Polis fires Colorado officials who opposed Tina Peters commutation

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) on Wednesday reportedly fired two members of his clemency board after they publicly opposed his commutation of the prison sentence of former state elections clerk Tina Peters, the first local official convicted over efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election.

Azra Taslimi and Hannah Seigel Proff told CNN that Polis fired them after they revealed secret details about the clemency process and criticized the Colorado governor for overruling the board to The New York Times.

Polis’s office confirmed to The Denver Post that he fired Taslimi and Seigel Proff. The Hill has reached out to a spokesperson for the governor for comment.

Peters, a former elections clerk in Mesa County, Colo., was initially sentenced to nine years in prison after a jury convicted her of seven of the 10 counts she faced for her actions with respect to the 2020 election.

That year, she certified the results to say that President Trump won Mesa County, Colo., despite former President Biden winning the county.

In 2021, she allowed a man associated with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a staunch ally of Trump, to make a copy of the county’s voter systems with the aim of exposing alleged fraud.

Polis commuted the sentence of Peters, 70, after she spent less than a quarter of her nine-year sentence behind bars. In commuting her sentence in May, Polis said Peters committed criminal activity but her right to free speech protected her from an “overly harsh” prison sentence.

Hours after leaving prison last month, Peters doubled down on her claims that Democrats “cheat” in elections.

The decision by Polis earned him condemnation from Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) and a censure from state Democrats.

Trump, who has falsely claimed he defeated former President Biden in 2020, urged Polis to commute Peters’s sentence for months before he did so. The president met with Peters earlier this week at the White House.

“‘FREE TINA!’ became the rallying cry of the Republican Party over the past two years. Tina Peters just came to the White House to thank me for getting her released from prison in Colorado,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.