Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, fired two members of his clemency board after they criticized his decision to commute the prison sentence of Tina Peters, The New York Times reported.

Hannah Siegel Proff and Azra Taslimi revealed that the clemency board twice voted unanimously to reject a commutation for Peters, following her conviction for tampering with voting machines in an effort to prove President Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

Trump had previously issued a federal pardon to Peters, who was convicted of state offenses, and pressured Polis to release her.

While the clemency board typically operates in secret, Proff and Taslimi said they felt compelled to reveal what went on behind closed doors, the Times reported.

"You breached the required duty of confidentiality by publicly divulging board members' votes," Polis wrote to each of the women, who shared the letters with the Times.

Proff and Taslimi said they knew they might be removed but believed the public had a right to know that Polis commuted her sentence over their opposition.

"He's saying the public doesn't have the right to know his own advisory board told him no — twice," Taslimi told the Times.

"He's not protecting a process. He's protecting himself from scrutiny," she added.

"We spoke up about this because it shows the process punishes people without power and protects the people with it. Speaking out has a cost, and here we are."

Eric Marayuma, a spokesman for Polis, told the Times that the women's decision to speak up, "threatens the credibility of the board, colors future deliberations by the board, and breaks clearly stated confidentiality policy."

Following the women's firings, Polis appointed two new people to the clemency board.

Peters, who served less than a quarter of her nine-year sentence, recently met with Trump in the Oval Office.

In April, a Colorado appeals court upheld her conviction but ordered Peters to be resentenced because it said the judge who sent her to prison wrongly punished her for speaking out about election fraud, a decision that Polis praised.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.