{"id":651860,"date":"2026-05-19T06:39:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T06:39:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/651860\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T06:39:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T06:39:15","slug":"fact-check-colorado-governors-misleading-rationale-for-freeing-tina-peters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/651860\/","title":{"rendered":"Fact check: Colorado governor\u2019s misleading rationale for freeing Tina Peters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Colorado Gov. Jared Polis justified his decision to release election denier Tina Peters<\/a> from prison with a series of false and misleading claims, inaccurately distancing her case from efforts to undermine the 2020 election.\n <\/p>\n

\n The former Mesa County clerk is set to be freed from state prison in two weeks, after Polis\u2019 commutation cut her sentence in half. A jury convicted<\/a> Peters of conspiring with allies of President Donald Trump to breach voting systems in her county in 2021, in hopes of proving his 2020 fraud claims.\n <\/p>\n

\n Polis, a term-limited Democrat, granted the commutation Friday. He justified his decision in a series of press interviews, including<\/a> with CNN\u2019s Kaitlan Collins, where he said the new 4 \u00bd-year sentence was \u201ctough but fair.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n He needed to \u201ceffectively resentence her,\u201d Polis told local affiliate KCNC<\/a>, in light of a recent ruling from the Colorado Court of Appeals that threw out her original nine-year sentence. The appeals court said the trial judge improperly based part of the punishment on Peters\u2019 protected speech about elections.\n <\/p>\n

\n Much of Polis\u2019 rationale related to these First Amendment concerns. He said Peters holds \u201ccrazy\u201d and \u201cdangerous\u201d beliefs about the 2020 election \u2014 but that she deserves a reprieve because she was unfairly punished for expressing them.\n <\/p>\n

\n Still, the commutation drew bipartisan blowback<\/a> from election officials and prosecutors. The district attorney who took Peters to trial said Polis \u201cmisunderstood\u201d key facts, and Colorado\u2019s attorney general said the governor\u2019s rationale was \u201cmind-boggling and wrong as a matter of basic justice.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s common for leaders to make false claims while justifying controversial clemency decisions. Trump did this<\/a> during the Russia probe in his first term, and former President Joe Biden did so after pardoning<\/a> his son in 2024.\n <\/p>\n

\n Here\u2019s a breakdown of three dubious claims from Polis.\n <\/p>\n

\n In his post-clemency interviews, Polis repeatedly distanced Peters\u2019 case and her criminal conduct from the attempts to undermine the 2020 election.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThis was after the 2021 \u2014 it was a small municipal election in the town,\u201d Polis said Friday on CNN. \u201cThe results were counted. No ballots were compromised. But she went in and illegally copied, tried to copy software before an update came. So, nothing to do with President Trump\u2019s election.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Polis also criticized Trump for linking Peters\u2019 case to the 2020 election, saying: \u201cHe does not understand this case. He thought \u2026 it had something to do with the 2020 election. It did not. Nothing to do with the 2020 election.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n This is highly misleading, and misses the big picture about her case.\n <\/p>\n

\n Polis is correct that Peters\u2019 specific crimes were not about the 2020 election. She was never accused of manipulating 2020 votes or trying to directly overturn the results. Her crimes \u2014 official misconduct, failing to comply with election rules, and more \u2014 all occurred long after Trump left office in 2021.\n <\/p>\n

\n But evidence from the trial established that these crimes were inspired by, and meant to help, the 2020 election denier movement. Peters conspired with associates of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell<\/a>, a notorious election denier who was, at the time, trying to prove that the 2020 election was rigged.\n <\/p>\n

