On today’s BradCast: The sad and/or maddening saga of one of the few 2020 MAGA election scammer/deniers to actually be held to account for undermining American elections. At least for a while. [Audio to full show follows this summary.]
After a few previews of today’s primary elections in California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota (full results on tomorrow’s program), it’s on to our main story today.
I’m not sure what is most maddening about the case of Colorado‘s disgraced former Mesa County Clerk, Tina Peters, who was sprung from prison on Monday after serving less than two years of her nine-year sentence for her criminal convictions on four felonies and three misdemeanors following the 2020 election.
- The fact that one of her top champions, Donald Trump, had absolutely zero clue what she was actually convicted of.
- The fact that Vice President J.D. Vance falsely claimed that she was convicted of absolutely nothing more than three misdemeanor counts for trespassing.
- The fact that Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis granted her clemency, despite her complete lack of contrition for her very serious and costly election-related crimes in early 2021, resulting in her walking free on Monday to continue her ridiculous, evidence-free claims that she somehow caught Democrats cheating in elections and revealed some sort of fraud in her county’s electronic voting and tabulation while serving as Mesa County’s top election official.
There is much more to be maddened by in this entire saga, which we revisit in detail today, from Peters breaking into her own secure voting system room with a hacker accomplice for whom she created a fake ID; to her turning off the security cameras in the room so that her accomplice could breach sensitive voting systems and make copies of the proprietary software; to the release of that stolen software over the Internet, endangering elections in more than a dozen states; to her running from the law, lies told to law enforcement, resisting arrest, disobeying a judge and continued false claims about election fraud.
Why Polis, a termed-out Governor, would actually free this woman, after about a year and a half of her sentence — amid unlawful threats made to the state of Colorado by Trump if she wasn’t set free — remains a mystery. It’s understandable that many cowardly elected Republicans are willing to sacrifice their futures for Trump. But why would Polis do so? He is now a pariah in his own party, censured by state Democrats. But we’ve got a guess or two on today’s show as to what he may be angling for at this point.
Also today, while our quickly deteriorating President enjoys claiming that the country “was stone-cold dead” under Joe Biden, and that it is now “the hottest country in the world” under his degenerate rule, the full numbers are now in for 2025 on international tourism to the United States. You’ll be shocked to learn that the truth is exactly the opposite of Trump’s claims. In short, as a CNN analysis describes, international visits to the U.S. plummeted in 2025, Trump’s first full year of his second term, as compared to 2024, Biden’s last. The result was a 5.5% drop in international tourism to the U.S., “the worst single-year decline in two decades, with the exception of the 2020 pandemic.”
The cost to the country is high, on several fronts. When it comes to dollars, the loss was anywhere from nearly $8.5 to about $25 billion. And it all happened in a year when international travel was on the rise pretty much everywhere else. Which country’s travelers accounted for the biggest drop-off in U.S. visits? Blame Canada.
Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, our first since taking a brief break last week. So, as usual in such episodes, there is way too much to catch up with. But we try anyway….
