As she weighs whether to take an out-of-state job in election oversight, former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters recently credited a senior White House official with helping “effectuate” her release from a Colorado prison earlier this summer.
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In a conservative media appearance last week, Peters said David Warrington, President Donald Trump’s White House counsel, had worked “with the administration, (Gov. Jared) Polis, for my release.”
It’s unclear what exact role Warrington played in Peters’ release. Her attorney said the White House counsel “helped with communications” with Polis.
Polis’ office would not directly respond to multiple requests for comment about whether the governor had communicated with Warrington or Trump about the former clerk before ordering her released on June 1. An attorney for the state said Polis’ office had no records that mention Warrington.
“I believe there were communications between Donald Trump and his office and Gov. Polis,” Peter Ticktin, Peters’ lawyer, told The Denver Post this week. He said he believed those conversations were about Peters “because Donald Trump wanted to see her released.”
The White House, which did not return a request for comment for this story, announced this month that Warrington was leaving the Trump administration.
Since he commuted her sentence in May, Polis has been repeatedly accused of bowing to a public pressure campaign mounted by Trump — an allegation the governor has denied. Polis has said he commuted the remainder of Peters’ eight-and-a-half-year sentence in May because it was too harsh, and he has pointed to an April appeals court ruling that found her sentence was partly motivated by speech protected by the First Amendment.
“The governor has said before that the president only made doing the right thing harder by making an illegal pardon and repeatedly tweeting — or Truthing — his opinion,” Polis spokeswoman Ally Sullivan said in a statement for this story, referring to Trump’s Truth Social platform. She added: “The governor independently and thoroughly reviewed this case and the president’s request had no bearing on the governor’s decision other than making it more challenging.”
Polis’ office has been serially cagey about his conversations with Trump, who frequently and publicly vented his Peters-related displeasure directly at the governor. Polis would not directly respond to several questions about Peters and Trump in January, though he did say he had not discussed releasing Peters as part of a deal with the federal government.
In May, Polis confirmed to the New York Times that he’d spoken with Trump last year about the former clerk, who had become an icon among election conspiracists after she was convicted for her role in an election misconduct scheme in Mesa County.
But after The Post reported that Trump administration officials had convened a meeting to take action against Colorado amid Trump’s fury over Peters last year, Polis’ office has refused to say when Polis and Trump spoke or whether the president had threatened the state during those conversations.
In a follow-up statement Thursday, Polis spokesman Eric Maruyama again did not directly respond to The Post’s questions about Warrington or the governor’s conversations with Trump. He said the governor’s office “can’t speak to the motivations of the White House or any recent comments by third parties on the governor’s clemency decision,” and he lamented that the case had been “politicized.”
Ticktin, Peters’ lawyer, declined to describe the nature of the White House’s communications with Polis. Peters’ podcast comments were first reported by Media Matters.
“Anything that was said to me would’ve been said in confidence,” Ticktin said. “Because don’t forget, I am an attorney. The one thing that we don’t do is gossip or spread the word.”
But Ticktin said Polis had rejected requests from the president and federal government; the state had refused to transfer Peters into federal custody late last year, for instance, and did not commute Peters’ sentence until months after the fall conversation with Trump. Hypothetically, Ticktin continued, “two people can have a conversation and don’t agree, and one won’t kowtow to the other, and ultimately decides to do the right thing. That’s pretty well what happened here.”
In an interview with Colorado Public Radio last month, Polis said that, “from my perspective,” Peters’ release was not part of a deal with the Trump administration. He had repeatedly hinted at commuting her sentence in the months before her release, and other state officials first began to fear he would do so late last year.
The Colorado Attorney General’s Office has alleged that Trump targeted the state because of Peters and because of Colorado’s mail-in balloting system and its laws limiting cooperation with immigration enforcement. The White House has denied that it punished Colorado last year because of Peters. Trump said in February the state was “suffering a big price” for not releasing her.
