Fact check: Colorado governor’s misleading rationale for freeing election denier Tina Peters

(CNN) — Colorado Gov. Jared Polis justified his decision to release election denier Tina Peters from prison with a series of false and misleading claims, inaccurately distancing her case from efforts to undermine the 2020 election.

The former Mesa County clerk is set to be freed from state prison in two weeks, after Polis’ commutation cut her sentence in half. A jury convicted 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.

Polis, a term-limited Democrat, granted the commutation Friday. He justified his decision in a series of press interviews, including with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, where he said the new 4 ½-year sentence was “tough but fair.”

He needed to “effectively resentence her,” Polis told local affiliate KCNC, 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’ protected speech about elections.

Much of Polis’ rationale related to these First Amendment concerns. He said Peters holds “crazy” and “dangerous” beliefs about the 2020 election — but that she deserves a reprieve because she was unfairly punished for expressing them.

Still, the commutation drew bipartisan blowback from election officials and prosecutors. The district attorney who took Peters to trial said Polis “misunderstood” key facts, and Colorado’s attorney general said the governor’s rationale was “mind-boggling and wrong as a matter of basic justice.”

It’s common for leaders to make false claims while justifying controversial clemency decisions. Trump did this during the Russia probe in his first term, and former President Joe Biden did so after pardoning his son in 2024.

Here’s a breakdown of three dubious claims from Polis.

The case was spawned by 2020

In his post-clemency interviews, Polis repeatedly distanced Peters’ case and her criminal conduct from the attempts to undermine the 2020 election.

“This was after the 2021 — it was a small municipal election in the town,” Polis said Friday on CNN. “The 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’s election.”

Polis also criticized Trump for linking Peters’ case to the 2020 election, saying: “He does not understand this case. He thought … it had something to do with the 2020 election. It did not. Nothing to do with the 2020 election.”

This is highly misleading, and misses the big picture about her case.

Polis is correct that Peters’ 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 — official misconduct, failing to comply with election rules, and more — all occurred long after Trump left office in 2021.

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 notorious election denier who was, at the time, trying to prove that the 2020 election was rigged.

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.

“She wasn’t specifically trying to prove that the vote count from 2020 was wrong,” said Rubinstein, a Republican. “But she was looking for evidence with the machines, systemically, that the 2020 election results were invalid.”

The appeals ruling that Polis touted also made clear that Peters’ case was related to 2020. The ruling noted that Peters attended official meetings in 2021 “about alleged 2020 election fraud,” and that the evidence showed that she wanted to help Lindell’s allies “substantiate a theory of election fraud.”

“Her 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,” the appeals panel wrote.

In response to CNN’s questions, Polis spokesman Eric Maruyama said in an email: “Peters’ 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.”

Peters did not certify Biden’s win

Polis falsely claimed three times in the CNN interview that Peters, as county clerk, “certified” Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

He said, “She was county clerk. She certified Biden won. Trump happened to win her county. It’s a conservative county.” He also said, “She certified President Biden won,” and that, “She did her job, she certified Biden won.”

This is false. There is no evidence that Peters ever certified Biden’s victory.

As Polis noted, Trump won Peters’ rural county. 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%.

After Polis announced the commutation, Peters said in a statement that she was “sorry” for “the mistakes of the past,” when she “misled” state election officials. But Peters has never publicly acknowledged that Biden won in 2020, and her social media feed is filled with debunked voter-fraud claims.

Maruyama, the Polis spokesman, said Monday that “the votes for Biden and Trump” from Mesa County “were included in the statewide total and Biden won the state and its 9 electoral votes.” He added, “Biden won Colorado, and the results that Tina Peters certified were part of that final tally.”

Election equipment was tainted

Polis wrongly claimed Peters didn’t compromise anything in her office.

“Her crimes were entirely related to the 2021 municipal elections after ballots were counted. Nothing was compromised,” Polis said Friday.

Rubinstein, the Mesa County prosecutor, told CNN that Peters’ actions in 2021 “100% compromised the equipment.” And Colorado election officials have said, for years, that the systems were tainted and couldn’t be used again.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a 2022 press release that “Voting equipment was compromised and election rules violated.”

The announcement also said that Griswold “decertified the election equipment in Mesa County.” (Griswold, a Democrat who is running for attorney general, has vocally condemned Polis for releasing Peters.)

An election official testified at Peters’ sentencing hearing in 2024 that Mesa County had to buy new equipment and spent more than $1 million in taxpayer funds “to purchase, test, and retest systems that she undermined.”

Maruyama told CNN on Monday that the governor “was referring to election results by choosing to use the word ‘compromised’” in his Friday interview.

“She did not actively interfere in the outcome of the 2020 or 2021 election and no election results were compromised,” Maruyama said. “Her 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.”

The-CNN-Wire
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