WorldNetDaily has long tried to whitewash the crimes of former Colorado election official Tina Peters. Boib Unruh did more of that in an April 2 article:
Judges in Colorado’s Democrat-run judiciary – the state’s Supreme Court tried to banish President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot before being slapped down by the U.S. Supreme Court – have affirmed the politicized convictions of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters.
But they overturned her sentence of nine years in prison, ceding that the judge and a lot of others involved in persecuting Peters made mistakes that were not allowable. Specifically, the sentencing judge was found to have violated the Constitution by lashing out at Peters for exercising her free speech rights.
The case now returns to the lower courts even as Gov. Jared Polis, a staunch critic of Peters, concerned about election integrity, President Donald Trump and anything Republican, still delays on whether he will grant clemency on state charges.
[…]Polis has been under pressure in the Peters case since before President Donald Trump granted her a full pardon. At the time, Colorado officials said Peters was convicted of a state offense regarding election system integrity so Trump’s decision didn’t matter.
The new ruling from the Colorado Court of Appeals addressed the case involving Peters, 70, who was arrested in July 2022 and accused of granting an unauthorized man access to Mesa County’s election system.
Her intent apparently was to preserve records from the 2020 presidential election vote, which by now is known to have been affected by several undue influences, including Mark Zuckerberg’s handout of $400 million plus to a long list of local elections officials.
Once again, Unruh omits the fact that Peters was not trying to preserve election records but, rather, try to gain fame in right-wing circles by uncovering “election fraud” that didn’t exist. He also doesn’t dispute the fact that Peters did, in fact, given an unauthorized person — an election denier like herself — access to the county’s election system. Still, Unruh went on to huff regarding Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold:
Curiously, Griswold, in her official office, was found to have posted hundreds of election system passwords online, and she was not even reprimanded, much less prosecuted.
In fact, it was an employee in Griswold’s office who posted the passwords, not Griswold herself, the posting was done inadvertently because they were hidden within the posted document — a key distinction from Peters, who gave that elecion denier passwords that ended up being posted on right-wing blog.
Much of the rest of Unruh’s article consists of repeating President Trump’s insults of Polis and his defense of Peters and rehashing claims against Griswold.
Unruh then ranted in an April 25 article:
The leftists on the Colorado Court of Appeals admitted there were problems with the leftists who prosecuted and sent to prison former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters.
They threw out her sentence.
Now the judge who imposed that now-lifted nine-year term for her efforts to document election records from the 2020 vote has claimed that he did nothing wrong, that his sentence was perfectly fine.
But Peters’ defense team has pointed out that the judge’s statement is “not true.”
For witnesses, plaintiffs and defendants in a courtroom, that could be called perjury.
Columnist Joe Hoft wrote about the situation as the state of Colorado tries to fix its egregious errors in Peters’ case by describing how Matthew Barrett, the sentencing judge, “is caught lying.”
Barrett defended his sentencing performance in a letter to Gov. Jared Polis, also a far-left activist.
“I chose a sentence in roughly the midpoint of the presumptive ranges that this state’s general assembly has set. My reasons for the punishment I chose [are] more specifically detailed in the remarks I made at her sentencing.”
Those remarks, his six-minute rant abusing Peters and making outside-the-judicial system accusations against her:
Joe Hoft, by the way, is the brother of Jim Hoft, who runs the repeatedly discredited Gateway Pundit. The headline on Unruh’s article called Barrett “rage-filled,” but no evidence to support that claim is provided.