When Jared Polis first strongly hinted that he would commute the sentence of election grifter Tina Peters, I wrote that if Polis signed the papers he’d also be writing his political obituary.
But now that it’s done, now that Polis has cut Peters’ sentence in half, meaning she’ll be out of prison on June 1, I think I underestimated the case.
In commuting her sentence, Polis has shown a deep lack of respect for both Colorado’s judicial system and its electoral system. That can’t be how the term-limited governor wants to be remembered.
And yet, his legacy will now be that he willfully took his place in the unholy trio that also includes Peters and, of course, Donald Trump. And I guess you could throw in Mike Lindell, the Pillow Guy, too, if there’s such a thing as an unholy quartet.
This is what we call in the business an unforced error, but, again, it’s worse than that. Polis doesn’t believe in the Big Lie that the 2020 election was rigged, but in freeing Peters, he has made himself, as I’ve written several times, an accessory after the fact.
He does believe that she was guilty, but also that her sentence was unjust. It’s a hard case for Polis to make — Coloradans overwhelmingly believe the sentence was just — and when he tries, he makes himself look either foolish or naive.
What’s clear is Polis is now officially a pariah in his own party. Nearly all Colorado Democratic leaders have condemned, and in the harshest terms, the commutation of the former Mesa County clerk who betrayed her oath of office and betrayed those whose votes she was elected to safeguard.
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SUBSCRIBEWhat’s not altogether clear is why Polis chose to do it.
Your answers may vary. I know mine do.
But let’s lay out the case. The obvious answer is that Polis caved to Trump — the orange king of pardons and commutations for his corrupt friends and supplicants — who has declared war on our state for a variety of reasons, but mostly because Polis refused to pardon Peters. Trump has said, among other niceties, that Polis should “rot in hell.”
You know the long list of Trump’s sins against our state. Maybe, though, that answer is too obvious. Polis has to know that Trump will not back down now from making Colorado one of his target states. That’s not who Trump is.
I think the answer lies more in who Polis is. He says the pressure Trump has put on him played no role in his decision. And I half-believe that.
You should know who Polis is by now. He has been your governor for nearly eight years. And if there’s one thing we have learned in that time, it’s that Polis pretty much always thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room.
Just as one example, Polis may have been the only top Democratic official to support Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination as health secretary. But worse, he has never admitted that his support was a clear and obvious mistake. There are so many other examples.
So when Michael Bennet and Phil Weiser and John Hickenlooper and even Barb Kirkmeyer, a leading Republican candidate for governor, condemn him, that doesn’t seem to bother Polis at all.
When the Colorado County Clerks condemn him, when the Republican DA who tried Peters condemns him, when the Colorado Secretary of State condemns him, it appears he couldn’t care less.
When his allies say they’re “furious” and that the decision, as Weiser put it, is “mind-boggling,” you’d think that might matter to Polis.
It does not.
This is Polis at his most arrogant, which is saying something. It’s Polis letting his libertarian freak flag fly at its highest, which is saying something.
In freeing Peters after she served only 17 months of her nine-year sentence, Polis is making the case that he is a champion — and I guess we’re not — of free speech and the First Amendment. He says he believes that her sentence was at least as much about what she said, in spouting conspiracy theories, than what a jury of her peers decided she had done — which was to organize a security breach of her own office.
As you may recall, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Judge Matthew Barrett, who lashed out at Peters when sentencing her, may have used her conspiracy theories against her in determining her nine-year sentence.
The court, which said the trial was otherwise entirely fair, sent it back to the trial judge for resentencing. Polis could have — indeed, should have — waited to see what the judge ruled, but he didn’t. Why not let the rule of law take its course? Why would Polis disrespect Judge Barrett?
I think you know why.
I’m guessing that Polis didn’t wait because he feared the judge would not change Peters’ sentence significantly. And that it would then become more difficult to justify the notion that there was a problem here and that only Polis could fix it.
As Polis told the Denver Post, “just because somebody believes the Earth is flat — just because somebody believes in conspiracy theories — does not mean that they should receive a harsher sentence for a very specific crime.”
Can you find any logic there — that Peters got her nine years because she was equivalent to a flat-earther? Does that sound as absurd to you as it does to me?
In his letter to Peters, Polis said once again that Peters’ sentence was too harsh for a first-time offender who had not committed a violent crime. But, of course, Peters’ crime was violent. It did violence to our electoral system. Although she wrote to Polis that she was wrong in what she did, that was the first time — and my guess, the only time — she has shown remorse.
Polis had said he wouldn’t commute her sentence unless she showed remorse. But he now admits that he puts little faith in Peters’ half-hearted apology.
And yet.
And yet.
Dan Rubenstein, the DA who prosecuted the case, had maybe the best answer for Polis’ actions, saying he had “arrogantly” disregarded those involved in the trial.
“Governor Polis’ irresponsible act was his decision to drastically reduce her sentence for a misguided and misunderstood reason that undermined accountability and eroded confidence in the integrity of the system itself. Ms. Tina Peters’ lack of remorse was greatly understated, and the Governor’s reliance on First Amendment concerns was greatly overstated.”
You remember Trump once tried to pardon Peters, but that time the law — which said that a president can’t pardon someone convicted of a state crime — actually stopped him.
Nobody can stop Polis now. It’s a done deal.
In his condemnation of Polis, Bennet said that, in the case of Peters, “lawlessness breeds lawlessness.”
What Polis did was perfectly legal. And yet it still managed to be lawless, in the sense that it, at minimum, violated the spirit of the law.
My guess is that’s how Polis will be remembered.
What I’m sure of is that’s how he should be remembered.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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