Justice Dept. to Review Election Tampering Conviction of Pro-Trump Clerk

The Justice Department said on Monday that it would review the conviction of the former clerk of Mesa County, Colo., who was found guilty of state charges last summer of tampering with voting machines under her control in a failed attempt to prove that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against President Trump.

The decision was the latest example of the Justice Department under Mr. Trump’s control seeking to use its powers to support those who have acted on his behalf and to go after those who have criticized or opposed him. It also played into the president’s effort to rewrite the history of his efforts to overturn the results of the election.

Three weeks ago, the former clerk, Tina Peters, who was sentenced to nine years in prison on the state election tampering charges, filed a long-shot motion in Federal District Court in Denver effectively challenging the guilty verdict she received in August at the end of a trial in Grand Junction.

But, in a surprise move, Yaakov M. Roth, the acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil division, filed a court brief known as a statement of interest on Monday, declaring that “reasonable concerns have been raised about various aspects of Ms. Peters’s case.” In the filing, Mr. Roth said the federal judge who received Ms. Peters’s petition this month should give it “prompt and careful consideration.”

Mr. Roth said that the Justice Department was concerned, among other things, about “the exceptionally lengthy sentence” imposed on Ms. Peters by the judge in Grand Junction. He also questioned a decision by state prosecutors to deny her bail as she appeals her conviction as “arbitrary or unreasonable.”

The review of Ms. Peters’s case was part of a larger examination of cases “across the nation for abuses of the criminal justice process,” Mr. Roth wrote. The scrutiny of Peters case, he added, was being conducted under the aegis of an executive order that Mr. Trump issued seeking to end the “weaponization of the federal government.”

It remains unclear what lasting effect the Justice Department’s review of Ms. Peters’s case might have on the proceeding. But Mr. Roth made clear in his court papers that the evaluation was taking place to determine whether the prosecution was “oriented more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice.”

The Justice Department has no power to directly overturn the state conviction. But its filing lobbying a federal court to intercede in the case was nonetheless a remarkable intervention in the matter.

Dan Rubinstein, the Mesa County district attorney who secured the conviction against Ms. Peters, said on Monday evening that, until Mr. Roth’s court papers were filed, he had had no idea that the Justice Department was thinking of scrutinizing Ms. Peters’s case for alleged political bias.

Moreover, he said, no one from the department had reached out to him before the filing to express concern about the case.

“I am happy to have a conversation with anybody in the administration as to the motivations and expectations that our community had when they overwhelmingly wanted me to bring this criminal action,” Mr. Rubinstein said.

A jury in Grand Junction found Ms. Peters guilty of seven charges stemming from her efforts to breach a voting machine manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems in the months after Mr. Trump lost the election to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The jury determined that Ms. Peters had helped an outsider gain unauthorized access to the machine in May 2021 and to obtain information that was later made public at a conspiratorial event held to undermine trust in Mr. Trump’s defeat.

At a sentencing hearing in October, Judge Matthew D. Barrett scolded Ms. Peters from the bench, telling her that he was imposing a stiff penalty on her because she had repeatedly advanced false claims about Mr. Trump’s defeat, and that, in so doing, she had become a celebrity among those who denied that he lost the race.

“You are no hero. You abused your position, and you are a charlatan,” Judge Barrett said, adding, “You cannot help but lie as easy as you breathe.”

Since Mr. Trump’s re-election, the Justice Department has faced criticism for its conduct in a number of cases, several of which have resulted in the abrupt resignations of federal prosecutors.

Top prosecutors in New York and Washington stepped down this month in response to the department’s efforts to dismiss the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York.

In a similar fashion, the chief of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington recently resigned after she declined a request from her boss, Ed Martin, to freeze the assets of a government contractor, saying she had insufficient evidence to do so.

Mr. Martin has also been quietly pushing to present evidence against Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, to a federal grand jury over comments he made about Supreme Court justices in 2020, according to people with knowledge of the situation. Justice Department officials have thus far rebuffed the request, one of those people said.