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The president’s stated intention to pardon Tina Peters, jailed for tampering with election machines in 2020, has set off a legal fight over the extent of Mr. Trump’s pardon powers.

Former Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters, middle, during her sentencing for her election interference case at the Mesa County District Court in Grand Junction, Colo., last year.Credit...Larry Robinson/The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, via Associated Press

Dec. 13, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET

President Trump’s pledge to pardon Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk convicted of tampering with voting machines, touched off a furious new battle on Friday over the fate of perhaps the last high-profile 2020 election denier still behind bars.

Democratic leaders in Colorado dismissed the pardon as an empty attempt to bully a Democratic state into freeing one of the president’s political allies. They argued that Mr. Trump had no legal power to overturn Ms. Peters’ conviction in state court.

“There’s no legal merit,” Attorney General Phil Weiser of Colorado, a Democrat, said in an interview on Friday.

Ms. Peters, the former clerk in conservative-leaning Mesa County, a ranching and oil-and-gas region on the western edge of the state, was sentenced to nine years in prison last year after being found guilty of interfering with voting machines in an effort to prove falsehoods that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against Mr. Trump.

The prison sentence made Ms. Peters, 70, a martyr for the election-denial movement, and launched a so far fruitless campaign by Mr. Trump’s followers to win her release from state prison.

Since Mr. Trump’s return to power, his administration has joined in that effort, which is part of a broader push to grant clemency to those convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, end prosecutions of Mr. Trump and allies who were accused of subverting the 2020 election and rewrite the history of that election and its aftermath.

In March, the Justice Department intervened on Ms. Peters’ behalf after she challenged her conviction in federal court. Last month, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons sought to have Ms. Peters transferred to federal custody and out of the state prison where her lawyer said she is being held in solitary confinement.

Those efforts have all failed, and on Friday, some Colorado officials said Mr. Trump’s promise to pardon Ms. Peters felt like last-ditch frustration.

“He is continuing to escalate out of desperation,” Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, Jena Griswold, said in an interview.

But a lawyer for Ms. Peters said he was planning to make a legal argument that Mr. Trump did have the power to pardon Ms. Peters.

“For all I know, the president may send a marshal to the prison to have her released,” Peter Ticktin, a lawyer for Ms. Peters and longtime friend of Mr. Trump, said in an interview.

Mr. Ticktin argued that Mr. Trump has the power to free Ms. Peters under an untested legal theory that the Constitution’s language allowing the president to pardon people for offenses “against the United States” applied not just to federal crimes but also to state-level charges.

“The President of the United States has the power to grant a pardon in any of the states of the United States,” Mr. Ticktin wrote in a letter to Mr. Trump last week that portrayed Ms. Peters as a political prisoner who could be a witness to investigations into the false claims that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump.

Legal scholars and Colorado officials were incredulous. They said the notion that the president could intervene in state courts clashed with the plain language of the Constitution, as well as its fundamental principles of federalism and states’ rights.

“This is so far beyond the pale,” Mr. Weiser, the attorney general, said. “No one has thought to do this because it is so clearly against our constitutional system of government.”

Some of Ms. Peters’ most ardent supporters appeared to be spoiling for a fight between Mr. Trump and a deeply Democratic state that has earned his ire over immigration and elections. They suggested in social-media posts that Mr. Trump’s grant of clemency set the stage for a “battle” between the president and Colorado, and that Colorado officials could be arrested if they failed to heed Mr. Trump’s pardon.

Colorado officials said they had not received any notice that the pardon had been made official since Mr. Trump announced it on his Truth Social platform a day earlier. It was not on the Justice Department’s list of clemency grants as of Friday afternoon.

Although the Supreme Court has expanded some of Mr. Trump’s powers, broadly protected him from prosecution for official acts as president and agreed to hear a case over whether he can strip birthright citizenship from the children of immigrants, Mr. Weiser said he did not see any credible legal argument for Mr. Trump’s pardon of Ms. Peters.

“We are ready to go before a court on this,” he said. “Our position is as strong and clear as any constitutional case I can imagine.”

Jack Healy is based in Colorado and covers the west and southwest.

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