Updated on: December 11, 2025 / 11:05 PM EST / CBS News
President Trump said Thursday evening he is granting a pardon to Tina Peters, a former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk who is serving a nine-year state sentence for allowing unauthorized access to voting machines — even though the presidential pardon power is widely understood to apply only to federal crimes.
“Democrats have been relentless in their targeting of TINA PETERS, a Patriot who simply wanted to make sure that our Elections were Fair and Honest,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, repeating Peters’ claims that she sought to “expose Voter Fraud” in 2020. Peters, a onetime candidate for Colorado secretary of state, has promoted false claims that voting machines were rigged in the 2020 election.
Peters was convicted in state court last year on seven charges, including three counts of attempting to influence a public servant and one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. She was sentenced in October 2024. Prosecutors allege that in 2021 Peters and others “devised and executed a deceptive scheme” to enable an unauthorized person to access Mesa County voting machines; images from the county’s equipment later appeared online. At sentencing, Judge Matthew Barrett called Peters a “charlatan” and said she was unusually defiant. Peters has denied wrongdoing and told the court she had “never done anything with malice to break the law.”
Colorado officials immediately pushed back on Trump’s move. Secretary of State Jena Griswold said Peters “was convicted by a jury of her peers for state crimes in a state Court. Trump has no constitutional authority to pardon her. His assault is not just on our democracy, but on states’ rights and the American constitution.” Attorney General Phil Weiser said the idea that a president could pardon someone tried and convicted in state court “has no precedent in American law” and “would be an outrageous departure” from the Constitution. Democratic Gov. Jared Polis noted that Peters was prosecuted by a Republican district attorney in a Republican Colorado county and said, “No President has jurisdiction over state law nor the power to pardon a person for state convictions.”
Earlier this week a federal magistrate judge denied Peters’ request to be released while she appeals her conviction. The Federal Bureau of Prisons recently asked Colorado to transfer Peters to federal custody, a request that drew pushback from state officials and calls for Polis to deny it.
Peters’ attorney, Peter Ticktin, submitted a letter arguing that Trump may have the power to pardon her and acknowledged the issue “has never been raised in any court.” In a statement after the pardon announcement, Ticktin thanked Trump and said Peters “needs to be released while the issues are being resolved,” including whether courts will weigh the effect of the president’s pardon on her state conviction.
Under the Constitution, the president’s pardon power applies to “Offences against the United States,” a phrase almost universally interpreted as excluding state crimes. Legal scholars and state officials say there is no precedent for a presidential pardon of a state conviction.
Trump has intervened in other cases involving supporters of his false 2020 election fraud claims. He previously offered clemency to people convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack and last month granted pardons to dozens accused in state court of trying to overturn his 2020 loss, including alternate electors and Rudy Giuliani. CBS News has reached out to the White House for comment.