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Back in 1988, after the Denver Broncos were trounced by the Washington Redskins (now the Commanders) in the Super Bowl, CBS Evening News reporter Bob McNamara got in one more dig, saying the loss must be tough “for a town that’s never been number one in anything but carbon monoxide levels.” (Catch the clip on the new Netflix Elway documentary.)
With the Broncos again eying the Super Bowl, CBS was back in town Monday, January 12, as part of new CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil’s “Live from America” tour. From his base at the renovated Denbrt Union Station (which looks very different today than it did in early 1988, before LoDo was named a historic district), Dokoupil — whose network had just been dubbed “See BS” by Nikki Glaser on the Golden Globes the night before — interviewed Colorado Governor Jared Polis, who weighed in on vaccines, lemonade stands, Colorado’s “pro-freedom” stance…and Tina Peters.
The Colorado Court of Appeals will hear the former Mesa County Clerk’s appeal of her nine-year sentence today, January 14; in December, the president said he’d issued Peters “a full Pardon”…but she was convicted under Colorado law and sentenced to nine years in a state prison.
“In sum, the case law, the text of the pardon clause, the structure of the Constitution and the historical evidence all point to the unmistakable conclusion that the President’s pardon power is limited to federal offenses,” attorneys for the state argue in a motion filed with the Appeals court in response to just one of the many reasons offered by Peters’s defenders for why the former Mesa County clerk should be released.
The Colorado segment (in which Dokoupil got Peters’s age wrong) followed pieces on Trump’s attack on former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Senator Mark Kelly’s suit against Pete Hegseth, and unrest in Minneapolis after the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent. (It made no reference to her Colorado roots, but did cite friends saying she was “optimistic and hopeful with a seemingly unlimited capacity for love.”)
Then, after a quick look at the outside of Union Station, CBS cut to the inside of the terminal, where the sweater-clad Dokoupil was “dressed more Colorado than me,” said Polis, wearing a suit and tie.
“You’ve been described as a politically endangered species,” said the anchor, who’d already noted that half of Colorado’s voters are unaffiliated. “Where do you fit politically?”
Polis settled on “pro-freedom,” explaining his pro-vax (but pro-parental choice) stance on vaccines; his anti-licensing position on kids’ lemonade stands, and his willingness to fight fraud. As for Dopoukil’s query whether Polis would pardon Peters for “unauthorized access to voting machines,” Polis responded: “You can’t give the president head space on this…You look at every case of clemency….We’re thinking about all of them.”
Which did not exactly clear the air. With the state’s county clerks — most of them Republican — urging Polis to stand firm on Peters, her case continues to hang over Denver like that old brown cloud.
