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Trump gets bored issuing real pardons, tries a fake one
It's hilarious ... right up until his supporters storm the jail.
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“FREE TINA PETERS, WHO SITS IN A COLORADO PRISON, DYING & OLD, FOR ATTEMPTING TO EXPOSE VOTER FRAUD IN THE RIGGED 2O20 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION!!!” the president screeched into the ether last month.
Peters was an election supervisor in Colorado before she decided that there were fraud gremlins in Dominion voting machines and fell into a life of crime. She’s also nine years younger than the president and apparently healthy, but Trump was never a stickler for details.
Nor is Trump much pressed about adhering to the niceties of the Constitution. And so on December 11 he purported to grant her “a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!”
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This is categorically illegal.
Under Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, the president has the power “to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States.” Peters’s offense was against the state of Colorado, which is why she’s serving a nine-year stretch at La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo. And it’s why this “pardon” has no legal effect.
But it does fit squarely into Trump’s effort to retcon his attempted coup in 2021 and use his office to reward supporters and punish his enemies. Peters was found guilty by a jury of her peers. And yet Trump has threatened the state of Colorado and its governor because they won’t allow her to break the law with impunity.
As his own chief of staff Susie Wiles admitted to Vanity Fair, the president has “an alcoholic’s personality” and “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
MAGA superstar
Peters served as the Clerk and Recorder in Mesa County between 2019 and 2022. In 2020, she certified Trump’s 28-point win over Biden and signed off on an audit attesting that the tally was fair. But soon she became convinced by Trump’s lies about rampant fraud and concocted a bizarre scheme to prove them true.
In May 2021, Peters allowed a former surfer named Conan Hayes to digitally image the county’s voting machines. Hayes is an associate of Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com, who subsidized the “Stop the Steal” movement. According to charging documents, Peters provided Hayes with a misappropriated government ID so that he could impersonate a county employee and attend a confidential software update with Dominion Voting Systems’ staff.
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In August 2021, the data Hayes exfiltrated appeared online, and state officials launched an investigation. But Peters had fled the state for Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where Mike “My Pillow” Lindell was hosting a “symposium” on voter fraud that featured the Mesa County data. Peters became a star of the MAGA movement, and then a martyr.
She was indicted in March 2022 and convicted by a jury in August 2024 on three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, official misconduct, violation of duty, and failing to comply with the secretary of state.
Peters’s conduct before and during the trail did not endear her to the court. At one point she got held in contempt for illegally filming a legal proceeding on her iPad and lying about it to the judge’s face. Then she kicked a cop in a bagel shop when he came to seize the device. Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced Peters to nine years in prison, calling her “a charlatan who used and is still usin