Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters enters the courtroom during her trial in Grand Junction on the morning of Aug. 12, 2024, when her defense team and prosecutors delivered closing arguments.
President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice said in a court filing Monday that it will conduct a “review” of Colorado’s prosecution of Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk who was convicted of participating in a breach of secure voting equipment in an attempt to prove Trump’s lies alleging widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
In a “statement of interest” submitted as part of a pending lawsuit filed by Peters in the U.S. District Court of Colorado, attorneys with the DOJ and the office of the U.S. District Attorney for Colorado wrote that the court should give “prompt and careful consideration” to Peters’ request for her immediate release from a Colorado jail, where she is serving part of a combined nine years behind bars in a sentence handed down by a Mesa County judge last year.
“Reasonable concerns have been raised about various aspects of Ms. Peters’ case,” said the two-page filing. “These concerns relate to, among other things, the exceptionally lengthy sentence imposed relative to the conduct at issue.”
The filing was signed by Yaakov Roth, acting assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Division; J. Bishop Grewell, the acting U.S. attorney for Colorado; and assistant U.S. Attorney Peter McNeilly.
Peters was convicted by a Mesa County jury in August 2024 on a variety of criminal charges, including felony counts of attempting to influence a public servant and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. The charges stemmed from her role in a scheme to allow an unauthorized person to enter the Mesa County’s elections department she oversaw, in order to make copies of election system software and capture images of passwords.
Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced Peters to eight and a half years of prison time in addition to a six-month stint in jail, citing the “immeasurable damage” that Peters had done to local elections and trust in the electoral process, her lack of remorse and other factors. She was transferred to the Larimer County Detention Center in December after expressing “concerns for her safety” in a Mesa County jail, and she is due to be transferred to Colorado Department of Corrections custody to serve her prison sentence.
Last month, Peters filed a federal lawsuit against Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and Larimer County Sheriff John Feyen, asking the court to issue a writ of habeas corpus and order her “immediate release.”
The Trump DOJ’s “review” of the Peters case comes amid an unprecedented effort by the new administration to contravene criminal justice proceedings related to the president’s election conspiracy theories and the Jan. 6, 2021, assault by a pro-Trump mob on the U.S. Capitol. That effort has included blanket pardons of roughly 1,500 people convicted in the Capitol attack and purges of prosecutors who handled many of those cases.
A spokesperson for Weiser said his office could not comment on an active case. The office of the U.S. attorney for Colorado also declined to comment.
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