President Trump said on Thursday that he would pardon Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who was convicted of tampering with voting machines after the 2020 election. But the pardon would be symbolic, because Ms. Peters was convicted of a state crime that falls outside the president’s traditional clemency powers.
Ms. Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colo., was sentenced to nine years in prison after being found guilty of tampering with voting machines under her control in a failed attempt to prove false claims that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against President Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Trump, who continues to repeat his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, has embarked on a wide-ranging campaign to settle scores related to his effort to overturn the race. On the first day of his second term, he issued a sweeping grant of clemency to nearly all 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
But the president has no power to pardon state crimes. Mr. Trump could not, for example, pardon himself for the 34 felony convictions handed down in a New York trial last year. Because Ms. Peters is in prison for a state offense, Mr. Trump’s announcement on Thursday was primarily symbolic.
“Tina Peters was convicted by a jury of her peers for state crimes in a state court,” Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, said in a statement on Thursday. “Trump has no constitutional authority to pardon her. His assault is not just on our democracy, but on states’ rights and the American constitution.”
While Mr. Trump’s declaration had little practical effect for Ms. Peters, it was a reminder that the president has used his expansive legal powers to reward and protect his allies, even as his Justice Department has shattered traditional norms of independence by following his orders to pursue criminal cases against perceived enemies.
In just the last few weeks, Mr. Trump pardoned Representative Henry Cuellar, Democrat of Texas, apparently believing that he would defect to the Republican Party. He also pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was prosecuted during the first Trump administration for leading a drug-trafficking conspiracy.
In one particularly strange case, Mr. Trump pardoned a real estate developer who had been indicted by his own Justice Department earlier this year.
In many ways, Mr. Trump’s promise to grant clemency to Ms. Peters echoed his announcement last month that he was pardoning his former lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and a wide array of others accused of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, even though none of them had been accused of federal crimes.
Mr. Trump’s social media post on Thursday about Ms. Peters followed an expansive effort by her allies to persuade him that he needed to help her. Led by the lawyer Peter Ticktin, a longtime friend and ally of Mr. Trump’s, Ms. Peters’ supporters have sought to convince the president that she is an important potential witness in an ainvestigation to prove false claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him.
Over the weekend, Mr. Ticktin sent Mr. Trump a nine-page letter asking him to pardon Ms. Peters, while admitting that the “question of whether a president can pardon for state offenses has never been raised in any court.”
In his letter, Mr. Ticktin cast Ms. Peters as the victim of a cabal of enemies that included Dominion Voting Systems, the voting machine company, and the Venezuelan government, which he claimed had sought to use digital vote counting technology to rig American elections.
Mr. Trump’s announcement was not the first time his administration had tried to help Ms. Peters.
In March, the Justice Department intervened in her efforts to ask a federal judge to release her from prison, saying there were “reasonable concerns” about the length of her state sentence. The department said that a review of her case was needed as part of a broader examination of cases “across the nation for abuses of the criminal justice process.”
On Monday, however, a federal judge in Denver turned down her request to be freed, finding that state courts, not federal courts, should determine her fate.
The same day, in what appeared to be another attempt to pressure Colorado state officials, the Justice Department announced that it was opening a civil investigation into the state’s prison system. Days earlier on social media, Mr. Trump had attacked Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, as a “sleazebag” for failing to release Ms. Peters on his own accord, claiming she had been “unfairly convicted.”
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
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