\n Dan Rubinstein, the Mesa County prosecutor who charged Peters, told CNN that Polis was wrong to recast the case as unrelated to the 2020 dispute.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cShe wasn\u2019t specifically trying to prove that the vote count from 2020 was wrong,\u201d said Rubinstein, a Republican. \u201cBut she was looking for evidence with the machines, systemically, that the 2020 election results were invalid.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The appeals ruling that Polis touted also made clear that Peters\u2019 case was related to 2020. The ruling noted that Peters attended official meetings in 2021 \u201cabout alleged 2020 election fraud,\u201d and that the evidence showed that she wanted to help Lindell\u2019s allies \u201csubstantiate a theory of election fraud.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cHer offense was not her belief, however misguided the trial court deemed it to be, in the existence of such election fraud; it was her deceitful actions in her attempt to gather evidence of such fraud,\u201d the appeals panel wrote.\n <\/p>\n

\n In response to CNN\u2019s questions, Polis spokesman Eric Maruyama said in an email: \u201cPeters\u2019 criminal activity, for which she was correctly convicted, occurred in 2021, well after the 2020 election was certified. Whether the 2020 election or random conspiracy theories were an inspiration for her illegal actions, she was not accused of, or charged with, trying to manipulate the 2020 election process.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Polis falsely claimed three times in the CNN interview that Peters, as county clerk, \u201ccertified\u201d Biden\u2019s victory in the 2020 election.\n <\/p>\n

\n He said, \u201cShe was county clerk. She certified Biden won. Trump happened to win her county. It\u2019s a conservative county.\u201d He also said, \u201cShe certified President Biden won,\u201d and that, \u201cShe did her job, she certified Biden won.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n This is false. There is no evidence that Peters ever certified Biden\u2019s victory.\n <\/p>\n

\n As Polis noted, Trump won Peters\u2019 rural county<\/a>. She was the Mesa County clerk, so she was responsible for certifying the results in her county, not for the entire state, which Biden carried. Peters did her job in 2020 and certified the county results. Trump beat Biden in Mesa County, 63% to 35%.\n <\/p>\n

\n After Polis announced the commutation, Peters said in a statement that she was \u201csorry\u201d for \u201cthe mistakes of the past,\u201d when she \u201cmisled\u201d state election officials. But Peters has never\u202fpublicly\u202facknowledged that Biden\u202fwon in 2020, and her social media feed is filled with\u202fdebunked<\/a> voter-fraud claims.\n <\/p>\n

\n Maruyama, the Polis spokesman, said Monday that \u201cthe votes for Biden and Trump\u201d from Mesa County \u201cwere included in the statewide total and Biden won the state and its 9 electoral votes.\u201d He added, \u201cBiden won Colorado, and the results that Tina Peters certified were part of that final tally.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Polis wrongly claimed Peters didn\u2019t compromise anything in her office.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cHer crimes were entirely related to the 2021 municipal elections after ballots were counted. Nothing was compromised,\u201d Polis said Friday.\n <\/p>\n

\n Rubinstein, the Mesa County prosecutor, told CNN that Peters\u2019 actions in 2021 \u201c100% compromised the equipment.\u201d And Colorado election officials have said, for years, that the systems were tainted and couldn\u2019t be used again.\n <\/p>\n

\n Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a 2022 press release<\/a> that \u201cVoting equipment was compromised and election rules violated.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The announcement also said that Griswold \u201cdecertified the election equipment in Mesa County.\u201d (Griswold, a Democrat who is running for attorney general, has vocally condemned Polis for releasing Peters.)\n <\/p>\n

\n An election official testified at Peters\u2019 sentencing hearing in 2024 that Mesa County had to buy new equipment and spent more than $1 million in taxpayer funds \u201cto purchase, test, and retest systems that she undermined.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Maruyama told CNN on Monday that the governor \u201cwas referring to election results by choosing to use the word \u2018compromised\u2019\u201d in his Friday interview.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cShe did not actively interfere in the outcome of the 2020 or 2021 election and no election results were compromised,\u201d Maruyama said. \u201cHer actions triggered the county replacing election equipment to preserve election integrity and had other costs, which is a big part of why the Governor felt a tough sentence of four and a half years in prison was appropriate.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Colorado Gov. Jared Polis justified his decision to release election denier Tina Peters from prison with a series…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":651861,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-651860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/651861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}