Last week, Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, commuted the sentence of Tina Peters, the Mesa County election clerk currently serving a nine-year sentence for her role in a plot to seize voting machines in an attempt to show voting fraud against President Trump in the 2020 election.
But the only attempted voting fraud was by Peters herself. In sentencing Peters, District Judge Matthew Barrett told her, “I am convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You’re as defiant as any defendant this court has ever seen.”
After Peters’s sentencing, Trump became obsessed with getting a pardon for her. Since this was a sentence for a crime under state law, he could not pardon Peters himself, though he did issue a symbolic pardon.
To put pressure on Polis, Trump cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for Colorado. This included rejecting disaster relief for counties damaged by floods and fire, and acting to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. Trump vetoed an urgently needed water pipeline for several counties in rural Colorado, and also froze child care and food assistance for low-income families, all the while lobbying Polis to free Peters.
In announcing the commutation, Polis insisted that he was not trying to appease Trump. In a letter to Peters, Polis wrote that she deserved to spend time in prison. “However, this is an extremely unusual and lengthy sentence for a first time offender who committed nonviolent crimes.”
Polis also cited an April decision of a Colorado appeals court, which ordered a new sentencing, on the premise that her original sentence “was based in part on improper consideration of her exercise of her right to free speech.” But this finding is preposterous, since Peters, whatever her beliefs, was prosecuted and sentenced for her conduct, not her speech.
Specifically, she was convicted (of seven felonies and five misdemeanors) and sentenced for conspiring with an outside computer expert, an associate of election denier and MyPillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell, to copy files from her county’s Dominion Voting Systems computer server.
The scheme was to try to show that state officials and Dominion Voting Systems had tampered with election results. Peters appeared with Lindell at a “cybersymposium” discussing alleged election-rigging.
Given that the trial judge, carrying out the appeals court order, was very likely to shorten Peters’s sentence, it is odd that Polis chose this moment to jump the gun and commute the sentence himself. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Polis was trying to ingratiate himself with Trump in the hope of getting some Colorado funding restored, rather than let the appeals court get the credit.
Polis denies this. He told a New York Times reporter that his commutation decision was not motivated by the hope that Trump might reverse his actions against Colorado. “That’s not something I ever considered,” Polis said. But that strains credulity, given the timing.
Colorado may well wait a long time for federal funding to be restored. The whole history of giving in to Trump’s blackmail is that it doesn’t work. Sycophancy just breeds Trump’s contempt. Just ask the former presidents of Columbia and Penn.
In this case, the damage of Polis’s action goes even deeper. Tina Peters becomes a vindicated martyr, now liberated to affirm Trump’s election conspiracy theories, and Trump will only redouble his efforts to interfere with the 2026 midterms.
Other Colorado officials, Democrat and Republican alike, were quick to condemn Polis. Republican Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said in a statement that Polis is “bending the knee to the same political forces and conspiracy movements that are actively undermining confidence in our democratic institutions.” Colorado’s Democratic attorney general, Phil Weiser, called the decision “mind-boggling and wrong as a matter of basic justice.”
Polis is termed-out as governor. Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat in the race to succeed Polis, said that he vehemently disagreed with the commutation, since Peters undermined elections and was convicted by a jury for knowingly breaking the law.
“Lawlessness only breeds more lawlessness,” Bennet said. “With President Trump continuing to attack Colorado, we must do everything we can to stand strong for our institutions and the rule of law.”
Even a Republican gubernatorial candidate, state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, said she would have preferred that the governor wait on any commutation until the trial judge reviewed the sentence. “A commutation or pardon by a governor should be reserved for truly extraordinary circumstances,” Kirkmeyer wrote. “The governor has a responsibility to apply justice fairly, consistently, and without bias.”
This is not Polis’s first screwy action as a supposedly progressive Democrat. He vetoed 11 pieces of pro-worker and -consumer legislation, including measures removing obstacles to workers forming unions and a ban on computer algorithms to set rents, as well as passenger safety requirements for Uber and Lyft and social media regulation.
And he lavishly praised the appointment of RFK Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. “I’m excited by the news that the President-Elect will appoint @RobertKennedyJr to @HHSGov,” Polis wrote on X. “He helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019.”
Polis’s footsie with Trump is weirdly in character. And only Polis fully knows what he hopes to achieve with the commutation of Tina Peters’s sentence.
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