Governor Hochul Highlights More Than 275 Million Free School Meals Served Across the State

An appeals court tossed out a nine-year sentence for discredited Colorado election clerk Tina Peters.

The Donald Trump ally will be re-sentenced by a district court judge after the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld her conviction but found that Mesa County District Court Judge Matthew Barrett had wrongly based part of his sentence on Peters’ exercise of her right to free speech, reported the Denver Post.

“Notwithstanding the fact that some of the trial court’s considerations were tied to proper sentencing considerations, when the court’s comments are viewed in their totality, it is apparent that the court imposed the lengthy sentence it did because Peters continued to espouse the views that led her to commit these crimes,” the opinion states.

The "tenor" of Barrett's original sentencing order indicates that he "punished" Peters for her persistence in insisting the 2020 election had been fraudulent and that keeping her in prison was necessary to prevent her from espousing views the judge felt were "damaging," and the appeals court sent the case back to him for a resentencing.

The appellate court found there was sufficient evidence to convict Peters and that she was not immune to state prosecution, and the judges also found that a purported pardon from Trump carried no authority under Colorado law.

The court denied Peters' request that a new judge resentence her, saying that issue should be raised in a lower court, and ruled that a prosecutor’s description of her case during closing arguments had no impact on the verdict.

“The evidence of her knowledge of the illegality of her conduct is so overwhelming, we simply cannot say that the prosecutor’s statement (even if improper) had any impact on the verdict, let alone an impact so great as to cause serious doubt about the reliability of the judgment of conviction,” the panel found.

Peters, now 70, was convicted by a Mesa County jury of four felony and three misdemeanor crimes for plotting to sneak unauthorized individuals into a secure area to examine voting equipment to look for evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

President Donald Trump made several telling remarks Sunday in an interview with the Financial Times, revealing some of his administration’s potential war plans as it relates to Iran.

“To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran but some stupid people back in the US say: ‘why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people,” Trump told the Financial Times, the outlet reported.

Trump told the outlet that his “preference” in his administration’s war against Iran would be for the United States to “take the oil," invoking a comparison to the U.S. takeover of Venezuela’s oil industry in January when the Trump administration halted Venezuelan oil shipments to the Cuban government, and started oil shipments to Israel “for the first time in years.”

Trump also spoke to the possibility of the U.S. military seizing Kharg Island, an Iranian island critical to the nation’s oil industry.

“Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t. We have a lot of options,” Trump said, speaking with the Financial Times. “It would also mean we had to be [in Kharg Island] for a while. I don’t think they have any defense. We could take it very easily.”