The district attorney who prosecuted Tina Peters urged Gov. Jared Polis on Thursday to reject the Trump administration’s effort to transfer the former Mesa County clerk into federal custody, where, he warned, she may be illegally released.
“Put simply, Ms. Peters is in prison today due to the crimes she committed that put Mesa’s election systems at risk and violated the public’s trust, and for no other reason,” Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein and Attorney General Phil Weiser told Polis in a joint letter that also called the transfer request “a transparent attempt to bypass the president’s inability to pardon Ms. Peters or commute her sentence.”
The letter comes a week after the federal Bureau of Prisons asked the state Department of Corrections to transfer Peters into federal custody. Peters, who was sentenced to nine years’ incarceration last year, has repeatedly been defended by President Donald Trump, who has called for her release. The president cannot pardon Peters, who embraced his baseless election conspiracies, because she was charged and convicted in state — not federal — court.
Earlier this week, Polis spokeswoman Shelby Wieman did not directly respond when asked if Polis was involved in the decision to transfer Peters, if he supported the request or if he had otherwise been contacted by the federal government about it. Wieman instead deferred comment on the transfer request to the Department of Corrections. A spokeswoman for that agency has said that the prison bureau’s request is under review.
But Weiser and Rubinstein’s letter is addressed to Polis, not state prison officials. The two men wrote that at best, the prison bureau’s request was intended to sidestep Colorado’s judicial system to “offer a politically connected inmate the comforts of an easier sentence.” At worst, they alleged, “this custody request could aid the unauthorized or illegal release of a convicted felon by the federal government.”
Natalie Baldassarre, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice, also declined to comment earlier this week. On Trump ally Steve Bannon’s podcast, Ed Martin, the agency’s pardon attorney, said the federal government has “to work with Colorado” to secure Peters’s release. He also told Bannon that federal officials were putting “the right kind of pressure” on the state to make Colorado officials “change (their) tune,” according to CNN.
Polis has previously said he would not pardon Peters as part of a deal with the federal government, and Wieman said this week that the governor “takes clemency very seriously and reviews each application individually.”
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