Democrats on Capitol Hill are sounding alarms over the potential commutation of an election denier and convicted felon’s sentence in Colorado, warning the state’s Democratic governor that clemency for Tina Peters would undermine the justice system and diminish the gravity of her crimes.
Gov. Jared Polis (D) has been under heavy pressure from President Trump to release Peters, a former county election clerk and ardent Trump supporter serving a nine-year sentence for election tampering in support of Republican efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat. And Polis opened the door wide to that prospect earlier this month, when he suggested the sentence was overly severe for a first-time offender. He’s now weighing his decision.
The development has prompted outcry from local Democratic officials in Colorado, and the protests are now spilling onto Capitol Hill, where Democrats spanning the political spectrum are voicing concerns that clemency for Peters would lend credence to Trump’s false claims of election fraud and downplay the severity of election interference at the expense of the public’s faith in the system.
“In an era where you have a president who’s attacking the rule of law, attacking the Constitution, using the government and the Department of Justice to suppress dissent and political opponents, now is not the time to capitulate to the president’s demands with regard to his political cronies,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said Thursday.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who chaired the House committee created to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, agreed. He warned that any effort to undermine the fairness of elections also erodes the public’s trust in the entire democratic experiment. With that in mind, he said, a figure like Peters — who was convicted on seven counts, including four felonies — should not receive any special leniency just because the president wants that to occur.
“It goes to the integrity of the process,” Thompson said. “[If] a person is convicted of … fraud, then it can’t be viewed as [deserving] a slap on the wrist.”
Peters was serving as an election clerk in Mesa County, Colo., around the 2020 elections. She certified the results of that contest in the county, which tilted heavily in favor of Trump. But the state went for former President Biden by more than 13 points, prompting charges from Trump that Democratic officials had “stolen” his victory. Several months later, in 2021, Peters arranged for a private figure — a conspiracy theorist, using a bogus name tag — to access the county’s electronic voting machines and retrieve data.
Peters said she was simply seeking to preserve election records in the event they contained evidence of Trump’s claims that widespread voter fraud had cost him the election. A Colorado jury disagreed, and Peters was convicted in August 2024 on seven counts, three of them for attempting to influence a public official. Two months later, she was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Since then, Peters has become a cause celebre among Trump supporters who continue to embrace the false claims the 2020 election was stolen. Trump has led that charge, saying Peters was persecuted for her conservative beliefs and pressing Polis — on numerous occasions over the course of months — to release her. Trump has also tried to pardon Peters himself, although the effort had no practical effect because he lacks the power to nullify convictions at the state level.
Trump’s latest salvo arrived Wednesday on Truth Social.
“Free Tina Peters, a 73-year-old woman with cancer, given a nine-year death sentence in a Colorado prison by a Democrat governor, Jared Polis, and a corrupt political machine, for exposing fraud by the Democrats during the 2020 presidential election,” Trump posted on the social media platform he also owns. “Again, free Tina!”
It’s not just words that Trump is employing to go after Colorado.
In recent months, the Trump administration has also made moves to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to the state, including money earmarked for food stamps. In December, Trump vetoed a major water project in the state, despite the fact that it had been championed by Colorado Republicans on Capitol Hill.
On March 3, Polis stunned many Democrats when he said he was weighing whether to release Peters. Citing another criminal case involving a former state senator — “a friend,” Polis said, who had also been convicted of four felonies but, unlike Peters, avoided prison — the governor decried the sentencing discrepancy and suggested he might remedy it through clemency.
“Justice in Colorado and America needs to be applied evenly, you never know when you might need to depend on the rule of law,” Polis wrote on the social platform X.
Many of the Democrats now criticizing the governor are pointing to the fact that commutations are typically awarded to those who have acknowledged their wrongdoing and shown some form of contrition for their crimes. Peters, by contrast, has been defiant, arguing that she was the target of a political witch hunt. It was actually Democrats, she’s said, who committed the election crimes.
“It seems to me that, if she repents and says, ‘I was wrong,’ that’s a whole different situation — then the governor should give thought to it,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.). “But if she’s still shouting obscenities and saying the things she’s said. … With her, she still was mean-spirited.”
A spokesperson for Polis, Shelby Wieman, said Peters is getting no special attention as a result of Trump’s pressure campaign, and that contrition — or a lack thereof — is a part of the calculus as the governor weighs all clemency applications. The deadline for those applications is April 3.
“The Governor is considering this inmate’s application just as he considers hundreds of others before him, and remorse is one of the many factors weighed as part of that consideration,” Wieman said in an email. “As he has previously said, this inmate got an unusually long sentence for a first time, non-violent offense.”
The Democratic critics say they’re sympathetic to that argument. But in the broader context of Trump’s effort to claim voter fraud where none has been found — and to preemptively pardon the major figures who fought to overturn the election results — those lawmakers are wary of providing leniency to the rare election denier who was convicted of concrete crimes.
“Commutation is a big step in a scenario like this, especially when there are so many efforts by the White House, and Trump in particular, to essentially undermine any kind of accountability on this front,” said Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.), a former state attorney.
“If she’s not even agreeing that she did something wrong — because normally, as part of commutation, or a pardon, at least at the federal level, that’s a key piece: acceptance of responsibility and a desire to move in a corrected direction,” he added.
“And if she’s not even doing that, then no.”
