Colorado’s governor is between a rock and hard place.
By upholding the law and keeping a convicted felon behind bars, Gov. Jared Polis is causing his state to suffer the wrath of President Donald Trump.
Of course, Tina Peters didn’t commit just any crime.
It all started in the aftermath of the 2019 general election when Peters, as Mesa County Clerk, tried to do her small part to subvert the election of Joe Biden.
Among her crimes, Peters was found guilty of orchestrating an unauthorized person to access the county’s electronic voting machines to make copies of election system software and capture images of passwords and other sensitive data, all while the room’s security cameras had been disabled.
Under the influence of election-deniers, Peters’ goal was to prove election equipment in Mesa County was somehow corruptible. A pursuit that continues to fail.
In 2024, a Mesa County jury found Peters guilty of seven of 10 criminal charges related to the security breach, including willfully compromising her office’s election equipment.
She was sentenced to nine years in prison.
In the lead-up to her incarceration, Peters, 70, appeared to relish her new-found role as a rabble rouser.
Not only did she find a national platform to spread election conspiracy theories, but she refused to comply with a subpoena issued by the Colorado Secretary of State during its investigation of her.
That insubordination no doubt grated on District Judge Matthew Barrett, who, during her sentencing, called her a “charlatan” who abused her role as a county clerk to “peddle snake oil,” and, Barrett predicted, “would do it all over again if you could.”
As the saying goes, “One man’s meat is another’s poison.”
What Judge Barrett found objectionable in Peters, Trump admired.
And once he was re-elected, Trump issued Peters a presidential pardon for her efforts to “expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.”
But because Peters’s conviction was on state charges, and not federal, like the 1,500 Trump pardoned for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol which aimed to overturn the 2020 election results, her pardon was only symbolic.
WHAT’S ALL too real, however, is Trump’s retribution on Colorado for its Gov. Jared Polis’s refusal to heed his demand to pardon Peters.
