Soft on Crime

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

 

Most of what I had to say about the president’s preposterous $2 billion slush fund was said in Friday’s newsletter. But I did have one thought after that piece was published that I wished I had included in it.

 

That is: How many millions do we think Tina Peters will receive from the fund?

 

Peters is the former Colorado clerk who was convicted of state crimes for enabling a security breach of her county’s voting system in 2021. Donald Trump lost her deep-blue home state badly in 2020, which was predictable, yet Peters became convinced that vote-rigging must have been afoot. The following year, hoping to prove that Colorado’s voting machines were faulty, she allegedly used “someone else’s security badge to give an expert affiliated with My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell access to the Mesa County election system.”

 

There were real costs to that breach, tangible and otherwise. The county was forced to replace its voting machines. And MAGA sore losers took to threatening and harassing other clerks in Colorado, emboldened by Peters’ insider skepticism of the results.

 

She was sent away in 2024 for nine years on various charges related to the incident, inevitably causing Trump to turn her into another “martyr” to election crankery. He tried to pardon her last year, but presidents have no authority to grant clemency for state offenses. So instead, he resorted to his other favorite tools for getting his way—screeching endlessly about “unfairness” and abusing his power to penalize adversaries for defying him. Among the reprisals he cooked up for Colorado for imprisoning Peters were “moving U.S. Space Command to Alabama, killing a water project, and closing down a climate-research center” in the state.

 

For once, though, he was checkmated. Hundreds upon hundreds of criminals motivated by “rigged election” fantasies have walked free since January of last year thanks to the president, but Peters remained beyond his reach. Only Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, could grant her early release. And Polis is a Democrat. It would never happen.

 

Until it did. On Friday, the governor commuted her sentence to four and a half years, cutting it in half.

 

And so we return to my question: How much of our taxpayer money do we suppose this soon-to-be-released criminal will receive as thanks for her crimes?

 

Don’t tell me that a state convict won’t be eligible for reparations from a fund created to compensate victims of “weaponized” federal law enforcement. The point of a slush fund is to eliminate all accountability in how the money is spent, and that’s doubly true for any fund that’s designed to be opaque and to answer exclusively to Donald Trump. The proceeds here will be used to remunerate Trump cultists who chose loyalty to the president over obeying the law, the highest act of patriotism under postliberalism. Peters will get a check, I promise.

 

Believe it or not, there’s an argument floating around that Jared Polis did the right thing by orchestrating this jailbreak of one of the very few convicts in America still doing time for crimes inspired by a coup plot. Let’s consider it.

 

Abuse of discretion.

 

The argument is that Peters is serving time not just for things she did but for things she said, which isn’t supposed to happen in America. And it’s strong enough that a Colorado appellate court recently endorsed it.

 

Last month, a three-judge state panel unanimously overturned her nine-year sentence because the trial judge who imposed it implied that he was punishing her in part for her “rigged election” activism. (She was scheduled to be resentenced until Polis intervened.) “The trial court’s comments about Peters’s belief in the existence of 2020 election fraud went beyond relevant considerations for her sentencing,” the majority wrote. “Her offense was not her belief, however misguided the trial court deemed it to be, in the existence of such election fraud; it was her deceitful actions in her attempt to gather evidence of such fraud.”

 

She can be punished for abetting a breach of her county’s election system, but the First Amendment protects her from being punished for saying kooky things about Joe Biden’s victory.

 

Go back and read the trial judge’s remarks to Peters during sentencing and you’ll see why the appellate court believed he blurred that line. “Prison is for those folks where we send people who are a danger to all of us, whether it be by the pen or the sword or the word of the mouth,” the judge told her. At one point he called her a “charlatan” and said she deserved a stiff sentence because she did more than merely “question” whether the election was rigged. She lied about it, he complained, abusing the “pulpit” that her stature as a county clerk had given her.

 

It is not, in fact, a crime to be a lying charlatan who exploits one’s government position to promote moronic conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. If it was, Donald Trump would be in Supermax, not the White House.

