Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado said he did not give in to President Trump when he commuted the prison sentence of Tina Peters, the former county clerk convicted over a voting-machine breach, in an interview broadcast Sunday by 60 Minutes.
Mr. Polis, a Democrat, cut Ms. Peters’s sentence of nearly nine years in May, after she had served less than two. “This would’ve been much easier to do had the president never mentioned her,” he told Bill Whitaker of CBS. “This was a nonviolent, elderly, first-time offender who got a longer sentence than she should’ve.” She should have gotten “a year, two years, three years,” he said.
Mr. Trump had pushed for her release for months. In a social media post in August 2025, as a wildfire burned across northwest Colorado, he wrote, “If she is not released, I’m going to take harsh measures.” He called Ms. Peters a patriot and a “hostage being held in a Colorado prison by the Democrats for political reasons,” and called Mr. Polis a “weak and pathetic man.” A pardon he issued her had no legal effect. She was convicted on state charges, not federal ones.
That fire, the Lee fire, burned nearly 138,000 acres. The administration turned down the state’s request for federal disaster aid. Mr. Polis said the damage, much of it to oil and gas infrastructure, “absolutely met the requirements for a federal disaster declaration,” and that Colorado had not been refused in what he believed was decades. Asked what had changed, he said, “Well, you know obviously I’m not the one to ask, right?”
Kathleen Kelly, a retired schoolteacher, lost almost all of her 2,000-acre ranch, which her father built in 1949. “It’s like watching a monster crawl across the earth,” she told CBS.
The administration also threatened food aid for the state’s poorest families, canceled $109 million in transportation funding and moved to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. It has called those independent agency decisions. “There is no politicization to the president’s decisions on disaster relief,” Lauren Bis, a White House spokeswoman, said.
Attorney General Phil Weiser, whose office helped prosecute Ms. Peters, doesn’t buy it. He first sued in October 2025 over the planned move of U.S. Space Command out of Colorado Springs, then expanded the suit in January to cover the fire aid, the food assistance, the transportation money and the research center. “The purpose is clear: to coerce Colorado to end mail-in voting and to release Tina Peters from prison,” the state’s filing said. In a statement from his office, Mr. Weiser called it a revenge campaign.
“The threats were not hidden, they were not subtle, they were out in the open, and we’re fighting back,” Mr. Weiser said on 60 Minutes.
Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said Ms. Peters helped an outsider pose as a county employee, gave him access to secure voting equipment and let him copy its proprietary software. “Tina Peters ordered that her video surveillance cameras be turned off and then took images of the voting equipment and shared it with a network of election deniers,” Ms. Griswold said. A jury convicted Ms. Peters in 2024 of four felonies and three misdemeanors. “You are no hero,” Judge Matthew Barrett of Mesa County District Court told her at sentencing. “You abused your position, and you’re a charlatan.”
Critics have questioned the timing of the commutation. In April, a state appeals court upheld her conviction but ordered her resentenced, and that process was still underway when Mr. Polis acted. “There is no timeline for commutations and pardons. It’s whenever I make up my mind,” he said. Ms. Peters was paroled on June 1.
Matt Crane, a Republican who leads the Colorado County Clerks Association, called the commutation “a complete betrayal of the election community.” Of Mr. Polis, he said, “I mean, as simple as it is, he bent the knee to President Trump.”
Ms. Peters has since met with Mr. Trump at the White House, gone on Alex Jones’s streaming show and attended the Fraud Fighter Summit in Las Vegas. Speaking to CBS in August, she said election records under her care “were wiped from the system.” Mr. Crane said they were cleared in a routine statewide update, and that “every record that was required under federal and state law for retention, her staff had already backed up.” Asked about the cameras, she said: “Did I, are you asking me if I broke the law? They said I broke the law.”
Some money is moving again. The administration unfroze $47 million for water projects and approved the wildfire aid last month. Ms. Peters wouldn’t say whether she would run for office. “I’m willing to do whatever needs to be done to save this country,” she said.