Jared Polis Folded. And He Got Nothing For It.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comYou know what’s funny about Jared Polis? He spent his whole career building a reputation as the cool, independent, doesn’t-bend-to-anybody Democratic governor of Colorado.Turns out all you had to do was pick up the phone.On Friday, Polis commuted the sentence of Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk who got nine years in prison for letting a stranger walk into her office and copy the hard drives of voting machines. She did it because she wanted to prove the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. It wasn’t. She got caught, a jury convicted her, and a judge sentenced her.And on June 1st, thanks to Jared Polis, she walks free. Less than two years into a nine-year sentence for trying to help steal an American election.The Phone CallHere’s what happened. Donald Trump called Jared Polis personally and told him to do it. Polis admitted it himself in an interview with the New York Times.Let me say that again: the President of the United States picked up the phone and demanded that a sitting Democratic governor release a convicted election criminal whose entire crime was trying to help him steal the election he lost.And while Tina Peters sat in prison, the Trump administration started punishing Colorado. They killed a water pipeline that rural ranchers needed. They moved U.S. Space Command out of Colorado Springs to Alabama. They started dismantling a federal climate research center in Boulder. The message was loud and clear: free our girl, or we keep hurting your state.On Friday afternoon, Jared Polis got the message.Everyone He IgnoredTo get there, Polis had to ignore just about every Colorado official and advisor in his orbit.He ignored his own Democratic Secretary of State, Jena Griswold, whose entire job is protecting Colorado elections. She wrote him a letter begging him not to do this and asked him for a meeting. He called her 45 minutes before he announced his decision. Forty-five minutes is enough time to take the dogs for a walk. It’s not enough time to brief the chief elections official in your state that you’re about to undercut everything she’s worked on.He ignored every county clerk in Colorado. They got on a virtual press conference and told him about the death threats, the harassment, the people showing up at their offices because of the lies Tina Peters spread. They begged him not to free her. He did it anyway.He ignored his own clemency advisory board, the panel that exists specifically to advise the governor on this exact kind of decision. They recommended against clemency for Tina Peters. He overrode them.He ignored Dan Rubinstein, the Republican district attorney who prosecuted her and told him don’t do it.He ignored Democratic Senator Michael Bennet, the guy who wants Polis’s job next year, who told him loud and clear not to do this.You know who Polis did listen to? Van Jones. The CNN guy, who told the New York Times Polis was in a “Hamlet posture” — whatever the f**k that means. That’s where we are: convicted election criminals walking out of prison while Democratic governors take counsel from cable news pundits quoting Shakespeare.The Defense Doesn’t HoldPolis says he didn’t cave. He says Tina Peters got a “disparately harsh” sentence because she’s a nonviolent first-time offender. He says “it’s not a crime to believe voting machines are flawed.”Okay, Jared. Sure.It’s not a crime to believe voting machines are flawed. That’s true. But it is a crime to let a random conspiracy theorist into a secure government facility to copy the hard drives of those machines. That’s what Tina Peters did. That’s not being prosecuted for a belief, that’s being prosecuted for a felony, and the jury that convicted her thought so too.And here’s the kicker: Jared Polis got nothing for this. The White House didn’t promise the water pipeline back, didn’t promise to return Space Command, and didn’t promise to save the climate center. Polis handed Trump a win and got a “Free Tina” Truth Social post in return. Way to show us the art of the deal, Jared.So Why Did He Actually Do It?Polis’s official defense is free speech. He says the trial judge improperly held Peters’s election conspiracy beliefs against her at sentencing, and back in April the Colorado Court of Appeals agreed and threw out her original sentence. Fine. If there’s reason to believe bias affected the judge’s handling, then the judge messed up.But here’s the problem with Polis’s clean free-speech story. The appeals court ordered a resentencing in trial court. That process was already underway. Polis didn’t wait for it. He jumped the line and cut the sentence in half before the courts could fix their own error. That’s not principled free speech advocacy. That’s a governor reaching into a court process he didn’t need to touch.There’s a bigger problem. Polis has been governor for eight years and commuted 25 sentences in that time. According to a 9News review, he has never granted clemency to an inmate who showed no remorse, with exactly one exception: an 84-year-old man who was blind, deaf, suffering from dementia, and confined to a wheelchair. That’s the bar Polis set for himself. That’s the company Tina Peters is keeping right now. And aside from a serious case of believing Trump’s b******t, Tina’s just fine.Has Tina Peters shown remorse? In her clemency application she wrote that she “made mistakes.” That was her entire apology. Every other public moment of the last four years, she’s called herself a political prisoner and pushed the same lies that got her convicted. Polis himself admitted to 9News, “I don’t expect her to change what she believes, I don’t want her to lie about what she believes.”So the governor commuted the sentence of a person he admits is not remorseful, on the basis of free speech, in a case where the courts were already cleaning up the free speech problem. That story doesn’t hold together.Here’s my read on what actually drove this.One: Trump’s pressure campaign worked. Trump called Polis “Scumbag Governor,” told him to “rot in hell,” uninvited him from a White House governors meeting, and started ripping federal funding out of Colorado. Colorado columnist Mike Littwin wrote this weekend that the obvious answer is Polis caved to Trump. When something looks exactly like a cave and the only guy saying otherwise is the guy doing the caving, I’ll side with Littwin.Two: Polis is term-limited and angling for a national future. There’s already chatter about a presidential run. “Principled independent Democrat who stood up for free speech” is a great brand if you want to run in 2028. It’s a terrible brand if you actually care about keeping election deniers in prison.Three, and this is the part that gets me: I think Polis convinced himself he’s the smartest guy in the room. Smarter than the Secretary of State who runs Colorado’s elections. Smarter than the clerks who deal with the death threats every day. Smarter than the prosecutor, smarter than his clemency board, smarter than every Democrat in his legislature who told him this was a mistake. Everybody else was being political. He alone was seeing it clearly.That’s the story he’s telling himself. It’s the same story powerful men have been telling themselves right before they make catastrophic mistakes for as long as there have been powerful men.What Friday Actually Taught UsIn my two decades in law enforcement, I learned something pretty simple. When you let one person walk on a serious crime because somebody powerful asked you to, the message you send is not “this was a one-time exception.” The message you send is “the price of getting out of this is knowing the right person.”Tina Peters knew the right person. So Tina Peters walks. And every election worker in this country watched it happen.If you do your job, if you defend the integrity of an election, if somebody breaks the law to sabotage your office and a jury convicts her and a judge sentences her, the people in your own party will let her out the second Donald Trump applies pressure. That’s the lesson of last week.One more thing. Tina Peters is appealing her conviction to the Colorado Supreme Court on May 21st. Her lawyer announced it Friday, and she wants the conviction overturned entirely. So this isn’t over. Peters wants the whole record erased. And after watching the entire Colorado Democratic establishment get rolled by one phone call, ask yourself how confident you are that anybody is going to hold the line on the next one.I’m not. I don’t think you should be either.The cops on January 6th held the line. We bled for it. Some of us died for it. The least Jared Polis could have done is not surrender it on a Friday afternoon because the president slid into his DMs.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!