Bari Weiss’s CBS News had Jena Griswold on to lecture Americans about threats to their elections in an interview on Sunday. The Colorado secretary of state tried to kick President Donald Trump off the Colorado ballot in the 2024 election, oversaw the leak of hundreds of election system passwords, and sent tens of thousands of postcards encouraging voter registration to noncitizens.
Griswold joined 60 Minutes seemingly just to denounce former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters. Peters was sentenced to a nine-year prison term after Griswold worked with state Attorney General Phil Weiser to prosecute Peters for effectively questioning the 2020 election results and preserving election data.
As Mike Davis reported in these pages, opponents of Peters “falsely alleged she illegally colluded with Lindell’s associate, Conan Hayes, to steal and misuse the ID badge of a Mesa County employee named Gerald Wood to access the county’s election system and to save a copy of the hard drive before a new system was installed.”
Notably, a jury acquitted Peters of identity theft and actually accepted her account that Wood consented to the use of his credentials, as Davis reported. An appeals court also found that the sentencing judge’s “comments about Peters’ beliefs were improper,” as described by Courthouse News, and vacated the sentence. (Before she could be resentenced, Gov. Jared Polis issued a commutation letter and shorted her sentence so that she would be released on parole. Jared cited the appeals court’s reasoning.)
In an interview with CBS News’ Bill Whitaker, Griswold said Peters “was elected by her county to uphold the elections. Instead — she attacked the elections from within.”
“Tina Peters ordered that her video surveillance cameras be turned off and then took images of the voting equipment and shared it with a network of election deniers,” Griswold said.
Peters has maintained that she sought to preserve election records before a state-mandated voting-system update. As Davis wrote in these pages, “Colorado law permitted Peters to access and archive the hard drive, but she went about things the wrong way.” As Davis also noted, Peters changed no ballots or results.
“What was harmed by her actions?” Whitaker followed up.
“Voting equipment, confidence in Colorado elections and American elections, and election workers,” Griswold argued.
But Whitaker failed to ask how any of those things were actually harmed. Further, Whitaker failed to ask whether there is a legal basis for a clerk saving data (there is, as Davis wrote in these pages, but Peters may not have done so properly). He also declined to question Griswold about her own election security failures.
Griswold’s own office posted passwords to statewide voting systems online. The secretary’s office put an Excel file online with a “hidden” page of 600 passwords to voting systems for nearly every single county in the state, as reported in these pages. The leak came while Colorado voting was already underway, seemingly posing a clear danger to the integrity of Colorado’s elections, though Griswold insisted there was no “immediate security threat.”
But Griswold is not in jail, nor has she been charged in relation to that security breach.
Griswold also sent out 31,000 postcards to foreign nationals on how to register to vote for the 2022 midterms. Her office used data from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). ERIC pulls data from agencies such as the department of motor vehicles, and in Colorado foreign nationals can obtain driver’s licenses. Griswold then refused to cooperate with county officials to see whether any of the ineligible residents illegally voted in the 2022 midterms.
Griswold’s record goes beyond administrative failures. The official CBS News invited to lecture Americans about election confidence also supported using lawfare to deny voters the chance to vote for Trump.
Left-wing activist group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) backed a challenge by Colorado voters to disqualify Trump under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was written to bar previous Confederate insurrectionists from holding office. Six Colorado voters asked the court to order Griswold to keep Trump’s name off the ballot. The left-leaning Colorado Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that Trump was ineligible to appear on the ballot. Griswold then filed a brief with the Supreme Court arguing states can keep Trump off the ballot and said that Trump should not get a “get out of jail free” card.
The Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision vetoing Griswold’s lawfare efforts, ruling states do not have the constitutional authority to kick Trump off the ballot.
Griswold said she was “disappointed” when the high court rebuked her attempt to kick a candidate off the ballot and said it was “concerning that federal candidates, at this point, can engage in insurrection and then face no accountability for ballot access.”
CBS could have asked Griswold how her own warnings about election confidence cohere with her support of an unconstitutional attempt to kick Trump off the ballot or how Griswold’s own failures to keep elections safe damage the trust she accused Peters of damaging. Instead, the 60 Minutes interview gave Griswold a free pass to smear Peters while evading scrutiny of her own failures.
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