We are all familiar with Trump’s efforts to rewrite the history of January 6, 2021, as a peaceful protest objecting to a “rigged” and “stolen” election. Even now, Trump continues to try to seize state ballots to prove that he beat Biden in 2020.
The election wasn’t even close, neither in the popular vote nor the electoral college. Trump was in charge of the federal government. Republicans in Georgia recounted the ballots three times. More than 60 courts turned down Trump’s demands because he had no evidence of fraud.
One of the most prominent election deniers was Tina Peters in Colorado. Trump gave her a federal pardon, but she was convicted in a state court.
Tina Peters was County Clerk of Mesa County in Colorado from 2019 to 2023. Mesa County conducts a bipartisan audit after elections to assure there were no irregularities. Peters signed off on the audit. However, she met with individuals who insisted the results were rigged, and she allowed an unauthorized person to access the county’s Dominion voting machines and copy their hard drives. She was arrested, charged, and found guilty of seven charges, four of which were felonies.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis just commuted her sentence but did not pardon her.
Tina Peters, perhaps the most prominent 2020 election denier who remains behind bars, is set to go free after Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, commuted her sentence on Friday.
The remarkable development cuts short the roughly nine-year sentence that Ms. Peters, a former county clerk in Mesa County, Colo., was given after being convicted in 2024 for her role in a brazen plot to examine voting machines under her control after the 2020 election. Ms. Peters had tried to prove that the machines had been used to rig the contest against President Trump.
In an interview at the Colorado State Capitol, the governor said his commutation was not an attempt to placate Mr. Trump, who has leveled a barrage of funding cuts and policy attacks at Colorado in a hostile effort to free Ms. Peters.
Instead, Mr. Polis said he believed that Ms. Peters, a nonviolent first-time offender, had received too harsh a sentence because of her embrace of conspiracy theories about Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss.
“She committed a crime; she deserves to be a convicted felon,” said Mr. Polis, who noted that he was not pardoning Ms. Peters. But, he added, “she was given an unusually harsh sentence.”
Mr. Polis called Ms. Peters’s beliefs about the 2020 election “dangerously incorrect,” but said they should not have been an element of her original sentencing.
“I think it’s an important message we send out, that supports free speech in our country,” he said.
Ms. Peters will be released on parole on June 1, the governor said.
Her impending freedom is the latest example of the steady erosion of efforts to hold supporters of Mr. Trump accountable for attempts to overturn the 2020 election. On his first day back in the White House last year, he granted clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Investigations into his actions, by both federal investigators and local law enforcement officials in Georgia, quickly collapsed.
But forcing the release of Ms. Peters, who was convicted of a state crime and not a federal one, had proved to be more challenging for Mr. Trump, who issued her a symbolic pardon. Her continued imprisonment undercut the president’s sweeping attempt to rewrite the history of the 2020 election.
The commutation by Mr. Polis was one of the most agonizing decisions about justice and punishment he has faced in his two terms as an against-the-grain Democratic governor. He has previously irked fellow Democrats by supporting the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health secretary and by vetoing dozens of bills passed by Colorado’s Democrat-controlled legislature.
Polis and Senator John Fetterman are both against-the-grain Democrats.
Diane Ravitch's blog 