CNN’s Kaitlin Collins tried to go after Tina Peters, the Republican former election clerk who Democrats accused of trying to “overthrow” the 2020 election in such absurd and ridiculous fashion that even her guest, the Democratic Governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, called her out on it and insisted that what she said was wrong, pointing out that the host cot the basic facts wrong.
As background, Peters was imprisoned in the wake of the 2020 election over allegations that she committed crimes in trying to aid President Trump in “overthrowing” the election. In reality, she did no such thing, and merely tried to copy the election software so it could be examined in a 2021 election, after being suspicious of the 2020 election.
In any case, Peters recently received clemency from Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, and will be released from custody, with Polis claiming the allegations about her of the sort that Collins repeated are made up and absurd, and that she committed no crime.
Such is what came up when he appeared on Collins’s show and got in a fight with her about Peters. Collins broached the subject. After thanking Gov. Polis for coming on the show, Collins claimed, “A lot of people might look at this and say Tina Peters was convicted by a jury of her peers and a conservative leaving county, no less.” She then asked, “Why did you decide to commute her sentence?”
Responding, Gov. Polis fired back and argued that she was incorrect, and that Peters had, in fact, committed no such crime. He said, “I have to start, Kaitlin, by correcting just one thing in the lead-in. She did not commit any crimes regarding the 2020 elections.”
Continuing, he argued that Peters had only tried to copy software to see if it was rigged, after the 2020 election, and that she hadn’t meddled with ballots. He said, “She certified President Biden won. This was after the 2021 It was a small municipal election in the town. The results were counted, no ballots were compromised, but she went in and illegally copied, tried to copy software before an update came.”
Building on that, he argued that she committed crimes of a sort and should be punished for them, but that the crimes of which Collins and others accuse her didn’t happen. He said, “So, nothing to do with President Trump’s election. Just wanted to make that clear. Look, what the appeals court found, and what I agree, is that fundamentally she deserves time, and she committed four felonies. Those are going to stay on her record.”
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Concluding, he said, pointing to how unfair and ridiculous her sentence was, “We’re continuing to fight the president’s bogus attempt to pardon her in court, but the truth of the matter is that her speech, meaning her conspiratorial beliefs and what she believes in, are certainly an athena to me and most of your viewers, and I strongly disagree with, but those are not the basis and should not be the basis for a longer sentence than somebody would normally get for this crime, and that’s really what the sentence reduction is all about.”
Watch that exchange here:
Bo Loudon, praising Polis for his comments in a post on X, said, “Colorado Democrat Gov. Jared Polis just put CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in HER PLACE on LIVE TV after he commuted the sentence of Tina Peters. ‘Tina Peters did not commit any crimes regarding the 2020 election.'”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video