{"id":22383,"date":"2025-05-06T10:55:17","date_gmt":"2025-05-06T16:55:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/trump-signals-for-department-of-justice-to-try-and-free-tina-peters\/"},"modified":"2025-05-06T16:55:17","modified_gmt":"2025-05-06T16:55:17","slug":"trump-signals-for-department-of-justice-to-try-and-free-tina-peters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/trump-signals-for-department-of-justice-to-try-and-free-tina-peters\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump signals for Department of Justice to try and free Tina Peters"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Former
Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters at the 2022 Colorado Republican State Assembly on April 9, 2022, at the Broadmoor World Arena in Colorado Springs. (Hart Van Denburg\/CPR News file)<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

President Donald Trump escalated the federal attempt to upend Colorado\u2019s prosecution of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters in a social media post Monday night.<\/p>\n

\u201cTina is an innocent Political Prisoner being horribly and unjustly punished in the form of Cruel and Unusual Punishment,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

In the post, Trump directed the U.S. Department of Justice to \u201ctake all necessary action to help secure the release of former Mesa county clerk Tina Peters,\u201d referring to her as a hostage that was \u201cbeing held in a Colorado prison by the Democrats, for political reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFREE TINA PETERS, NOW!\u201d Trump wrote to punctuate the message.<\/p>\n

\"Peters\"
Peters<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

In August, Peters was found guilty by a jury of Mesa County residents on seven counts, including four felonies, after she helped facilitate unauthorized access to county voting equipment that she was supposed to safeguard in search of voter fraud. Despite years of investigation and attention from election conspiracy groups, neither her supporters nor her legal defense have ever shown that the machines were involved in any sort of election manipulation.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s online proclamation is the latest step in a growing federal effort to free Peters. In March, the Department of Justice went to court in a bid to help Peters and potentially free her from custody. Attorneys for the state of Colorado have asked a federal judge to reject the Justice Department\u2019s filings. The judge said at the hearing that he will rule after determining whether he has jurisdiction. Peters is serving nine years at La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo.<\/p>\n

Peters supporters have been trying to persuade the governor and state lawmakers to do something about her long prison sentence. State lawmakers have no authority over her sentence but Gov. Polis has the ability to issue a pardon or clemency.<\/p>\n

In March, a Polis spokesman said Peters had not applied for clemency or a pardon and said the office would only consider clemency on its own merits \u201cregardless of bullying and threats.\u201d The office didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump\u2019s latest social media post.<\/p>\n

Peters continues to argue she did nothing wrong when she helped an unauthorized person use someone else\u2019s identity to access her office\u2019s election equipment and attend a secure software update. And she remains a cause celeb for those on the right who believe election equipment makers conspired with Democrats to sway elections \u2014 claims that have never been upheld in any court.<\/p>\n

\u201cRadical Left Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser ignores Illegals committing Violent Crimes like Rape and Murder in his State and, instead, jailed Tina Peters, a 69-year-old Gold Star mother who worked to expose and document Democrat Election Fraud. Tina is an innocent Political Prisoner being horribly and unjustly punished in the form of Cruel and Unusual Punishment,\u201d said Trump, referring to her case as a \u201cCommunist persecution by the Radical Left Democrats to cover up their Election crimes and misdeeds in 2020.\u201d<\/p>\n

Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, the MAGA firebrand who represents the state\u2019s 4th Congressional District, said she sent a formal request to the FBI to look into the sentencing and treatment of Tina Peters.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am glad to see President Trump address this situation,\u201d she wrote in a post on X. \u201cI know FBI Director Patel and Deputy Director Bongino will get the answers we deserve to hear!\u201d<\/p>\n

Boebert also compared Peters\u2019 crimes to the inadvertent posting of voting machine passwords by the Democratic Secretary of State\u2019s office, writing that the fact there were no legal charges in that situation is why \u201cColoradans believe the justice system is rigged.\u201d<\/p>\n

AG Weiser\u2019s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CPR News. But in March Weiser\u2019s office said the DOJ intervention in the case has no legitimate basis and is a \u201cgrotesque attempt to weaponize the rule of law.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe United States cites not a single fact to support its baseless allegations that there are any reasonable concerns about Ms. Peters\u2019 prosecution or sentence, or that the prosecution was politically motivated,\u201d Weiser said.<\/p>\n

State audits have found no evidence of election fraud in Colorado in the 2020 election and confirmed that the machine vote tally matched the markings on the paper ballots.<\/p>\n

The only instance of voter fraud recorded in the 2024 election in Mesa County came from a pair of women who allegedly stole mail ballots and attempted to cast them in an effort to test the state\u2019s election security procedures. One of the women charged, Vicki Stuart, pleaded guilty to two charges related to that investigation Monday morning.<\/p>\n

To read more stories from Colorado Public Radio, visit www.cpr.org<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Tina is an innocent Political Prisoner being horribly and unjustly punished,\u2019 he wrote<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22384,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[168,1503,28,1515,315,1722,1621],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-22383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-crime","tag-fraud","tag-headlines","tag-judiciary-system-of-justice","tag-president-donald-trump","tag-regional-elections","tag-voting"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22383"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=22383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}