Plaudits for bipartisanship! Dan Rubinstein, the Republican Mesa County district attorney and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a Democrat, urged Gov. Jared Polis in a recent letter not to acquiesce to demands by the Trump administration to transfer former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters to federal custody. Another letter by the Colorado County Clerks Association counsels the same.
They are right. Under no circumstances should Peters be transferred out of La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo, where she is serving a nine-year sentence. Peters committed multiple felonies in connection with an illegal 2021 scheme to grant unauthorized access to voting equipment in an attempt to prove the election was stolen from her candidate. Peters’ crimes cost taxpayers millions of dollars to replace equipment compromised by her actions and for legal fees, investigations, recounts and other costs. Her election lies fueled harassment and threats to clerks, their staffs, and even their family members, and diminished the public’s trust in elections.
No one is surprised that President Donald Trump is working to free Peters from the grip of justice. He has pardoned most everyone charged with crimes related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. First, he granted clemency to nearly all of the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, even those convicted of assaulting police officers. Trump also ordered the Department of Justice to dismiss any cases still pending against perpetrators of violence. Later, he pardoned the architects of his election subversion conspiracy – liars, I mean, lawyers Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Now it’s Peters’ turn to receive her get-out-of-jail card.
After a few months of truculent, all-caps argle-bargle on social media demanding her release, Trump is now trying other means to liberate her from accountability. He cannot pardon Peters since she was convicted of breaking state laws, but that won’t stop him from trying. On Nov. 12, the Federal Bureau of Prisons sent a letter to the Colorado Department of Corrections requesting Peters be transferred to federal custody.
Not only would this circumvent our justice system here in Colorado, as Rubinstein and Weiser’s letter points out, it also would “offer a politically connected inmate the comforts of an easier sentence. This is not mere speculation or conjecture, as one need only to review recent reports on other politically connected criminals presently receiving ‘preferential treatment’ in federal facilities during their sentences.”
Is this an oblique reference to a certain associate of Jeffrey Epstein’s who was sent to prison for sex trafficking? Ghislaine Maxwell’s sentence got a bit cushier after being transferred from a federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security one in Bryan, Texas. Maybe Peters can get that magnetic mattress she says she needs if transferred to a new facility.
It’s more likely that once transferred, a bureaucratic “error” would spring Peters. When was the last time the Trump administration let law get in the way? Peters would be free to continue her public recrimination of election clerks, again putting them in harm’s way.
At no point has the jailbird shown contrition for her crimes. Peters’ fans and enablers continue to help her maintain the fantasy of victimhood. Peters’ lead attorney, Peter Ticktin, one of the attorneys who helped secure pardons for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, confessed in a recent interview that Peters is “not embarrassed or ashamed in any way. She’s proud of what she’s done because she’s not a criminal.” Meanwhile, her pal, far-right podcaster Joe Oltmann, said Colorado’s governor, attorney general and Secretary of State Jena Griswold “should be hung.”
To release Peters into federal custody, thereby securing an easier sentence or outright release, would not only undermine our justice system, it also would encourage people like Oltmann who spout lies and advocate violence. Colorado Republicans and Democrats who uphold truth and justice cannot stop the release of criminals at the federal level, but we can stop that travesty of justice from happening here.
Krista Kafer is a Sunday Denver Post columnist.
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