Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D) was on the business end of a brutal fact check by CNN after commuting the sentence of Tina Peters.

Peters, a former Mesa County clerk, was convicted in Colorado state court in 2024 on seven counts, including four felony charges, after she conspired to breach her county’s voting systems in 2021. She was sentenced to nine years in prison.

Upon being sentenced, the judge scolded Peters for showing no remorse.

“I’m convinced you would do it all over again if you could,” he told her at the time. “You’re as defiant as a defendant as this court has ever seen.”

Last week, Polis granted Peters clemency and said she will be released on June 1, after President Donald Trump repeatedly demanded Peters be freed.

On Monday, CNN’s Marshall Cohen published a comprehensive fact check of remarks Polis has made justifying the clemency. The governor has insisted that Peters’ actions were not related to the 2020 election.

“This was after the 2021 — it was a small municipal election in the town,” Polis said on Friday’s edition of The Source 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 even went as far as to say that Peters’ case had “nothing to do” with the 2020 election.

Cohen called the governor’s claim “highly misleading”:

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.

In the CNN interview, Polis also claimed Peters “certified Biden won.”

Cohen noted that Trump won Peters’ county 63% to 35%, and certified those results. As such, there was no victory for Joe Biden to certify in Mesa County.

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

But as Cohen pointed out, multiple state officials said Peters compromised the county’s election systems. One Mesa County prosecutor stated that Peters’ actions “100% compromised the equipment.” Meanwhile, Colorado’s secretary of state said in 2022, “Voting equipment was compromised and election rules violated.”

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!