Tina Peters isn’t a household name. But she has been a cause célèbre in right-wing circles, particularly this week amid a Donald Trump clemency spree. Peters, a former election official in Mesa County, Colorado, is currently serving a nine-year sentence for allowing an election denier to gain unauthorized access to the county’s voting machines following the 2020 election—which, echoing Trump’s conspiracy theories, Peters insisted was marred by fraud. To Marjorie Taylor Greene and the other MAGA figures who have championed her cause, she’s something of a government hostage. As Kari Lake put it Monday, “She saw something criminal in Colorado elections and chose to do something as her job required.”
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Calls of “Free Tina Peters” are a distillation of Trump’s approach to criminal justice, which was perhaps best summed up by his pardon attorney, Ed Martin, earlier this week: “No MAGA left behind.” That certainly seems to be Trump’s motto: The president issued a number of pardons and commutations this week, including for reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, who were convicted on fraud charges in 2022; former Republican congressman Michael Grimm, who was convicted on a tax crime; and Scott Jenkins, a former Virginia sheriff whose bribery conviction was, Trump claimed, a persecution “by the Radical Left ‘monsters.’” And there are likely more to come: Among the others who could soon benefit from his leniency is his chief trade adviser, Peter Navarro, who served four months in prison on contempt charges for defying a subpoena from the House January 6 committee; the Justice Department is reportedly considering voiding the case.
Because Peters was convicted on state charges, she is not eligible for a presidential pardon. But in a social media post earlier this month, Trump said he was directing his Justice Department to “take all necessary action to help secure” her release: “Tina is an innocent Political Prisoner being horribly and unjustly punished,” he wrote.
Trump has always used the powers of his presidency to benefit himself and those who suck up to him. “You don’t look like terrorists to me,” he is said to have told the Chrisleys as he pardoned them, after appeals from their daughter, who spoke at the Republican National Convention last summer.
Neither, it seems, do the men who plotted to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, in 2020: “It looked to me like somewhat of a railroad job,” Trump said Wednesday of their convictions, suggesting he would consider pardoning them. “I’ll take a look at that.” (Whitmer, who has taken a more cooperative approach to the Trump administration than some of her fellow Democratic governors, told a local NBC outlet that she was “very disappointed that they are even considering it.”)
The message is clear: Supporters like the Chrisleys can get preferential treatment from this president, with those who would engage in criminal activity on his behalf, like Peters, perhaps feeling further incentivized to do so. “Donald Trump is trying to create a two-tiered legal system in our country,” Colorado secretary of state Jena Griswold told me. “One for his supporters, where they can do whatever the heck they want, including storming the Capitol and threatening election officials’ lives. And a second tier for his opponents and potentially everybody else.”
Trump, of course, began his second term by pardoning the 1,500 “J6 hostages,” as he called them—including leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia groups—who rioted at the Capitol in his name in 2021, That went beyond what even his vice president, JD Vance, and other allies said he would and should do: “If you committed violence on that day,” Vance said a week before Trump’s inauguration, “obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
But Trump did not agree with Vance; he saw himself more as a “king.” And he has applied that approach to the legal system, using it as a threat against opponents; a reward for allies; and even, in the case of New York mayor Eric Adams, an apparent bargaining chip. (The mayor’s corruption case was dropped after he said he was “collaborating” with the administration on its mass deportation plan.) Democratic senator Adam Schiff, who investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election as a member of the House January 6 committee, told me that “Trump’s routine disregard for the rule of law makes a mockery of the idea that we are a nation of laws, not men,” paraphrasing John Adams.
Of course, politics have always loomed over the pardon process. But Trump has taken it to “a different level,” said legal analyst Kim Wehle, author of Pardon Power: How the Pardon System Works—and Why. “The law,” Wehle told me, “is being morphed into what the White House decides the law is.”
On the day I spoke with Griswold, a Colorado man named Teak Ty Brockbank was sentenced to three years in prison for posting online threats to kill Griswold and other Democratic election officials. Brockbank said his actions had been influenced by far-right content. His attorney argued for a more lenient sentence, noting that January 6 insurrectionists had been pardoned for acting on the same kind of material. “Trump pushes up all these lies that incite folks to act in a criminal way, and then they see that he’s pardoning people who support him,” Griswold said. “Far-right actors believe that there is a different tier of justice for them.”
