There were snow flurries in the air on the day in early 2022 when two FBI agents knocked on my door. I was taking an afternoon power nap at the time, but my partner answered the door, then came to wake me up with words I will never forget.
“The FBI is here to see you. They promise you aren’t in trouble.”
I reached a state of wakefulness more quickly than I imagine most doctors would recommend and said something cogent like “uhhwhat?”
As my heart rate stabilized and I extracted myself from the Gordian knot of blankets I had tied myself into with the speed and force of my ascent to consciousness, my lagging brain finally processed what she had said and made two quick judgements: I believed the first part, but I was less certain on the second — not because of any fear that she had lied to me, but because of a fear that the feds darkening our doorstep may have lied to her. I’m familiar enough with the history of our nation’s domestic security and intelligence apparatus to appreciate that its relationship to the truth is often incidental.
I rubbed my eyes, trudged down the hall, and executed a hastily planned power move: I opened the door to the two feds, stepped out onto the porch, and closed the door behind me, determined not to let Johnny Law into my home until I had ascertained the truth of both parts of the statement which had awakened me. But I was barefoot, and it was January or February. The clock on my alleged power move started ticking immediately.
In front of me were two federal agents, a man and a woman, complete with windbreakers and — to my immediate horror — what appeared to be printouts from my Twitter account.
About 18 months before this, hundreds of thousands of my closest friends and I took to the streets of Denver to protest police brutality, one bright ember in the nationwide bonfire of demonstrations lit by the extrajudicial execution of George Floyd. I swallowed a lot of tear gas, sustained multiple blasts from flash-bangs, and was ultimately disappointed by the lack of real action at the national or local levels in the aftermath. I tell you this so that you know something that the FBI agents, who had spent quite a lot of time perusing my Twitter account before knocking on my door, already knew: I am not overly fond of cops. I certainly appreciate law enforcement in concept, but its American incarnation leaves much to be desired in practice.
So, as I stood barefoot on the front porch in the falling flurries, casually darting my eyes to-and-away-from the tweet printouts in the male agent’s hands, I tried to remember how gently or sternly I might have phrased those sentiments, and tried to piece together whether those relatively mild expressions of my First Amendment rights could possibly have brought the FBI to my door – but, by then, one of the agents was speaking, and two words caught my attention: “Tina Peters.”
Oh, I thought. Suddenly, I knew exactly what tweets they were holding. And suddenly, I was pretty sure that both parts of what they had told my partner were true.
To make a somewhat long story a good deal shorter: the summer before the feds knocked on my door, before Peters was ever arrested, I pieced together a theory fairly close to the reality of what she had done. This feat was not quite as impressive as it may sound: at the time, I was a full-time opposition researcher with a number of digital assets well-placed inside Colorado’s online conservative circles. One of those assets was invited to a Zoom meeting from within one of the most unhinged of those online circles, and I recorded it. In that meeting – which included participants and CTR frequent flyers like Sherronna Bishop, former state Sen. Kevin Lundberg, former state Rep. and current congressional candidate Ron Hanks, former Colorado GOP official Priscilla Rahn, and more – certain oblique references were made to actions that had been taken. When I compared those oblique references to other hints and implications which had been made in recent months in other videos by people in the same circle, a picture came together pretty easily.
I was not a journalist at the time, so I did what any normal civilian would do. I tweeted it. The thread, which included quotes from the Zoom meeting and other videos, laid out my theory that Peters or someone close to her had done roughly what we now know she did. I was wrong in some particulars, largely due to the assumption that some of these people had to be smarter than they ultimately turned out to be, but broadly correct.
To save you some time looking, or wondering why I haven’t linked them: the tweets are long gone. I deleted them before the FBI left my house that day, on their request. Though I am not particularly fond of cops, I am very fond of democracy, and was relieved to see action appearing to be taken against someone who had compromised it. Deleting some prescient tweets was a small price to pay for a role in what ultimately became the successful prosecution of Tina Peters.
