Colorado elections clerk Tina Peters released from prison after sentence commuted

Tina Peters, the former clerk convicted of participating in a scheme to chase election conspiracy theories promulgated by Donald Trump, was released from prison on Monday after the president successfully pressured Colorado’s Democratic governor into commuting her sentence.Peters’ release was confirmed by the Colorado corrections department. The state agency said it would have no more information about the 70-year-old.Her sentence was shortened by Jared Polis, Colorado’s governor, in May after Trump waged a lengthy pressure campaign against the governor and his state.Peters served less than a quarter of her nine-year sentence.Peters was the first local election official to be charged with breaching security after the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden at the end of his first presidency.She snuck in an outside computer expert affiliated with the MyPillow chief executive, Mike Lindell – who himself denied that Trump lost the White House in 2020 – and the person copied the county’s Dominion Voting Systems computer server as it was updated in 2021.Peters then joined Lindell onstage at a “cybersymposium” that promised to reveal proof that the election was rigged. Video and photos of the computer system upgrade, including passwords, were posted online. The move stoked false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from Trump.Peters was convicted in 2024 of attempting to influence a public servant, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, violation of duty and other crimes by jurors in Mesa County, a Republican stronghold that supported Trump. An appeals court upheld her conviction in April – but ordered Peters to be resentenced because it said the judge who sent her to prison wrongly punished her for speaking out about election fraud.Trump had championed Peters’ case, but because she was convicted under state law, he did not have the power to pardon her. Instead the president pressured Polis to do so, lambasting him on social media and disinviting him from a White House meeting with other governors. The Trump administration also announced plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and relocate the US space command to Alabama.Polis commuted Peters’ sentence on 15 May. In a letter he wrote that although Peters was convicted of serious crimes and deserved to spend time in prison, the sentence was “extremely unusual and lengthy” for a first-time and non-violent offender.Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state and also a Democrat, called the move a “dark day for democracy” and said it amounted to “selling out our state’s justice system for Trump”.