Trump gets bored issuing real pardons, tries a fake one
It's hilarious ... right up until his supporters storm the jail.
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“FREE TINA PETERS, WHO SITS IN A COLORADO PRISON, DYING & OLD, FOR ATTEMPTING TO EXPOSE VOTER FRAUD IN THE RIGGED 2O20 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION!!!” the president screeched into the ether last month.
Peters was an election supervisor in Colorado before she decided that there were fraud gremlins in Dominion voting machines and fell into a life of crime. She’s also nine years younger than the president and apparently healthy, but Trump was never a stickler for details.
Nor is Trump much pressed about adhering to the niceties of the Constitution. And so on December 11 he purported to grant her “a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!”
This is categorically illegal.
Under Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, the president has the power “to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States.” Peters’s offense was against the state of Colorado, which is why she’s serving a nine-year stretch at La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo. And it’s why this “pardon” has no legal effect.
But it does fit squarely into Trump’s effort to retcon his attempted coup in 2021 and use his office to reward supporters and punish his enemies. Peters was found guilty by a jury of her peers. And yet Trump has threatened the state of Colorado and its governor because they won’t allow her to break the law with impunity.
As his own chief of staff Susie Wiles admitted to Vanity Fair, the president has “an alcoholic’s personality” and “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
MAGA superstar
Peters served as the Clerk and Recorder in Mesa County between 2019 and 2022. In 2020, she certified Trump’s 28-point win over Biden and signed off on an audit attesting that the tally was fair. But soon she became convinced by Trump’s lies about rampant fraud and concocted a bizarre scheme to prove them true.
In May 2021, Peters allowed a former surfer named Conan Hayes to digitally image the county’s voting machines. Hayes is an associate of Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com, who subsidized the “Stop the Steal” movement. According to charging documents, Peters provided Hayes with a misappropriated government ID so that he could impersonate a county employee and attend a confidential software update with Dominion Voting Systems’ staff.
In August 2021, the data Hayes exfiltrated appeared online, and state officials launched an investigation. But Peters had fled the state for Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where Mike “My Pillow” Lindell was hosting a “symposium” on voter fraud that featured the Mesa County data. Peters became a star of the MAGA movement, and then a martyr.
She was indicted in March 2022 and convicted by a jury in August 2024 on three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, official misconduct, violation of duty, and failing to comply with the secretary of state.
Peters’s conduct before and during the trail did not endear her to the court. At one point she got held in contempt for illegally filming a legal proceeding on her iPad and lying about it to the judge’s face. Then she kicked a cop in a bagel shop when he came to seize the device. Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced Peters to nine years in prison, calling her “a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again.”
Peters filed multiple lawsuits seeking to overturn her conviction, in both state and federal court, but none have succeeded thus far.
For my friends, everything
When Trump came back into office, he pardoned almost 1,600 January 6 defendants, including members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who were convicted of seditious conspiracy. That left Peters one of the only MAGA “warriors” still in jail.
The US Justice Department has tried like hell to get her out. In March, it said it was conducting a review of the Colorado state prosecution for “abuses of the criminal justice process.” It sought to intervene in her federal habeas corpus case. It requested that she be transferred to federal custody, and then, when Colorado refused, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said it was investigating the state’s adult correctional facilities and youth detention centers.
The president was even less subtle. In May, he called Peters “an innocent Political Prisoner being horribly and unjustly punished” as part of “a Communist persecution by the Radical Left Democrats to cover up their Election crimes and misdeeds in 2020.” In August he threatened “harsh measures” if state officials refused to release her.
Trump’s pardon attorney Ed Martin gushed on X, “I just spoke with Tina Peters from her prison cell. What a privilege. What a lady. God bless her. Tina, we are coming for you, M’am [sic].”
Meanwhile Peters’s legal team was thinking outside the box. Way outside the box.
Peters’s lawyer Peter Ticktin is a Trumpworld insider of sorts. He roomed with the future president at boarding school and later authored a book entitled “What Makes Trump Tick: My Years with Donald Trump from New York Military Academy to the Present.” On December 7, he sent a letter to his former roomie (first published by Colorado Newsline) in which he explained that presidents really do have the power to pardon state crimes.
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Ticktin insisted that that the Founders intended the president to be able to forgive “all offenses” and so “it does not make sense that they intended to give the individual states the power to circumvent the President’s power to pardon.”
Why no previous president discovered this power is not explained. But Ticktin’s nattering was apparently good enough for Trump, who announced four days later than he was “granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!”
Fake news, real war
This pardon has absolutely zero legal effect, and Colorado confirmed that it will not be releasing Peters based on the president’s meaningless incantation.
And yet,Trump’s minions raced to pretend that the naked emperor’s proclamations carry the full force of law.
The White House quickly added her to the official list of Trump’s second-term clemency grants, alongside all the crypto scammers, tax evaders, and drug smugglers favored by the president. But the addition only served to highlight the fake pardon’s impropriety. The entry describing which federal district Peters committed her crime in was blank, since she was never prosecuted by any US attorney. And hers was the only offense described in scare quotes.
Every other pardon is granted “for those offenses against the United States.” But Peters’s is “for those offenses she has or may have committed or taken part in related to election integrity and security during the period from January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2021.”
Perhaps whichever lackey magicked up this document understood it to be worth less than Monopoly money. Lucky for Trump, the chittering choir of of rage farmers who spent Christmas 2020 spreading lies about the election are back to assure the MAGA faithful that Trump was righteously exercising a power heretofore undiscovered by his predecessors.
Always be fomenting
Trump, who lost Colorado in 2020 by 14 points, insists that the real crime in the state was rampant electoral fraud. On Monday he attacked Polis as “weak and pathetic” and moaned about the “high intensity jail” where Peters is being housed. (In fact, prosecutors in the state have complained that parts of the facility resemble a “five star hotel.”)
Trump immediately pivoted to claiming that “a truckload of evidence” of electoral fraud from 2020 was just about to be released. And just like five years ago, his supporters are braying for blood.
Denver newsman Kyle Clark of the local NBC affiliate compiled a supercut of Peters’s supporters demanding a military invasion of the jail, replete with public executions of the wardens. Ticktin himself makes an appearance, agreeing with Steve Bannon that the feds should send in troops just as they did to desegregate schools in Arkansas and Mississippi.
All of this is eerily familiar.
Six years ago when Trump refused to concede the election, his supporters spun bizarre legal theories about Vice President Pence’s ability to overturn the results by rejecting swing state electors. Initially, Trumpworld insiders figured he’d throw a tantrum and then wear himself out. Instead Trump summoned a violent riot.
Tomorrow, December 19, is the anniversary of Trump’s infamous tweet: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Three weeks after that post, thousands of angry Trump supporters, convinced that the election had been stolen and the vice president could stop it, stormed the Capitol demanding to “Hang Mike Pence.”
All of which is to say that Trump’s fake pardon of a grifting weirdo is very funny. And also … not funny at all.
That’s it for today
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You know, “Looney Tunes” had a great instrumental intro … something to look into, Donald.
Donald “Every Day a New Headline” Trump bleats.