In the Maga (Make America Great Again) sphere, she is considered a “heroine”. Tina Peters, a former local elected official from Mesa County, Colorado, was released from prison on Monday, June 1. This conspiracy theory follower will have served less than a quarter of her nine-year sentence, commuted in May by the Democratic governor of Colorado, Jared Polis.
Tina Peters was the last person still incarcerated for trying to overturn the 2020 election, and reactions to her release are virulent. “A criminal is free,” blasted Colorado Democratic Senator Michael Bennet. Colorado’s current Secretary of State, Jena Griswold, accused the governor of “encouraging Holocaust denial” around the election.
Having become a famous figure among Trumpists, Tina Peters had never been talked about before the 2020 presidential election. According to the Los Angeles Times, at that time she gradually became “obsessed” with theories contesting Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump. By frequenting circles of far-right activists, she became convinced that the vote would have been rigged using voting machines that had been manipulated.
“RELEASE TINA PETERS, NOW!” »
To prove it, she uses a security badge to let a computer expert linked to people close to Donald Trump secretly access the Mesa County election system. They found no evidence of potential fraud. Instead, confidential passwords and other sensitive information are copied and posted on an online forum.
According to the Attorney General, Tina Peters would have done this in the hope of becoming famous, in order to appear on stage during the “Cyber Symposium”, organized a few months later and during which “evidence” of vote rigging was to be revealed. Tina Peters then became the first election official prosecuted for violating the security of the 2020 election system. In 2024, she was found guilty by a Mesa County jury.
In November of the same year, Donald Trump returned to power. Having remained silent on the case of Tina Peters until now, the President of the United States becomes one of her most ardent defenders. In 2025, the US Department of Justice decided to re-examine his case. The president, who still does not recognize his 2020 defeat, published a first message on social networks calling Tina Peters a hostage “held in a Colorado prison by the Democrats, for political reasons”. “RELEASE TINA PETERS, NOW!” », he writes.
A presidential pardon of little weight
Reductions in federal funds, closure of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado… Donald Trump is stepping up maneuvers to ensure that the former elected official is released. He insults the Republican prosecutor behind the indictment and calls Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, a “bastard,” while exerting strong pressure on the latter. “Let them rot in hell,” he rages on Truth Social.
Last November, everyone involved in efforts to deny the results of the 2020 election received a presidential pardon. Tina Peters benefits from a specific pardon, which however carries little weight since she is not convicted of any federal crime. It was ultimately Jared Polis who created the surprise by commuting his sentence. “Believing that the Earth is flat is not a crime in our country,” he then explained, describing his conviction as “disproportionate and severe”.
On the day of her release, the 70-year-old woman declared on the microphone of the podcast of Steve Bannon, an influential figure in the Trumpist base: “I still have to fight to clear my name and bring out the truth about why they went after me. »
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