Prominent 2020 election denier Tina Peters, who was sentenced to nine years in prison over attempted vote interference, is being freed in a shock commutation by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis—a Democrat.
Polis told The New York Times that he wasn’t trying to placate Donald Trump amid the president’s continued baseless claims that the election he lost was rigged, but that he believed Peters’ sentence was too harsh. She was a first-time, nonviolent offender, he noted.
Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado’s Mesa County, was convicted on August 12, 2024, as part of a plot to seize voting machines in a failed bid to demonstrate a false claim that the race had been rigged against Trump.
“She committed a crime; she deserves to be a convicted felon,” Polis conceded to the newspaper, while also calling her sentence “unusually harsh.” At the same time, he emphasized that her position on the election results was “dangerously incorrect.”
Yet Polis defended Peters’ stance, and apparently her actions, as “free speech,” adding that his commutation of her sentence is “an important message we send out, that supports free speech in our country.”
While Polis substantially reduced Peters’ sentence, he did not pardon her of her crimes.
Trump has railed on Truth Social that his 70-year-old “elderly” supporter be freed (Trump is 79), and blasted Polis as a “sleazebag.”
Peters was convicted of seven criminal counts—including four felony charges—for letting Trump’s allies illegally access the county’s election system.
When she was sentenced, Colorado trial court Judge Matthew Barrett blasted her “as defiant a defendant as this court has ever seen,” and declared that her “lies” and “corrupt conduct” made her a “danger to the community.”
After she was indicted, the MAGA heroine continued to push her wild election conspiracy theories. In 2022, she even ran for Colorado Secretary of State.
Polis had earlier insisted that Peters must express remorse for her actions before he would consider action on her sentence. He said on Friday that in her latest application, Peters “owns up” to what she did, and that she was wrong to allow outside access to voting machines. She promised to “always follow the law” in the future, the governor told the Times.
Quickly after the clemency was announced, Trump posted on Truth Social: “FREE TINA!”
The move was yet another failure in numerous battles to hold accountable those who attempted to overturn a legitimate presidential election that was lambasted by several Democrats and some Republicans. Trump granted clemency to almost all of the 1,600 people linked to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