But that came later. At the time, my feet were freezing, an understanding of what had brought the feds to my door was unspooling in front of me, and my petty resolve to keep them standing outside in the cold was fading away in the face of those realities. I invited them inside, pausing for only a moment to re-realize that my coffee table book – which I had received as part of a fundraiser for a bail fund the previous year – was sporting the large, all-caps title THIS BOOK CONTAINS PICTURES OF POLICE VEHICLES ON FIRE. I decided that moving it would draw more attention to it than was necessary, but also had plenty of time to rethink that decision as the two federal agents and I surrounded the book on three sides for the next hour or so.
The gist was what I assumed. They were investigating Peters, and the printed-out tweets they brought along for the ride were copies of my original thread from the previous summer. After asking me to tell them what I knew, they eventually told me why they had woken me up from my nap: somehow, they needed my help. Basically, they had been able to find all of the videos referenced in my tweets except for the most damning one: the Zoom meeting. Unlike the others, most of which had been Facebook Lives, the Zoom meeting was not posted anywhere online – but, in my thread, I mentioned that I had recorded it. The FBI had come to my house to ask if I would give them a copy of the recording.
By that point, my general mistrust of cops had given way to a number of other feelings, so I helped. I gave them a copy of the recording. Then, as they packed up to leave, something else unexpected happened: perhaps the most sterling moment of organic banter in my life thus far.
The male agent, heading for my front door, asked me not to tell anyone about this, and I, feeling perhaps too confident about the fact that the FBI had come to me, hat-in-hand, for help, half jokingly quipped, “I won’t – I have a reputation to maintain, and it doesn’t involve helping the FBI.” To which the male agent looked me dead in the eye, lifted the printed out tweets in the other hand and said:
“I know. I’ve read your tweets.”
The rest of what happened is history by now: Peters, after a cooperative investigation between the FBI and state authorities, was indicted by the state in March 2022, and ultimately convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors related to her efforts to compromise Mesa County voting machines in pursuit of nonexistent proof that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump. In October 2024, she was sentenced to nine years in prison.
There have been other updates since then. Trump called for Peters to be freed, the original sentence was called into question, and Peters was recently scheduled for a resentencing. Then, last Friday, before the court could engage in its own processes, Democratic governor Jared Polis unilaterally decided to commute Peters’ sentence. She will be released on June 1, a free woman.
The same things which compelled me to cooperate with the FBI compel me to call Polis’ decision what it is: a gross miscarriage of justice made in pursuit of plaudits from the worst people in American politics.
Polis is “selling out our state’s justice system for Trump,” Secretary of State Jena Griswold said, calling last Friday “a dark day for democracy.” U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper also criticized the decision, saying that Peters is “guilty as sin and a disgrace to Colorado.” Others went further: congressional candidate Melat Kiros called for an investigation into the commutation, and attorney general candidate David Seligman called for Polis to be impeached by the state legislature.
This is where I should mention that I am also no fan of the American carceral system. Like with law enforcement, the gap between theory and practice is staggering. The United States confines a larger percentage of its population at any given time than almost any civilization in world history. Dramatic over-incarceration is one of our leading national pastimes. I firmly believe that our sentencing guidelines should be wholesale overhauled, and that everybody serving dimes for dimebags should be freed yesterday.
I also believe that Tina Peters should still be in jail.
In this country, where the penal system has always been geared more towards the enforcement of racial and cultural norms than the proportionate punishment of crimes that are detrimental to society, you can get 20 years for theft. Peters, meanwhile, will have served less than 20 months for an assault on the systems at the very heart of our democracy. Which of those crimes should weigh more? It’s not a hard question.
I don’t know that Peters deserved nine years – our fetish for over-incarceration has warped our view of these things, I think – but she deserved more than 20 months. Even though I participated in sending her to jail, I was open to the resentencing, knowing that it was likely to shave a few years off of the original sentence. But this? This is wrong.
Roughly 1.9 million people are currently incarcerated in the United States. Around 30,000 of them are here in Colorado. Many of them should be released. Many of them never should have been locked up in the first place. They should have been given counseling, and resources, and second-third-fourth chances. But Tina Peters? Whose crime was a felony-level attack on democracy, whose victim was faith in elections, and who remains completely unrepentant?
She deserved a few more years to think about what she did.
