Donald Trump is thinking outside the box. He wasn’t elected because of his color-inside-the-laws, paint-by-Constitution thinking. MAGA wants results! Or at least a big MISSION ACCOMPLISHED sign, which is functionally the same thing when you get your news from social media.
Trump’s current mission is to rescue Tina Peters, the former election clerk for Mesa County, Colorado and current guest of the La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo. In 2020, Trump’s margin of victory in Mesa was 28 percent. But Peters became convinced that there were ghosts in the Dominion Machines and set out to prove it. That effort included: giving her voting machine password to associates of the pillow weirdo Mike Lindell; stealing a government ID for an associate of Overstock weirdo Patrick Byrne; sneaking said associate in and allowing him to digitally image the Dominion machines; passing off the associate as a government employee so he could attend a confidential software update with Dominion staff; recording a court hearing on her iPad; and kicking a cop in a bagel shop when he came to seize the device.
All this endeared her to the MAGA faithful, but not to the court. In August of 2024, she was convicted on seven counts and sentenced to nine years. Colorado Judge Matthew Barrett called her “a charlatan who used, and is still using, your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again.”
None of this dimmed her right-wing star, and springing her from jail became a particular fixation of the Trump administration.
For the record, Old Lady Peters is 70 — a full nine years younger than the guy who wrote that post, and another one in November demanding that the state of Colorado “FREE TINA PETERS, WHO SITS IN A COLORADO PRISON, DYING & OLD, FOR ATTEMPTING TO EXPOSE VOTER FRAUD IN THE RIGGED 2O20 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION!!!”
In March, the Justice Department docketed a statement of interest in her federal habeas petition and announced that it intended to review Peters’s state prosecution for “abuses of the criminal justice process.” In November, the Federal Bureau of Prisons sent a letter to the Colorado Department of Corrections demanding that Peters be transferred to federal custody. A week after Governor Jared Polis refused, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced an investigation of the Colorado Department of Corrections and Colorado Department of Youth Services “to ensure that DOC inmates and youths in the custody of DYS are being afforded their rights under the U.S. Constitution and federal law.” (By coincidence, that was the same week the administration decided to stop enforcing the Prison Rape Elimination Act’s requirement to protect transgender inmates in federal custody.)
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On December 8, Peters’s habeas petition was denied, and her lawyer had to get creative. Luckily Peters’s lawyer is Peter Ticktin, the president’s former boarding school roommate and the author of the book “What Makes Trump Tick: My Years with Donald Trump from New York Military Academy to the Present.” Ticktin has also penned some amazing poetry, featured on his law firm’s website legalbrains.com.
And so he put his mind to it and came up with A PLAN. In a letter published by Colorado Newsline, he suggested that the Framers totally meant for the president to be able to pardon state crimes.
The reason that many pundits opine that you have only the power to grant pardons for federal offenses is that we all understand the “United States” to be the federal government of our country. We have one country, and it is called the “United States.” When we consider the United States, it’s personal pronoun is “it” which exemplifies that it is one nation. Therefore, we read “Offenses against the United States” to mean offenses against the federal government.
[…]
The question of whether a president can pardon for state offenses has never been raised in any court. The issue which needs to be answered whether our founders understood or intended when they wrote that the President had the Power to Pardon offenses against the United States, if it meant the states or only the federal government. Did they mean the one central authority, or did they mean the plural, meaning the states which were united? In that day and age, they were speaking of the United Countries, and the President was given the right to pardon all offenses.
Moreover, it does not make sense that they intended to give the individual states the power to circumvent the President’s power to pardon. The matter of Tina Peters is a perfect example of how the power of the President is being circumvented.
Federalism, LOL.
But since Chief Justice John Roberts has assured the president that none may question him for his exercise of the pardon power, Trump figured what the hell.
Well, you can type any shit you like on social media. As of this writing, the Justice Department has not added this “pardon” to the list of Trump’s clemency grants. Nor has it been announced by the White House. But lawyers in this administration have a seemingly bottomless appetite for beclowning themselves, so …
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.