Abuse of power

Jared Polis a free-speech martyr? More like a sucker

A Trump crony will keep criming thanks to him.

Courtesy of Colorado Public Radio.

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Colorado Governor Jared Polis popped up on a Colorado Democratic Party Zoom call this week with black tape plastered over his mouth. While Polis dodged reporters’ requests for comment on what the hell he was thinking, he appeared to be smarting from overwhelming censure by his own party for commuting the sentence of election-denier Tina Peters. Peters was serving a nine-year sentence for leaking county election data to Mike “My Pillow” Lindell in a bid to prove the Big Lie of a stolen 2020 election. Thanks to Polis, Peters will walk free on parole on June 1.

The gag is Polis trying to cast himself as a free-speech martyr rather than a sucker. He claims he commuted Peters’ sentence because the trial judge improperly punished her for her election denial ideology, over and above her criminal actions.

The judge brought up her beliefs in order to illustrate her complete lack of remorse, but an appeals court agreed with Polis.

“You are no hero, you abused your position, and you're a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that's been proven to be junk time and time again,” Judge Matthew Barrett said at her sentencing. “Your lies are well-documented, and these convictions are serious. I'm convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You're as defiant as a defendant as this court has ever seen.”

The appeals court ordered Barrett to re-sentence Peters without taking her ideology into account. Peters’ free speech rights had already been vindicated, but instead of letting the process play out, Polis foolishly tried to earn some credit with Trump by commuting her sentence.

Polis acquiesced to Trump's ruthless and unconstitutional pressure campaign to free Peters. Polis has proven that Trump can bully governors into springing maga criminals from state prison. Trump can pardon federal crimes and now he's dangling $1.8 billion taxpayer dollars in front of the goons who stormed the Capitol on J6. State prison is the last bulwark against maga crime and Polis foolishly set the precedent that governors can be bullied into short-circuiting justice for Trump’s cronies.

Trump fake-pardoned Peters late last year and demanded that Polis release her from prison. Colorado’s attorney general shrugged off the stunt, because it was devoid of legal merit. The president has no power to pardon state-level crimes.

Polis tried to minimize Peters’ misdeeds. “This was after the 2021 — it was a small municipal election in the town,” Polis told CNN.

Here’s what happened.

In a bid to prove the Big Lie, Peters conspired with another elected official and a clique of conspiracists to leak her county’s most sensitive election data. She smuggled one of Mike Lindell’s minions into the facility to copy the data, which ended up online.

It was gross official misconduct. The compromised voting machines had to be replaced at a cost of over a million dollars. Peters also defied subpoenas issued to investigate her crimes and even kicked a cop while resisting arrest.

“If [Peters] is not released, I am going to take harsh measures!!!” Trump threatened last summer.

A campaign of vengeance ensued. Trump slashed transportation funding, relocated Space Command, and killed the world-renowned National Center for Atmospheric Research, which supported hundreds of good jobs in Colorado. Trump vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have provided clean drinking water for part of Colorado. “We were told that Tina was the reason we couldn’t get water,” Congresswoman Lauren Boebert of Colorado said. Trump threatened to kick Colorado out of the federal food stamp program, a move a federal judge deemed unconstitutional because it was a blatant attempt to punish the state for Peters’ incarceration.

Trump ordered the Department of Justice to “take all necessary action” to get Peters out of prison. “We did it in a way that puts the right kind of pressure on them,” Justice Department official Ed Martin boasted, adding that “if you’re Colorado … if the feds say we want something, you change your tune.”

A senior White House official, who declined to be identified sounding like a mafia underboss, told the Times in response to the research center closure announcement that Coloradans would be better served if Governor Polis wanted to work with the president.

Everything Peters has done since her commutation seems calculated to make Polis look as foolish as possible. Polis claimed that Peters had taken responsibility for her crimes and had shown “a commitment to follow the law going forward." Whereupon, Peters accused the Colorado secretary of state and the attorney general of being part of a vast conspiracy. In an appeal filed last week, the unrepentant Peters argued that the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump should have been able to pardon her for a state crime, because she was acting on his behalf when she leaked Mesa County’s election data.

Even Polis’s claim that Peters is non-violent is a stretch. She kicked a cop while resisting arrest. She was later caught on prison CCTV throttling a fellow inmate.

Vice president JD Vance floated Peters as a potential beneficiary of Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for pedophiles, insurrectionists and white supremacists. The fund is supposedly to compensate people who were wrongly convicted or excessively sentenced by Joe Biden’s Justice Department. Yet Peters never caught a federal case. Instead, she, like Trump, was convicted of multiple state-level felonies. If Peters can get federal taxpayer cash for her state case, what’s to stop Trump from demanding cash for his 34 felony convictions in New York?

Trump pardoned all the January 6th insurrectionists on his first day in office. Now he’s promising to make them rich beyond their wildest dreams with our tax dollars. Between the power of the pardon and the power of the purse, Trump has powerful tools to induce his followers to commit crimes on his behalf. Only the state justice systems remain nominally beyond Trump’s reach.

Trump bullied Polis by withholding federal funds until Polis let Peters out of prison. Peters has already vowed to keep fighting for “election integrity” upon her release. The White House has all but promised to pay her for her trouble with our tax dollars.

Jared Polis made it all possible.