Tina Peters, the former Colorado elections clerk who has been at the center of a political fight between President Trump and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D), is asking a state appeals court to recognize the president’s pardon of her state convictions.
Lawyers for Peters, who served as a clerk in Mesa County, filed a motion Tuesday that argues the Colorado appeals court no longer has jurisdiction over her case because of a Dec. 5 pardon issued by Trump, the Associated Press reported. They asked the court to release her from prison.
Trump granted Peters a full pardon earlier this month, even though a president does not have the power to overturn state convictions with the pardon power.
Peters was convicted in 2024, including on counts of attempting to influence a public servant and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. She had been accused of using someone else’s security badge to give someone connected to My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell access to the Mesa County election system.
Trump has taken a number of steps to help those convicted of crimes related to support for his claims he did not lose the 2020 election to former President Biden, including pardoning thousands convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Trump for months has pressured Polis to free Peters, threatening “harsh measures” if no pardon is granted.
“Tina is sitting in a Colorado prison for the ‘crime’ of demanding Honest Elections,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Today I am granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!”
“This lightweight Governor, who has allowed his State to go to hell (Tren de Aragua, anyone?), should be ashamed of himself,” Trump wrote online earlier this month, referencing the Venezuelan gang.
Trump earlier this week denied disaster aid to Colorado, which recently experiences wildfires and flooding, a decision Polis said was political.
“Coloradans impacted by the Elk and Lee fires and the flooding in Southwestern Colorado deserve better than the political games President Trump is playing,” Polis said in the statement.
“I call on the President’s better angels, and urge him to reconsider these requests. This is about the Coloradans who need this support, and we won’t stop fighting for them to get what they deserve. Colorado will be appealing this decision,” he said.
The White House said there was nothing political in Trump’s decision.
“The President responds to each request for Federal assistance under the Stafford Act with great care and consideration, ensuring American tax dollars are used appropriately and efficiently by the states to supplement—not substitute, their obligation to respond to and recover from disasters,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in an email.
Jackson added that “there is no politicization to the President’s decisions on disaster relief.” She said that the Trump administration also mobilized two firefighting planes to help with the response to the fires.
In another move affecting Colorado, the administration this month said it would break up a climate and weather research lab in the state.
The National Science Foundation will break up the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said in a post on the social platform X, calling it a source of “climate alarmism.”
That move led Colorado senators to block a prospective funding deal in December that would have kept much of the government operating through the end of September.
Colorado Sens. Michael Bennet (D) and John Hickenlooper (D) objected to moving forward with the so-called minibus spending package that, if enacted into law, would result in 85 percent to 90 percent of the federal government being funding through September 2026.
“We need to fix this problem,” Bennet said, explaining his opposition to moving forward with the spending package. “We’ll have to work together. We’ll have to work together to figure out how to do this.”
Bennet said his Republican colleagues know how critical the center is to providing scientific analysis of weather patterns.
“Everybody on that floor knows what an excellent job [it] does,” he said, pointing to the Senate floor.
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