 

Jared Polis is known for having a libertarian streak by the standards of modern Democrats, so it wasn’t surprising that he pointed at free speech when asked why he commuted Peters’ sentence. “It’s not a crime in our country to believe the earth is flat,” he told the New York Times. “It’s not a crime to believe voting machines are flawed.”

 

He’s right. All he needs to do now is explain why he, rather than the courts, was the proper authority to declare that Tina Peters had served enough time for the crimes she actually did commit.

 

It’s not inherently crazy. Clemency is an extraordinary remedy, but we can all imagine cases where an injustice is so egregious that a governor should intervene even when the judicial system is trying to correct it. Courts move slowly but executives move fast, and justice delayed is justice denied.

 

This isn’t one of those cases, though.

 

To begin with, the Colorado appellate court that ruled in Peters’ favor didn’t order her release or even instruct the trial court to reduce her prison term on resentencing, as one would assume it might do if it believed the original sentence was indefensibly harsh.

 

And the trial judge at that original sentencing gave several legitimate reasons for taking note of Peters’ election lies. He cited them as evidence of motive: “At the end of the day, you cared about the jets, the podcasts, and the people fawning over you.” He cited them as evidence of her lack of remorse: “I’m convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You’re as defiant as a defendant as this court has ever seen.” And he cited them as evidence that she might reoffend: You’re not fit for probation, he told Peters, because that’s “about putting someone back in the community who’s not at risk and giving them a chance to correct those things that brought them before me in the first place.”

 

Motive, remorselessness, and propensity toward recidivism are all factors courts traditionally weigh during sentencing. (Why, there’s an entire class of crimes in America that are punished more harshly because they were motivated by the defendant’s socially poisonous—but constitutionally protected—opinions.) Even if you believe that Peters didn’t deserve nine years for her crimes, why should Jared Polis substitute his divine judgment that four and a half is the appropriate sentence rather than let the trial court resentence her?

 

There are doubtless many convicts in the Colorado penal system with potentially meritorious appeals who have waited years for the courts to take up their cause. Somehow Tina Peters, an accomplice after the fact in a plot to undermine the constitutional order that persists to this day, was one of the very few for whom Jared Polis deemed delayed justice intolerable.

 

“Liberalism cares about process, postliberalism cares only about results,” I wrote last week. MAGA fans would say that the governor served liberalism in this case by intervening to reduce an unfair punishment. The truth is the opposite: Polis interrupted a process that was working to impose a fair punishment by imposing upon it a result he believed to be just. The only difference between what he did and what Trump did in setting the January 6 goons free is that Polis’ act of clemency wasn’t grossly self-serving.

 

Which, in a way, makes it worse.

 

A political debacle.

 

The president’s corrupt pardons are rational as a matter of reptilian logic, just as his new slush fund is. In both cases he’s using government power to ease any qualms right-wing cretins might have about breaking the law to serve his interests. Not only will you not go to prison for doing so, but now you might get rich. It’s abhorrent moral nihilism, the end of America as an even arguably respectable country, but it’s sensible from Trump’s standpoint.

 

Commuting Tina Peters’ sentence was not sensible for Jared Polis.

 

His career is almost certainly over because of it, washed away by a ferocious backlash on the left. Among the Democrats who have lashed the governor for his act of clemency are Colorado’s attorney general, its secretary of state, and both of its U.S. senators. Michael Bennet, one of those senators, is running this year to succeed Polis as governor; on Monday he vowed that he won’t appoint Polis to his vacant Senate seat if he wins, deeming the Peters commutation “disqualifying.” Hundreds of Democratic officials across the state have gone further, filing a complaint with the state party calling on it to formally censure Polis and block him from speaking at its events going forward.

 

He doesn’t even have the excuse that Colorado’s clemency board recommended mercy in this case. It did not, two sources whispered to the Times.

 

The politics are mind-boggling. Democrats just sustained a heavy blow on redistricting from the Supreme Court that will cut deeply into their House gains this fall. The president’s Justice Department henchmen are chattering about exposing the great 2020 election-rigging plot, obviously as a pretext to try to tamper with the midterm elections. Trump himself has turned the throttle all the way up on the most cartoonishly corrupt presidential administration in U.S. history, reveling in the absolute impunity he enjoys from Republican degenerates in Congress.

