One year ago last Friday, former Mesa County, Colorado, Clerk Tina Peters was sentenced to nearly nine years in prison after being convicted for breaching her own election offices in the heart of Colorado’s Trump Country.
Now the 70-year-old is pleading for release from prison, claiming she’s broke even as a new Florida-based legal team and revamped fundraising website have emerged. President Donald Trump has waded into her state case, ordering the Justice Department to intervene for her freedom.
TRUMP ‘ISN’T HOLDING HIS BREATH’ OVER THIS YEAR’S NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
“This woman is a real patriot, and they put her in jail for a long time,” Trump said in the Oval Office last month. “She touched the machines …. She’s trying to find out what was going on, and they went and arrested her for doing that.”
He closed: “They should let her go. Let her out.” On Truth Social, he threatened “harsh measures” against Colorado if she isn’t released.
As a journalist and three-time Trump voter, who has closely covered the Peters saga since it broke, interviewed her, watched most of the trial, and sat in the courtroom for sentencing, I wonder: Who’s feeding the president bad information about Peters?
Because the truth, and whoever’s keeping it from him, leaves Trump greatly exposed.
Peters was convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors tied to an elaborate identity theft scheme. In May 2021, she ordered surveillance cameras shut off, lied to obtain credentials for a county IT contractor, and then handed them to pro-surfer-turned-hacker Conan Hayes. Hayes used them to sneak into a secure room and copy sensitive election data that later leaked online.
All the while, Peters had the one thing she needed to prove fraud: the paper ballots. Every Colorado voter casts one, which must be preserved for 25 months.
Republican County Commissioner Cody Davis had offered to fund a full hand recount of the 2020 election results. Peters refused. “She said, Cody, we really don’t need to do this. I think we’re just trying to pacify a few people,” Davis told me. Instead, she breached her own voting system.
Peters insists she merely “preserved” election records before a routine software update, but by law, those logs aren’t considered election records. Her reports, alleging deleted files and flipped votes in a county with only 13% registered Democrats, have been debunked, including by the Republican District Attorney Dan Rubinstein.
Rubinstein, who was elected alongside Peters, noted Trump “overwhelmingly received the most votes” in Mesa County. Peters was indicted and unanimously convicted by a jury of her peers. “It is a gross mischaracterization to claim Ms. Peters did nothing wrong,” Rubinstein concluded.
On May 24, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon muted an X user who demanded she “get Tina Peters out of jail” because Peters supposedly “expose[d] the fraud.”
“Muted for sheer ignorance,” Dhillon replied. Is someone keeping her from Trump’s ear?
Peters didn’t act in a vacuum. At an April 2021 meeting organized by her un-indicted coconspirator, Sherronna Bishop, who leads the Lindell Legal Offense Fund, Douglas Frank told Peters MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell was paying him to “go around the country” pushing discredited voter fraud projections. Bishop later helped connect Peters to Hayes.
Peters’ lawyers admitted at trial that her actions served Lindell’s defamation defense. Attorney Dan Hartman asserted the “deleted” records were ones Lindell “needed to defend his lawsuit.”
OSSOFF STICKS WITH TRUMP RESISTANCE DESPITE SHUTDOWN PRESSURE
Recently, Lindell said he’s eyeing a bid for Minnesota governor — shortly after a federal judge ruled he’d defamed London-based voting-machine company Smartmatic. Months earlier, a Denver jury ordered Lindell to pay $2.3 million to former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer. That trial exposed the money trail linking many different operatives who have cashed in on “stolen election” claims.
These narratives have built a cottage industry of grifters trading on grievance, and Trump’s brand fuels it. The president can keep insisting 2020 was stolen from him, but backing Tina Peters isn’t loyalty. It’s self-sabotage that serves those besmirching Trump himself.
Jimmy Sengenberger is an investigative journalist, a twice-weekly columnist at The Denver Gazette, and a longtime Denver talk-radio ho_st. Reach Jimmy online at Jimmysengenberger.com or on X (formerly Twitter) @SengCenter.