When I asked Polis if Peters was a factor in any negotiations over the Space Command, the governor replied, “She committed a crime and she was prosecuted by a Republican D.A. in a Republican county, convicted by a jury of her peers in a very Republican area in our state.”

In early November, the president and his aides started searching for information about Dan Rubinstein, the Mesa County district attorney whose office had brought the case against Peters. Jeff Hurd, the Republican who represents the county in Congress, told the president that Rubinstein was a conservative and a principled lawman, two people familiar with their discussion told me.

On November 7, David Warrington, the top lawyer in the White House, sought to speak to Rubinstein, leaving a voicemail I obtained in response to a request for public records. “President Trump asked me to give you a call about a matter,” Warrington said. Rubinstein confirmed to me that he spoke with Warrington about Peters but would not divulge any details. A White House spokesperson did not comment on the call.

Days later, the Federal Bureau of Prisons asked state correctional officials to transfer Peters into its custody. The motivation for the request is unknown, but it coincided with an amplified social-media campaign mounted by MAGA influencers to get Peters released, along with claims from her attorneys and allies that she was “witness” to election crimes perpetrated by Democrats. Her lawyers and friends also said she had a worrisome persistent cough.

The Colorado Department of Corrections has not granted the request. Polis told me that Peters does not meet the criteria that would lead to a federal transfer—she’s not in danger, he said, and she doesn’t present a danger to others: “Neither one seems to be the case with this inmate, so our Department of Corrections has not requested a transfer.” Peters’s former colleagues have been more vocal. Giving Peters special treatment, they said, would undermine the entire judicial system. “It would imply that accountability for violations of Colorado law can be negotiated or avoided, while those who acted honorably were left to face the consequences alone,” the Colorado County Clerks Association wrote in a letter to the governor.

In a separate letter, Rubinstein and Weiser, the attorney general, described the transfer request to Polis as an attempt to bypass the state’s judicial system—“all to offer a politically connected inmate the comforts of an easier sentence.” At worst, they wrote, moving her to federal custody “could aid the unauthorized or illegal release of a convicted felon.”

Sitting behind his desk, near a giant portrait of Lady Justice, Rubinstein told me the federal government’s role in his business is limited. “This is a crime of local interest,” he said, adding, “We should be able to charge, try, and punish someone who commits crimes against our local people without interference.”

From Washington, Trump continued his pressure campaign, posting on his Truth Social that Peters was sitting in prison, “DYING & OLD.”

If Peters does not win her appeal, her attorney Peter Ticktin told me, she hopes to serve the remainder of her sentence at a federal women’s prison—preferably the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, West Virginia (where Martha Stewart served five months and learned how to crochet). Ticktin, a longtime friend of Trump, said it’s a better fit for the Gold Star mom, who he doesn’t think should be living with so many violent criminals. (She has been threatened and attacked, he wrote in a letter this month to Trump and his pardon office.) Plus, he said, she’d be close enough to Washington, D.C., that it would be easy for federal authorities to question her about the alleged election-related crimes she claims to have witnessed in Colorado.

Ticktin insists the transfer idea isn’t a backdoor way to win her release. “She’s not getting freed if that process takes place,” he said. If the U.S. were to take custody of her under false pretenses and then free her, he said, “that would destroy the whole system.”

Ticktin, who helped secure pardons for some of the January 6 rioters, said he is in touch with Ed Martin, Trump’s pardon attorney. Martin has indicated on social media and Bannon’s show that he is working to help Peters. In September, Martin said on his personal X account that Peters had just talked to him from prison. “Tina,” he wrote, “we are coming for you, M’am.” The Justice Department declined to comment.

Ticktin aggressively sought a presidential pardon for Peters, and he described to me at length a novel legal theory that would allow Trump’s decision to apply to state crimes. “I know that this may not seem like something that makes sense, because everybody knows that a president can only pardon for federal crimes,” Ticktin told me. “But that’s not actually true.” He rooted around for a copy of the Constitution and directed me to Article II, Section 2, which says: “The President … shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” Ticktin argues that at the time that it was written, “United States” referred to the individual states, not to a federal entity as it does today.

“It does not make sense that they intended to give individual states the power to circumvent the President’s power to pardon,” he wrote in a letter to Trump and the pardon office after we spoke. “The matter of Tina Peters is a perfect example of how the power of the President is being circumvented.”

Ticktin told me he thinks his argument “will pass muster before the Supreme Court.”

Despite the president’s attention and the clamor online within MAGA, there’s little uproar over Peters’s sentence in Grand Junction, Colorado, where she worked as the county clerk. “I’ve just sort of stopped paying attention,” one woman told me outside of the bagel shop where, police said, Peters resisted arrest. Half a dozen people at a restaurant said they had little sympathy for Peters. Others said they were horrified at the prospect that a jury verdict could be overridden by the federal government. A few Republicans told me they thought that Peters broke the law but that her sentence was excessive. Peters’s successor at the clerk’s office, Bobbie Gross, a Republican, prefers not to talk about the office’s prior occupant. But it’s becoming impossible not to. Polis, she said, “is going to pick a path, whatever that might be.” Hours after I met with her, Trump had more to say on Truth Social. He called Polis a “SLEAZEBAG” and “lightweight” who let his state “go to hell.” The president signed off: “FREE TINA!”

This week, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said it opened a civil investigation into conditions at Colorado correctional facilities and residential youth centers. The probe, viewed by some as retribution for Peters’s incarceration, will examine among other things whether the state provides adequate medical care and safe and sanitary conditions at its prisons. The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment. Harmeet Dhillon, the division head, noted on X that her office is also investigating prisons in other states. The Justice Department, she wrote, “has a duty to protect all Americans.”

Trump’s pardon announcement came in a Truth Social post “granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!” The idea that a president could pardon someone tried and convicted in state court, Weiser said in response to the post, “has no precedent in American law, would be an outrageous departure from what our constitution requires, and will not hold up.”

Other legal experts tell me that Trump and Peters’s lawyers will have a difficult task convincing the Supreme Court that presidential pardons extend to state crimes. Instead, Peters’s best chance of relief lies in Polis or the state’s parole board (she is eligible to appear before it in January 2029). The date falls after the presidential election, the lead-up to which will surely bring more of the conspiracy theories and misinformation that led Peters to prison. Election clerks nationwide take pride in the work they have done to ensure their voting systems are safe and secure. They frequently invoke her crimes and conviction as the price to be paid for breaking the law. And the question posed by the county clerks’ letter hovers over Peters’s case: What message would it send to the thousands of people who diligently carry out the democratic process if someone who continues to undermine it from a prison cell is rewarded by the hand of a president?

Michael Scherer and Sarah Fitzpatrick contributed reporting.