A job offer in California
Scrutiny over Peters’ commutation is unlikely to die away, particularly as she remains active in undercutting trust in the nation’s elections ahead of the November midterms. She has been offered a job as an assistant registrar of voters in California’s Shasta County, the clerk, Clint Curtis, said in a radio appearance last week.
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Ticktin said Peters was considering the job and that it would be a temporary role to work with Shasta County “on their election concerns.” Curtis, a controversial election skeptic who was recently censured by county officials, did not respond to a message seeking comment. He told the Atlantic that he wanted Peters as a consultant “to assist us with making sure the FBI and (Department of Homeland Security) can test the ballots for authenticity.”
In the weeks since Polis’ May 15 clemency announcement, tens of millions of dollars in federal funding have been unlocked for the state. The Environmental Protection Agency uncorked $44 million on May 19. On May 22, the federal government released $40 million to purchase water rights — money that had been withheld for more than a year. On June 1, the state received $1.8 million for a small business development center; that funding had also been delayed for months.
“We can’t comment on the Trump administration’s reasoning for withholding and then releasing funding, which has been a common theme for Colorado and other states throughout his administration,” Polis spokesman Eric Maruyama said in a June statement.
Ticktin declined to say whether he had been aware of the administration’s discussions to take action against Colorado, but he said they made sense, given that the state had gone “rogue.” He said that while “much” of the problems between Colorado and the federal government involved Peters, there were other issues, too.
“There were problems between the two governments,” he said. ” … It’s not just that they weren’t releasing Tina Peters.”
Trump has indeed had repeated run-ins with Colorado, from criticizing his presidential portrait in the state Capitol to the Colorado-born lawsuit that sought to keep him off of the 2024 ballot. Colorado’s Attorney General Phil Weiser has filed or joined dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration, which has filed its own litigation challenging the state’s immigration laws and seeking access to state voter rolls.
But the Peters saga has drawn the most intense scrutiny and, for Polis, the most scathing criticism — first from Trump and now from Democratic Party members. After the governor announced her commutation, the Colorado Democratic Party overwhelmingly voted to censure him and strip him of certain privileges. He later fired two members of his commutation board after they revealed that the board had twice unanimously rejected Peters’ application — once at an initial meeting and then again after Polis’ office asked them to reconsider.
Peters in D.C. and ’60 Minutes’
As Polis has weathered a summer of criticism from his fellow Democrats, Peters has kept busy.
In June, she met with Trump in the Oval Office and has traveled to the nation’s capital at least three times. She later posted pictures to her website and social media showing her with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump campaign lawyer who’s now the Justice Department’s point person on civil rights.
Under the terms of her parole, Peters must receive permission to leave Colorado. Ticktin said that the state has treated her “the way they would treat any other prisoner that’s been paroled” and that her requests have not been denied.
On her website, Peters wrote that she’d also met with the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal agency charged with protecting the nation’s election equipment. She spoke with the Atlantic and sat for an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes.” She described the interview during the same media appearance in which she talked about Warrington’s role in her release.
“They tried to blame Trump, everything on Trump — how he put pressure on Colorado, that the wildfires in Colorado right now are not getting the money that they deserve from the federal government because of me,” Peters said of “60 Minutes,” which has not yet aired the interview. “Everything was my fault and Trump’s fault.”
In June, she spoke at Rocky Mountain Voice’s Freedom Festival in Douglas County, where she alleged that she was “cheated” out of her 2022 bid to be secretary of state. (She lost in the GOP primary by 14 points). She said she’d told Trump that she was discouraged that more had not been done about the nation’s election systems.
” ‘I’m seeing (Zohran) Mamdani get elected, I’m seeing (Abigail) Spanberger get elected, I’m seeing what’s going on in California, in Texas, and all over,’ ” she said she told the president, referring to New York’s democratic socialist mayor and the Democratic governor of Virginia. Both were elected last year.
“But they’re working,” she assured the audience of the Trump administration. “It may not be on our timeframe, but they’re working. Just know that.”
The New York Times contributed to this report.
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