Tina Peters’ Lawyer Endorses Trump Using Troops to Free Her From Prison
The attorney for convicted Colorado election clerk Tina Peters is publicly embracing the idea of an Eisenhower-style military operation to free her from a state prison, even as bipartisan local election officials warn Governor Jared Polis that caving to pressure to release her would put them in danger.
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Peter Ticktin, a longtime Trump ally who now represents Peters, appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room Battleground program to argue that President Trump could pardon Peters despite her state convictions. Ticktin claimed the Constitution allows presidential pardons for “crimes that are state related,” a theory mainstream legal experts say has never been recognized by any court.
Ticktin went further when talking about how to enforce such a move. After describing Peters as a “political prisoner,” he suggested “maybe we need to do what Eisenhower did in Mississippi” — a reference to President Dwight Eisenhower sending federal troops to force school integration in the 1950s. Pressed by Bannon on whether that meant calling out the 101st Airborne to go to Peters’ Colorado prison and tell state officials to “back off” while they removed her, Ticktin answered that he would “love to see that happen.”
Peters, the former Republican clerk in Mesa County, is serving a nine-year state sentence for her role in breaching local voting machines in 2021 as part of a failed effort to prove Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen 2020 election. Her case has become a cause for election deniers nationwide, and Trump has repeatedly demanded that she be freed.
The Trump administration recently took the unusual step of asking Colorado to transfer Peters into federal custody, a move that could set up an attempted federal pardon. That request has triggered a sharp backlash from state officials and local election administrators across the political spectrum.
The Colorado County Clerks Association, which includes Democratic, Republican and unaffiliated clerks, sent Polis a letter urging him to deny the transfer and warning it would “send a deeply damaging message” to the officials who ran secure elections and now face threats for it. The group says Peters has fueled harassment and intimidation by continuing to repeat debunked conspiracy theories about voting machines.
This week, a bipartisan group of county clerks held an online press conference pleading with Polis to publicly announce he will keep Peters in state custody. They said the governor’s silence amid a spike in threats after the transfer request became public is already putting them at risk and leaving them to “face the consequences alone.”
Polis has so far said only that he and the Department of Corrections are reviewing the federal request and the clerks’ letter.
That leaves Colorado election workers caught between a Trump-aligned lawyer openly entertaining the idea of federal troops showing up at a state prison to free his client, and a governor who has yet to say whether he will firmly reject growing pressure from Washington to let her go.