Washington —

Inside the red brick walls of the La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo, Colorado, Tina Peters has grown impatient.

The former Republican clerk of Mesa County, Peters is one year into a nine-year prison term for her role in a scheme with fellow election deniers to breach voting machines in hopes of proving President Donald Trump’s baseless fraud claims. Closely guarded election passwords from her county spilled out onto the Internet as a result, showing up on a QAnon-affiliated messaging channel.

Peters is the only person currently in prison for trying to overturn the 2020 election – after Trump pardoned hundreds of convicted January 6 Capitol rioters, including those who planned the attack or were violent that day.

She remains locked up on state charges that are immune to a presidential pardon. Even from prison, she’s keeping the 2020 lies alive, through public letters and a jailhouse video interview in her orange prison uniform.

Trump has publicly badgered Colorado officials to free Peters, calling her an “innocent Political Prisoner.” The Justice Department has also intervened on her behalf, in an unorthodox move, urging a federal judge to consider releasing her on constitutional grounds, a decision that hasn’t come yet.

“Why is the DOJ defying Trump’s demands?” She recently wrote in a public letter posted to her Twitter account earlier this month. “Get off your asses and get me out!”

Nearly five years after the 2020 election, the debunked conspiracy that Trump was robbed of the election due to massive voter fraud has become gospel in many corners of the Republican Party. Back in power, Trump has not only pardoned rioters but also rewarded the advisers, allies and attorneys who promoted the lie on his behalf.

Some have new jobs at the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department. And at the White House, Kurt Olsen, a lawyer behind one of Trump’s major lawsuits in 2020 seeking to throw out millions of votes, now reportedly has a role investigating issues from 2020 and other voting-related matters. Others are running for office with Trump’s endorsement. And some are helping advance Trump’s agenda on elections through their outside advocacy efforts.

– Heather Honey, a self-styled election researcher, who seeded the 2020 conspiracy theory that there were more votes than voters in Pennsylvania, has been installed into a key election integrity position at the Department of Homeland Security.

– Honey is a close ally of Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who aided Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia and is now running a national “election integrity” network that’s more powerful than ever and is pushing Trump’s election priorities on the ground in key states.

– Trump is also endorsing figures who backed his election falsehoods, including Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a 2020 “fake elector”, who is running for the GOP nomination for governor in next year’s midterm elections.

– And Sigal Chattah, a Republican lawyer who represented an indicted fake elector in Nevada, is now the state’s interim US attorney and is reportedly pushing for 2020-related probes.

“The overall dynamic, which is a huge problem for the country no matter which party wins, is that people can lose faith in the reliability of elections,” said Ben Ginsberg, a top GOP election lawyer turned Trump critic. “And elections are the basic mechanism for the peaceful transfer of power that has always been the foundation of our country.”

The president’s elevation of unrepentant election deniers into positions of power comes as he tries to assert new authority over el