 

“This is easily the saddest time in American history,” a viral tweet that circulated widely today observed. “The absolute worst people are systematically destroying the country, and our system is completely failing to stop them.” The first sentence there is dubious, but the second is indisputable. If you’re the Democratic governor of Colorado, how do you choose this moment to go all-in for possibly the only person in the United States who’s still being held criminally accountable for “rigged election” malfeasance because her sentence was—debatably—a bit too long?

 

America is plumbing new depths of third-world civic depravity hour by hour and somehow Jared Polis’ priority is making sure that a celebrated accomplice to that effort needn’t wait a moment longer for the courts to decide whether she belongs back on the streets.

 

He’s not even pretending that Peters has been reformed. A Colorado reporter noticed that the governor’s letter of commutation in this case conspicuously omitted a boilerplate paragraph about rehabilitation that he’s included in other such letters since 2019. “You have taken full accountability for your actions and recognize the mistakes you made in the past,” that paragraph reads. “You are remorseful and ready to advance to a new phase of life. I believe you will be successful upon your release.”

 

Polis cut that passage this time because, presumably, he knew that it would be cited to mock him when Peters gets back to her old tricks. And I do mean “when,” not “if”: Inevitably, she’ll be given a hero’s welcome by the president and end up being appointed to some White House “election integrity” commission tasked with harassing blue states this fall, making Polis look that much more ridiculous.

 

The point to bear down on in thinking about all this is that executive clemency is a political, not legal, act. It’s entirely discretionary, to be exercised or not exercised as the governor chooses. It’s improper for a judge to let political considerations influence his thinking in a matter of law like sentencing. (That’s why the appeals court in Colorado wants Peters resentenced.) But it’s not improper for a governor to weigh political considerations against granting a convict’s petition for clemency, especially if the courts are already being responsive.

 

The key political consideration for Polis in freeing Peters was the risk of signaling to postliberals that they’ll be treated leniently for undermining democracy in America, even if they commit crimes—and even if they do so in jurisdictions where the other party is in charge. That is emphatically not a signal that should have been sent again after Trump sent it umpteen thousand times by relentlessly praising and then pardoning the January 6 defendants. The governor did it anyway.

 

Why?

 

Motives.

 

One possibility is that he’s so darned devout a libertarian that he felt obliged to act even if doing so meant destroying his prospects for future office.

 

I don’t buy it. Any Democrat, even a maverick-y one like him, would find Peters unsympathetic. And as I’ve explained, her case is not so cut-and-dried an injustice that Polis might plausibly have felt a moral duty to act without further hesitation. Had he done nothing, the trial court might have spared him this entire ordeal by sentencing her to time served at her upcoming resentencing.

 

It’s not like Polis had nothing to lose professionally. He’s term-limited as governor, sure, but he’s only 51, won all of his previous House and gubernatorial elections easily, and stood a solid chance of replacing Bennet in the Senate—until this. It would be a remarkable show of principle for a man who might have had a national future to throw it all away to trim away a few years of prison time for a Mike Lindell-adjacent conspiracy nut.

 

The best I can do to rationalize his capitulation is speculate that he bowed to pressure from Trump.

 

The president lobbied Polis directly to free Peters. And when Polis didn’t, as noted earlier, Trump punished Colorado by cutting various federal projects in the state. Perhaps the governor believed that those projects might be restored if he granted Trump’s wish but wouldn’t be restored if the courts beat him to the punch by releasing Peters on resentencing. The White House would owe Polis in the first case but not the second.

 

So he caved. Maybe he did so for altruistic reasons, reluctant to see Coloradans penalized by the federal government when it was within his power as governor to do something about it. Or maybe he misjudged the politics, calculating that Coloradans would blame Trump for forcing a difficult dilemma on Polis.

 

Either way, he’s not as deft a politician as I thought. If I’m not mistaken, he’s now the only politician besides Trump himself to release an election denier from prison essentially because they’re an election denier. He’ll never recover from it. To the long list of lives that the president has damaged over the past five and a half years to pursue his “rigged election” fantasy, add that of Jared Polis. He and Tina Peters have little in common, but they do have that.