Justice Department is reviewing prosecution of Colorado clerk who supported Trump’s election lies

DENVER (AP) — The Department of Justice is backing a former county election clerk in Colorado who was convicted for her role in allowing supporters of President Donald Trump to access confidential data about the 2020 election, the latest move by the administration to use its power to reward allies who violated the law on the president’s behalf.

Acting U.S. Assistant Attorney General Yaakov M. Roth submitted a filing in federal court in Colorado this week supporting a request from former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who’s asking a federal court to free her from jail while she appeals her state conviction for the 2021 election security breach. Roth wrote that “reasonable concerns” have been raised about Peters’ prosecution and that it was among others nationally that the government was reviewing for “abuses of the criminal justice process.”

Peters has become a celebrity in the world of those who embrace Trump’s lies that he lost the 2020 election due to fraud. Her supporters have been pushing the new Republican administration to pressure Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, to pardon her.

The intervention by Trump’s Justice Department in the Peters case marks a new stage in the administration’s effort to use the federal government to promote the president’s political interests. By getting involved in a state-level prosecution, in a case filed by an elected Republican prosecutor in Colorado, the Justice Department is taking an even more unusual step than it has in previously supporting the president’s agenda.

Previously, Trump pardoned more than a thousand people convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He named an attorney for some of those defendants, Ed Martin, to be acting U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia. Martin has since threatened to investigate Democratic politicians and others who criticize the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts. The Department of Justice also moved to drop corruption charges against New York’s Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, contending that they, too, were tainted by “weaponization” and that the administration needed Adams’ cooperation in its immigration enforcement efforts.

Mesa County District Attorney Daniel P. Rubinstein, a Republican who has served in that role since 2015, prosecuted Peters’ case and said nothing about it was politically motivated.