President Trump said he is granting a pardon to Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who was convicted of allowing unauthorized access to voting machines — even though the pardon power is widely understood to only apply to federal crimes.

“Tina is sitting in a Colorado prison for the ‘crime’ of demanding Honest Elections,” Trump said on Truth Social on Thursday. He said he was granting Peters a pardon for “her attempts to expose voter fraud” in the 2020 presidential election.

President Donald Trump is attempting to claim that he is pardoning Tina Peters, who was sentenced to nine years on state level charges for election tampering.

Peters is serving a nine-year prison sentence in Colorado after being convicted by a state court for tampering with voting machines.

Trump's pardon is largely symbolic since Peters, who is now in prison, was convicted of state crimes, which are not shielded by presidential pardon powers. “Democrats have been relentless in their targeting of TINA PETERS, a Patriot who simply wanted to make sure that our Elections were Fair and Honest,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

President Donald Trump said late on Dec. 11 that he had issued a pardon for Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk convicted of orchestrating a scheme to breach secure election equipment, though Colorado officials and legal experts immediately countered that the president’s broad pardon powers don’t extend to state-level crimes like those committed by

A federal magistrate judge has rejected a bid by a former Colorado county clerk to be released from prison while she appeals her state conviction for orchestrating a data breach scheme driven by false claims about voting machine fraud in the 2020 presidential race.

“The DOJ is trying to collect a lot of data on American voters, and they do not have a legal right to the sensitive information they're asking for, and we don't trust what they're trying to do with it,” said Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold in an interview with CPR News.