Mike Lindell is busy running for governor of Minnesota, so he hadn’t heard about Governor Polis’ decision to free Tina Peters until contacted by the Colorado Times Recorder.
“Praise the Lord! I’m glad your governor had the sense to let her out,” said Lindell. “She was one of the biggest political prisoners ever. Hopefully, people will look, now that all the evidence is pouring out, that we all want secure elections. Just a shame she had to do this much time, but at least she’s going to be out before they killed her.” Lindell clarified that he was referring to her age and health issues putting her at risk of dying behind bars.
Lindell is one of several election deniers here in Colorado and across the country who are celebrating Polis’ decision to commute her sentence to about half its length, which will result in her being released from prison on June 1. The timing of Polis’ decision is notable for two reasons. First, he did not let the judicial process, in which Judge Barrett had been directed to resentence Peters based on the appellate court’s ruling that his initial sentence may have been too harsh, play out. Secondly, Polis did wait until the state legislature adjourned for the year, preventing any potential policy-related retaliation or official rebukes from the General Assembly’s Democratic majority.
Lindell had to end his interview with CTR to join Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, where he reiterated many of these same points. Bannon concluded the interview with own list of thanks, including to Polis.
“Tina Peters will be free from the Colorado maximum security prison for women on one June, in the year of our Lord, 2026,” said Bannon. “We want to thank President Trump, Governor Polis, the entire Tina Peters legal team, Ticktin Case, McSweeney, all of them, plus Apollo and that great team there. Tina Peters is going to be free!”
While Lindell was speaking with CTR, Peters’ lawyer Peter Ticktin was on Bannon, also thanking Polis and insisting that Peters did nothing wrong and was a victim of political corruption:
“This lady, she didn’t deserve to be in there for a day,” said Ticktin. “Even Governor Polis saw that the sentence was so harsh that it just needed to be reduced. And this is one of those situations where we have a captured state. When you have a captured state, you have captured judges or the kinds of judges that are in those states, unlike places like Florida, where we have such good judges that know how to call balls and strikes. You see different things in states like Michigan and Colorado, where injustice prevails. In terms of Tina Peters, there are three reasons that she was incarcerated by this judge: One was to basically keep her quiet, shut her up. The second was to give Jena Griswold a scapegoat. And the third and most important was to let the clerks of all the counties of all the United States to know that when you see something, you better not say something because you could end up in prison like Tina Peters. The whole situation was rotten from the beginning.”
Gubernatorial candidate Scott Bottoms, who is also an enthusiastic election denier, likewise publicly shared his belief that Peters did nothing wrong as well as his thanks to Polis.
“Governor Jared Polis did the right thing by making Tina Peters eligible for parole on June 1st and moving her out of prison,” writes Bottoms. “While she fully deserves a complete pardon for crimes she never committed, this is a positive step forward. Tina stood up for election integrity and has paid a terrible price.
“I want to thank Governor Polis for listening to reason and refusing to cave to the extreme pressure from his own party. It takes real courage to choose justice over politics. I am the only candidate in this race who has never wavered on my position with Tina Peters. I have always called for her full pardon. When I’m Governor of Colorado, on Day One I will grant Tina Peters a full pardon and take immediate action to make it possible for her to sue the State of Colorado for this unjust persecution and wrongful conviction. She deserves her day in court to hold those responsible accountable. Justice isn’t complete until Tina is fully exonerated and made whole.”
Joe Oltmann, an election-denying podcaster who is now running to lead the Colorado GOP, not only believes she did nothing wrong, but wants her to return to public office, this time at the state level.
“One, President Trump gave her an unequivocal pardon. And for those of you that say that federal pardons do not apply to states, they do, they 100% do. If you go back in history, 200 years and they said, well, that’s 200 years ago. So here’s what I will tell you. Tina Peters did nothing wrong. There are about to be some really interesting things that happened that President Trump is working on. He just talked about the Venezuelan whistleblowers. I believe that they were gonna walk in and have the marshals walk her out of prison early. I think this was kind of a forced hand.”
“… If President Trump is out of office in two years, are they gonna come back in and do more things to adversely affect or hurt Tina Peters? We need to put a stop to it completely. We need to make sure we have more connective tissue inside the judiciary that is not rotted. And that’s gonna take us making sure we get people elected. I think Tina Peters specifically should run for office. We should find a way to put her in an office of authority inside of the state of Colorado and work on how do we get to the bottom of what’s happening with this election fraud in all 50 states. I will say this, the elections have never gotten better. They have only gotten worse. It wasn’t that they just woke up one day in 2020 and said, I know what they will steal an election. They have been doing it for decades across the entire country. And they’ve been changing the rules systematically from state to state as they were able to yield power in order to do things like putting in rank choice voting, in order put things like universal mail-in balance, things that allowed for them to have the gas for the machine so that it became a non-transparent process for the American people.”
Oltmann has said in recent party chair debates that he’s been financially supporting Peters by “paying her a salary” during her incarceration.
