Democrats warn Colorado governor against commuting sentence of election denier

Democrats on Capitol Hill are sounding alarms over the potential commutation of an election denier and convicted felon’s sentence in Colorado, warning the state’s Democratic governor that clemency for Tina Peters would undermine the justice system and diminish the gravity of her crimes.

Gov. Jared Polis (D) has been under heavy pressure from President Trump to release Peters, a former county election clerk and ardent Trump supporter serving a nine-year sentence for election tampering in support of Republican efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat. And Polis opened the door wide to that prospect earlier this month, when he suggested the sentence was overly severe for a first-time offender. He’s now weighing his decision. 

The development has prompted outcry from local Democratic officials in Colorado, and the protests are now spilling onto Capitol Hill, where Democrats spanning the political spectrum are voicing concerns that clemency for Peters would lend credence to Trump’s false claims of election fraud and downplay the severity of election interference at the expense of the public’s faith in the system.

“In an era where you have a president who’s attacking the rule of law, attacking the Constitution, using the government and the Department of Justice to suppress dissent and political opponents, now is not the time to capitulate to the president’s demands with regard to his political cronies,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said Thursday.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who chaired the House committee created to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, agreed. He warned that any effort to undermine the fairness of elections also erodes the public’s trust in the entire democratic experiment. With that in mind, he said, a figure like Peters — who was convicted on seven counts, including four felonies — should not receive any special leniency just because the president wants that to occur. 

“It goes to the integrity of the process,” Thompson said. “[If] a person is convicted of … fraud, then it can’t be viewed as........

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