Presidents can’t pardon individuals convicted of state crimes. Whether Trump understands that isn’t entirely clear.
Trump’s pardon for Colorado’s Tina Peters suffers from one fatal flaw: she was convicted under state law. Trump can't pardon state crimes.
How stupid is Donny Trump? www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...
— Cheeky Tart (@svenable.bsky.social) 2025-12-12T16:32:51.170Z
https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-pardon-tina-peters-colorado
Over the course of the past year, Donald Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to help Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who’s currently in prison for election crimes. The one step the president had not taken was to issue a pardon, since that wouldn’t make any sense.
Late Thursday, he did it anyway. The Associated Press reported:
President Donald Trump issued a symbolic pardon for Tina Peters on Thursday, but it alone won’t free the former Colorado elections administrator who was convicted under state laws of orchestrating a data breach scheme driven by false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
.....In August, Trump threatened Colorado with
“harsh measures” unless the state agreed to release Peters, who he claimed had been “tortured by Crooked Colorado politicians.” More recently, Trump’s Federal Bureau of Prisons contacted the Colorado Department of Corrections, seeking to transfer Peters from a state prison to federal custody, but that didn’t work, either.
Left with no other options, the president announced a pardon for Peters.
Except that won’t work, either. Peters faced state prosecution over state crimes. She was tried and convicted in state court. She was sentenced by a state judge and sent to a state prison.
A federal pardon might make Trump feel better, but it’s also utterly irrelevant. As Colorado Attorney General Philip Weiser explained in a written statement, “
One of the most basic principles of our constitution is that states have independent sovereignty and manage our own criminal justice systems without interference from the federal government. The idea that a president could pardon someone tried and convicted in state court has no precedent in American law, would be an outrageous departure from what our constitution requires, and will not hold up.”
The question, however, is whether Trump knows this.
It’s possible that the president, desperate to assist an ally he’s powerless to help, issued the pardon as a symbolic gesture, grudgingly aware of the fact that it will change nothing. What’s unclear, however, is whether Trump intended this to have some force of law as Peters’ attorney continues to work to get his client out of prison. Watch this space.
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