Election denier Tina Peters released from prison

By Marshall Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — Election denier Tina Peters was released from a Colorado prison Monday, prison officials confirmed, weeks after the state’s Democratic governor granted a controversial commutation that cut her sentence in half.

The Republican former Mesa County clerk was convicted in 2024 of state felonies for conspiring with fellow election deniers to breach her county’s voting systems in hopes of proving President Donald Trump’s baseless 2020 voter-fraud claims.

She was sentenced to nearly nine years in prison, which was reduced last month by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to 4 ½ years. She ultimately served about one year and eight months in prison, due in part to Colorado’s parole policies.

Over the years, her plight has become a rallying cry in the election conspiracy movement. And until Monday, she was the last remaining person behind bars in connection with the varying efforts by Trump allies across the country to undermine the 2020 results.

Polis, a Democrat whose term ends next year, announced on May 15 that he was reducing Peters’ sentence.

The governor primarily justified his decision by citing a recent Colorado appeals court ruling that found the trial judge violated Peters’ First Amendment rights by improperly punishing Peters for her protected speech about the 2020 election. But he also defended his decision with a series of misleading and false claims about Peters’ case.

“It was a straightforward decision because, after reviewing the facts, and reading the Appeals Court decision, I concluded that her sentence was simply too long,” Polis wrote Sunday in a Substack post, where he condemned Peters’ crimes.

A bipartisan array of election officials, state prosecutors and lawmakers has condemned Polis for releasing Peters early. He was even censured by the Colorado Democratic Party, which said the commutation set a “dangerous and disappointing precedent.”

Peters’ early release marks a triumphant moment for the 2020 election denier movement and for Trump, who waged a long pressure campaign against Colorado over her incarceration. Polis said his decision wasn’t influenced by Trump’s actions — which included closing a Colorado-based climate lab, denying federal disaster assistance requests, vetoing a Colorado water project and pulling federal transportation funds.

Trump granted a symbolic federal pardon to Peters last year, but she had remained in prison under state charges. Peters is appealing her convictions, and she maintains her innocence.

CNN has reached out to Peters’ lawyers seeking comment.

Doubling down on election lies

Shortly after walking out of the La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo, Colorado, Peters appeared on Trump ally Steve Bannon’s podcast, where she doubled down on debunked conspiracy theories about US elections.

“I know that the Democrats are going to cheat, and no one’s really addressing the problem that I spent my time in prison as retribution for and that was exposing the election machines that allow the votes to be flipped,” Peters said.

She was referring to the long-debunked assertion that Dominion Voting Systems’ machines can fraudulently flip votes. This claim was at the heart of baseless claims of systemic cheating against Trump in 2020. And it’s what she was tying to prove when she breached her county’s equipment in 2021.

“I still have a fight to clear my name and bring out the truth of why they came after me the way they did,” Peters said.

Few signs of remorse

Throughout her incarceration, Peters has stayed active on social media through allies and has continued spreading conspiracy theories about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden.

But in her clemency application submitted to Polis, she acknowledged wrongdoing for the first time. She said: “I made a mistake four years ago. I misled the secretary of state when allowing a person to gain access to county voting equipment. That was wrong. Going forward, I will make sure that my actions always follow the law.”

In a letter to Peters granting clemency, Polis said her statement “demonstrates taking responsibility for your crimes.” Polis also told CNN in an interview on the day of the commutation that “she’s also expressed contrition now with this statement.”

But her lawyer Peter Ticktin told CNN in a recent interview that he doesn’t see it that way.

“I don’t think she indicated that she was feeling contrition and remorse. She basically was admitting to the fact that she could have done it better,” Ticktin said. “It’s very hard to be someone who has real contrition. There’s a difference between regret and contrition. It could have been done in such a way where she didn’t actually deceive anybody, and that was her mistake.”

In that vein, Peters and Ticktin have continued attacking election officials after her clemency. Peters recently posted on X that Colorado’s secretary of state, Democrat Jena Griswold, was engaged in a “cover up” and Ticktin said she deserves decades in prison. (Griswold has said she always upheld the law, and she staunchly opposed Peters’ release.)

“I will never back down, I will never give up, and I will never give in,” Peters wrote on May 22. “I will always stand for truth, transparency, and fairness in our elections.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

CNN’s Jeremy Herb and Edward-Isaac Dovere contributed to this report.

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