Trump allies and his Department of Justice have been agitating for a mechanism by which to free former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters from prison, where she's serving a nine-year state-imposed sentence for attempting to influence a public servant, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, and official misconduct.
Peters was a 2020 election denier who used her office to allow an associate of pillow hustler Mike Lindell to access county election equipment. To the dismay of Trump and other members of Peters' fan club, she was tried and convicted in Colorado under state statutes, and the DOJ has no authority over the state's justice system.
But that hasn't stopped Trump from trying to usurp the state's sovereignty, as evidenced by his post on Truth Social on May 5 in which the president calls out Colorado Attorney General (and 2025 Democratic gubernatorial candidate) Phil Weiser:
Truth Social Screenshot
One of the two Mesa County women charged with stealing more than a dozen mail-in ballots last October pleaded guilty to one count of identity theft and one count of forgery on Monday, May 5. Vicki Stuart, who was a United States Postal Service employee at the time of the thefts, was accused of collaborating with a friend to "test" the state's signature verification process.
Spoiler alert: The system worked, mostly.
Stuart and the other woman charged in the case, Sally Jane Maxedone (aka Sally Jane Smith), were alleged to have stolen about twenty ballots meant for a subdivision where Stuart delivered mail. Three of the stolen ballots were counted as legitimate by the Secretary of State's office before the fraud was caught by residents who were notified by the BallotTrax system that their ballot had been counted before they'd filled it out. The remainder of the fraudulently voted ballots were caught by the system before they were counted.
Stuart is due to be sentenced on June 25, 2025.
