CBS's 60 Minutes Gave Jena Griswold a Free Pass to Smear Tina Peters While Ignoring Her Own Election Failures
Source: Brianna Lyman. "CBS News Invites Dem Who Kicked Trump Off The Ballot To Spread 'Election Denier' Garbage - The Federalist." October 26, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author argues that 60 Minutes let Colorado's top election official call Tina Peters an election threat without asking her tough questions. In the author's view, Griswold has her own record of election security lapses and tried to remove Trump from the ballot, and the interviewer should have raised both.
Conclusion
CBS News's 60 Minutes interview failed as journalism because it let Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold lecture Americans about election integrity and denounce Tina Peters without confronting her own election-security failures and her attempt to remove Trump from the ballot.
Premises
- Griswold's office posted a spreadsheet with a hidden page of roughly 600 voting-system passwords online while Colorado voting was underway, yet she faces no charges or jail time.
- Griswold's office sent about 31,000 voter-registration postcards to foreign nationals using ERIC data and then refused to cooperate with county officials checking whether ineligible residents voted in 2022.
- Griswold supported removing Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states lack that authority, so her effort was unconstitutional 'lawfare'.
- Peters was convicted and sentenced to nine years, but a jury acquitted her of identity theft, an appeals court found the sentencing judge's comments about her beliefs improper and vacated the sentence, and she changed no ballots or results.
- Griswold claimed Peters harmed voting equipment, confidence in elections, and election workers, but interviewer Bill Whitaker did not ask how, whether Colorado law permits a clerk to preserve election data, or how Griswold's own failures damaged public trust.
- A competent interviewer would have pressed Griswold on these points, but CBS instead allowed her to make unchallenged accusations.
Assumptions
- Griswold's past administrative failures and her support for removing Trump from the ballot are directly relevant to her credibility on election integrity.
- A journalist's role in an adversarial interview is to challenge the guest's claims and expose inconsistencies, including ones the guest did not raise.
- The password leak, the postcard mailing, and the ballot challenge are failures or abuses, not defensible administrative or legal judgments.
- Peters's actions were legitimate preservation of records or at least not harmful enough to justify the prosecution and rhetoric against her.
- The omissions reflect bias or lack of rigor rather than editorial constraints such as time, format, or a narrow focus on Peters.
- The Federalist's account of the facts, largely sourced to its own earlier reporting, is accurate and complete.