Colorado’s Guv commutes ex-election clerk’s sentence after Trump pressure

DENVER, May 16: Colorado Governor Jared Polis on Friday commuted the sentence of election conspiracy theorist Tina Peters following pressure from President Donald Trump, the latest instance of the president using his powers to reward those who echoed his baseless claims of mass fraud as the cause of his 2020 loss.
Trump has championed the case of Peters, a 70-year-old former county clerk who was sentenced to nine years behind bars after being convicted in a scheme to make a copy of her county’s election computer system. She gets released June 1.
In April, a Colorado appeals court upheld her conviction but ordered Peters to be resentenced because it said the judge who sent her to prison wrongly punished her for speaking out about election fraud, a decision that Polis praised.
In a letter to Peters, Polis wrote that Peters was convicted of serious crimes and deserved to spend time in prison. “However, this is an extremely unusual and lengthy sentence for a first time offender who committed nonviolent crimes,” the governor wrote.
President Trump posted around the time of the announcement on his Truth Social platform: “FREE TINA!” (AP)