Tina Peters Gets a New Sentence and a New Champion

The Colorado Court of Appeals decision that came down April 2 regarding disgraced former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters lets Governor Jared Polis off the hook…for now.

While upholding her conviction for numerous state crimes, including attempting to influence a public official and breaching the very election system she’d sworn to protect, the judges sent her case back for resentencing, determining that the heavy lift of nine years handed down by the judge was influenced by Peters continuing to push her wacky election-denial agenda, an infringement on her free speech rights.

“The trial court’s comments about Peters’s belief in the existence of 2020 election fraud went beyond relevant considerations for her sentencing,” the judges ruled. “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.”

But the judges also determined that Donald Trump’s equally wacky pardon of Peters was illegal, which means the president might let up on his anti-Colorado Trumper tantrums…for now.

“We are unaware of — and can find no historical record of — any instance of a president pardoning someone for a state offense,” the judges wrote.

While Polis had rejected Trump’s demand that he release Peters, the governor has been considering clemency for a sentence that was an “obvious outlier,” he said yesterday. Now he can wait while both Peters and the Colorado Attorney General decide whether their side will appeal the appeals court decision.

Also presumably off the table: the suggestion by Joseph Maldonado, aka Joe Exotic the “Tiger King,” that Polis do a prisoner exchange. Last month, the former animal park operator, now in federal prisoner on a 21-year sentence for animal abuse and, not incidentally, attempting to hire a hitman to kill a rival, wrote Polis, offering to trade places with Peters, moving to a state prison in Colorado — where he once tried to get on the presidential ballot. That would have moved Peters to federal custody, where she could have been sprung by Trump.

Weirder things have happened in this saga, after all. When Peters went on the lam after her Mesa County shenanigans, she was offered shelter by none other than Mike “Pillow King” Lindell.

Time to head to the mattresses.