President Donald Trump launched into a scathing and baseless attack against Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) on Monday, accusing him of being “run by Tren de Aragua” – the Venezuelan gang Trump has labeled a terrorist organization. Of course, there is no evidence or regular accusation that Polis is in any way connected with the gang.
Trump was speaking about the ravages of fentanyl in the U.S. when he went off on a tangent, “Not all [fentanyl] is very bad when you mix it with certain ingredients, but it also is very important for medicine, for anesthesia, various other things. I want people to understand that it’s not made necessarily for bad. When it’s mixed with certain things, it becomes bad, and that’s what’s taking place in Mexico. We’ve got it down to a much lower number—not satisfactory, but will be satisfactory soon.” Trump continued:
In May, we executed the largest fentanyl bust in the history of the U.S., seizing three million fentanyl pills all at one time. Think of that: three million pills. It’s amounted to billions of dollars’ worth of drugs.
And last month, we seized another 1.7 million fentanyl pills in the state of Colorado, the poorly run state of Colorado, with a governor who’s incompetent and, frankly, with a governor that won’t allow our wonderful Tina to come out of a jail—in a high-intensity jail—because she caught people cheating on an election, and they said she was cheating. She wasn’t cheating. She went over. She looked at one of the election scams going on, and because she did that, they put her in jail for nine years.
The governor of Colorado is a weak and a pathetic man who was run by Tren de Aragua. The criminals from Venezuela took over sections of Colorado, and he was afraid to do anything. But he puts Tina in jail for nine years because she caught people cheating. And when she walked over and got involved in it, they said she was cheating. She wasn’t cheating. She caught people cheating on the election—2020—along with a lot of other people that cheated on that election. You’ll see that coming out more and more.
The “Tina” Trump was referring to is Tina Peters, who was successfully prosecuted by Mesa County, Colorado’s Republican District Attorney Dan Rubinstein, over her role in a scheme to breach county voting systems after the 2020 presidential election. Rubinstein has repeatedly defended the conviction and slammed Peters for trying to “kick at cops” when she was initially arrested.
Peters, a former county clerk, was sentenced to 9 years behind bars in October of 2024. Her conviction stemmed from her participation in a plot to break into election machines under her supervision and copy data from them to prove try and fraud — instead voter information from the machines appeared online in August 2021, published in part by QAnon-affiliated conspiracy theorists like Ron Watkins.
Judge Matthew Barrett pulled no punches when reading out the verdict against Peters and sentencing her in October 2024. He told her:
Our system of government can’t function when people in government think that somehow, someway, the power they’ve been given is absolute in all respects. And that’s where you fell. You have no respect for the checks and balances of government. You have no respect for this court.
You have no respect for law enforcement. At the end of the day, you cared about the jets, the podcast and the people fawning over you.
You abdicated your position as a servant to the Constitution and you chose you over all else. Yes, you are a charlatan and you cannot help but lie as easy it is for you to breathe.
Trump announced a pardon for Peters last week, something he legally can’t do as she was not convicted in federal court.
