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President Donald Trump on Wednesday renewed his calls to free Tina Peters, a pro-Trump poll worker who was convicted for her role in a scheme aimed at finding evidence of voter fraud in the president’s 2020 election loss.
Peters, a former election clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, is serving a nine-year prison sentence following her conviction in August 2024 on seven charges, including four felonies, related to a security breach of the county’s voting systems in 2021, while seeking evidence to support Trump’s claims that his loss to former President Joe Biden was due to voter fraud.
Trump has been pressuring Democratic Gov. Jared Polis to release Peters, 70, since he returned to the White House last year.
“Free Tina Peters, a 73-year-old woman with cancer, sentenced to nine years of death in a Colorado prison by a Democratic governor, Jared Polis, and a corrupt political machine, for exposing Democrats’ fraud during the 2020 presidential election,” Trump wrote Wednesday on Truth Social. “Again, free Tina!”
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President Donald Trump continued his calls to free Tina Peters. (Photo by Marc Piscotty/Getty Images)
Polis has acknowledged that Peters’ sentence was “harsh” given that he had no criminal record.
The governor recently noted on social media that Peters was sentenced to nine years in prison, while a former state lawmaker convicted of the same crime was sentenced only to probation and community service.
“Justice in Colorado and the United States must be applied evenly, you never know when you may need to rely on the rule of law. This is the context I am using when considering cases like this that have sentencing disparities,” Polis wrote in X.
But Polis said his decision on whether to grant clemency would be influenced by whether Peters has expressed remorse for her actions, something officials say she has not done.
“What she would have to show in any successful pardon application would be appropriate contrition, an apology. That’s the kind of thing I would be looking for,” he previously told KUSA-TV.
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President Donald Trump has been pressuring Gov. Jared Polis to release Peters since he returned to the White House last year. (Hyoung Chang/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, whose office helped prosecute Peters, has emphasized that she has not shown any remorse for her actions.
“A pardon should be based on remorse, rehabilitation and extenuating circumstances, not political influence, favor or retribution,” said Weiser, a Democrat running to succeed the term-limited politician.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., who also hopes to replace Polis as governor, similarly said Peters should not receive a pardon or have her sentence commuted.
“Donald Trump may be seeking revenge on Colorado, but bowing to his political pressure will not make our state stronger or safer,” he said.
Trump has repeatedly defended Peters on social media and announced last year that he would grant her a “full pardon,” although such a move would not apply to a state conviction, as that authority rests with the governor.
Earlier this week, a federal judge found that the Trump administration had threatened to withhold funds from Colorado, describing it as possible retaliation for the state’s reluctance to pardon Peters. The discovery came shortly after Trump’s symbolic announcement of his pardon.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly defended Tina Peters on social media. (Jacquelyn Martín/AP Photo)
U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson wrote that the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s threat in December to withhold millions of dollars in federal funding for Colorado’s SNAP program violated the Spending Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
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“This broader context gives away the game; the pilot project appears to be about punishment and nothing more,” the judge wrote.
A lawsuit also claimed this week that the Trump administration targeted a climate and weather research laboratory in retaliation against Colorado officials for jailing Peters.
Fox News’ Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.