President Donald Trump may get his wish yet when it comes to Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk convicted of trying to help Trump overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
On Thursday a Colorado appeals court overturned Peters’ nine-year prison sentence and ordered her to be resentenced, according to The New York Times. Although the court did not specifically order a shorter sentence for her and did not overturn her conviction, the decision is still viewed as a win for Trump.
“President Trump has demanded her release for months in a pressure campaign aimed at Colorado and its Democratic governor, Jared Polis,” the Times reported. “The judges found that the trial judge who sentenced Ms. Peters had violated her free-speech rights by criticizing her as a ‘charlatan’ and a snake-oil saleswoman who peddled false claims that the 2020 election had been rigged against Mr. Trump.”
The Times elaborated with an explanation about why Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat who has frequently criticized the president, has pushed for the Colorado appeals court to grant this decision.
“The willingness of Mr. Polis, who will leave office early next year because of term limits, to consider commuting Ms. Peters’s sentence has drawn strident opposition from nearly every elected Democrat in the state, and some moderate Republicans,” the Times wrote. “They have questioned why their governor would speed up the release of a Trump supporter who helped fuel false claims of election fraud after the 2020 election.”
Yet the governor went ahead with Trump’s position because “over the past few months, the administration has cut off transportation money earmarked for the state; relocated U.S. Space Command to Alabama from Colorado; vowed to dismantle a leading climate and weather research center in Boulder; and rejected disaster relief for rural counties in the state hammered by floods and wildfires.”
Likely motivated by facts such as these, Polis has repeatedly gone to social media and other public platforms to call for Peters to be resentenced, although Trump called for an outright reversal of her conviction.
"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 said on X last month. "This is the context I am using as I consider cases like this that have sentencing disparities."
Judge Matthew Barrett, who sentenced Peters, argued at the time that Peters should be granted no leniency, pointing out that “this case was about your corrupt conduct and how no one is above the law. I consider deterrence in sentencing that is both general and specific that the sentence I impose must deter Ms. Peters from engaging in similar conduct in the future, but it also must deter others generally from engaging in this type of conduct.”
Although the courts determined that Peters should pay the legal penalty for her crimes, in December Trump adviser Steve Bannon even contemplated having the president send the military in to release Peters from prison.
Peters’ lawyer Peter Ticktin, appearing on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, said at the time when Bannon suggested Trump dispatch the 101st Airborne Division to free Peters.
“Do I think it should be done? For who I am, yeah – I’d love to see that happen," Ticktin said.
