You’ll be happy to know that Tina Peters, the former Mesa County elections clerk, is not simply wasting her time in prison as she serves a nine-year rap for allowing unauthorized entry into a secure elections area.
If you listen to Peters’ defenders, you’d think it was just a sightseeing tour. But as a jury of her peers found, she brought someone in to make copies of computer hard drives, even as she was misleading election officials about her little jaunt into criminality. Peters was sure the hard drives would prove there was election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
They didn’t, and there wasn’t.
There’s a line from some Greek or Roman poet, Pliny the Elder or someone, that said the only thing certain in life is that nothing is certain.
And so, Peters, who somehow remains certain, is doing her time as a martyr, as a political hostage, as an election denier who was willing to risk everything for her belief in the fantasy of a rigged 2020 election.
And as of late, she has become the central piece of the “Free Tina Peters” movement that has become a cause celebre in Trump/MAGA circles and has brought a thousand emails or more into Gov. Jared Polis’ office, demanding, well, what they consider justice.
Why should Peters serve time in prison, the reasoning goes, when pet-eating migrants still roam free in this great land, at least for now?
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SUBSCRIBEAs you may have noticed, Trump is not only doing his best to unsettle the economy, to cut large holes in the nation’s safety net, to starve children around the world, to remove the higher in higher ed, to abandon Ukraine to his buddy Putin, to destroy U.S. democracy and the rule of law we’ve enjoyed for more than 200 years.
He’s also on a clemency spree that began with his pardon of those convicted for crimes, including crimes of violence, in the January 6 assault on the Capitol. He has now moved on to pardoning random Trump allies and friends and relatives of Trump allies and random fraudsters, a corrupt sheriff, a corrupt former congressman, a corrupt union leader, corrupt reality TV stars — for whom Trump inevitably has a soft spot — and others whose mothers might have invested in Trump’s cryptocurrency scam.
And, yes, most of all, there are the political hostages, meaning anyone in prison who marches, presumably during exercise break, under the MAGA flag. I mean Trump is apparently considering freeing the bad boys who plotted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. After carefully studying the evidence — or maybe he just got a phone call — Trump said it looked as if they might have been “railroaded.”
Whitmer said that Trump had promised her he wouldn’t pardon them. Yeah, here’s another certainty. Playing nice with Trump makes you the loser. Another certainty is that Trump is unafraid to lie right to your face.
Trump’s special adviser on pardons — a DOJ attorney named Ed Martin whose hardline pro-right leanings may not be everything you want in this job— has expressed the method behind Trump’s pardoning madness when declaring, “No MAGA Left Behind.”
Which brings us back to Peters, who was MAGA even before someone thought to put the letters on a red cap and about whom Trump is extremely worried. Because he desperately wants to pardon her.
But he can’t. However much he wants to, he can’t. No matter how much Mike Lindell, the pillow guy who went bankrupt trying to prove election fraud, wants him to, he can’t.
We know there’s nothing that ticks off Trump more than being told he can’t do something. After all, the main benefit of becoming an authoritarian is that you get to do whatever the hell you want, and while Trump may still be an authoritarian in training, he believes that’s close enough to afford him any powers he chooses to claim, including bringing a $400 million gift/bribe home from the Middle East.
There’s a simple reason, though, why Trump can’t pardon Peters. It’s in the Constitution, which says that a president’s pardoning and commuting power extends only to those convicted in federal court.
Peters, sadly for her, was convicted under state law in dead-red Mesa County, which means that only Polis can legally pardon her. You think the idea that Polis has more power in Colorado than Trump doesn’t drive the Orange One even crazier?
What will Trump do? Send in the National Guard — just spitballin’ here — to arrest Polis for appropriating Trumpian power? Or maybe Trump would prefer a jailbreak, something like in “The Rock.” We know Trump’s feelings on Alcatraz.
A more likely proposition would be that Trump would withhold federal funding from the state until everyone cracks.
I mean, rules and laws and the Constitution? Seriously? Is that what makes America Great Again?
Trump has taken his case to the masses by going on social media to make his usual measured commentary on the situation, writing:
“Radical Left Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (who helped prosecute Peters) 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 prevent Democrat Election Fraud. This is an innocent Political Prisoner being horribly and unjustly punished in the form of Cruel and Unusual Punishment.”
In the meantime, the usual suspects are out there, people like Lauren Boebert and Lara Logan, encouraging their acolytes — although not always in capital letters — to take their pleas for justice to Polis. And Peters, for her part, has appealed her October 2024 conviction and filed a habeas corpus request — you think Kristi Noem was advising her? — that would allow her to be set free pending appeal.
There’s more. Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast has become command central in the matter. Bannon actually asked this question on his podcast: “Is Tina Peters a political prisoner and isn’t the the purpose of the case to torture her?”
While trying to free Peters, the War Room team is taking the usual route, trying to smear Colorado, claiming that the state’s incarceration rate “is higher than in any democratic country in the world.”
And yet it turns out, that isn’t even close to being true.
The U.S. rate may be higher than any democratic country’s, but Colorado ranks somewhere in the middle of U.S. states (not including Canada).
In a statement from a Polis spokesperson, the governor said, “Quid pro quo or blackmail is not the way our system of laws work. Coloradans are federal taxpayers. It’s repugnant to demand to withhold taxpayer money in exchange for a political favor.”
Trump isn’t giving up. The DOJ said it was looking into the case, to see whether the state prosecution had been “oriented more toward inflicting political pain.”
As you might imagine, this didn’t sit well with Weiser, who called it a “threat.”
But there’s also a wild theory making the rounds that there’s a way to make the Peters case a federal one. It would go something like this: The Justice Department would indict Peters on a phony federal charge. That way she could be switched into federal custody, meaning Trump could fly her to a country that has no extradition treaty with America. Trump could pardon her there, which, presumably, would mean Colorado no longer had any prosecutorial rights.
It’s crazy, sure. But what isn’t crazy these days?
Let’s just say that if any of you out there actually believe Peters is a political prisoner or that Colorado is somehow a police state, then who’s to say what’s real and what isn’t.
I could see Trump — ever the movie fan — hiring, say, MAGA Chuck Norris as a Tom Cruise stand-in to spirit Peters away on the next “Mission: Impossible.”
Who thinks that would be a happy ending?
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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