Exactly one year ago this week, Donald Trump threatened to impose “harsh measures” on the state of Colorado unless it agreed to release election denier Tina Peters from prison several years before her sentence runs its course. The degree to which the president was serious is still coming into focus.
The New York Times reported late last week, for example, that as Trump publicly condemned the Rocky Mountain State for incarcerating a convicted felon, the White House organized an urgent “brainstorm call” with five federal agencies, with the goal of exploring ways to curtail federal support to Colorado. The meeting, evidently, was a success — at least as far as the administration was concerned. From the article:
The [day after the “brainstorm call”] the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy, whose representatives were invited to the brainstorm, announced they were canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for Colorado projects.
State officials say the email, which was revealed in a federal court hearing on Tuesday, is the clearest evidence yet that the Trump administration marshaled government resources to retaliate against Colorado over its use of mail-in ballots and its conviction of Ms. Peters, a county clerk who was found guilty in a plot to tamper with voting machines after the 2020 election..
To be sure, some of this might sound familiar. The first veto of Trump’s second term, for example, came when he rejected legislation intended to bring clean water to the southeastern part of Colorado. The president shed light on his motivation soon after, telling Politico that as far as he was concerned, Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis was a “bad governor.”
It was one of several related moves. The Times summarized late last year, “Miffed at Colorado’s votes against him in three successive elections and furious at its refusal to free Tina Peters, a convicted election denier and ardent Trump supporter, Mr. Trump has opened an assault against the Democratic-run state. His administration has cut off transportation money, relocated the military’s Space Command, vowed to dismantle a leading climate and weather research center and rejected disaster relief for rural counties hammered by floods and wildfires.”
A few months later, the Republican administration also took steps to dismantle a renowned science lab in Colorado, which also appeared to be an extension of an aggressive retaliation scheme.
But while the pattern is not new, what is new is the newly disclosed document: We’re now aware of an email, sent by White House special assistant Emily Underwood just days after the president published a series of messages related to Peters, which reinforces rather obvious suspicions that the administration’s campaign against Colorado was not a mere coincidence: Team Trump set out to punish the state, and then took a variety of steps to execute that plan.
Although a White House spokesperson officially denied that the “brainstorm call” related to Peters (she referred questions about the Colorado grants to the Office of Management and Budget), as the Times’ report added, U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson expressed shock at the revelation.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the jurist said of the email, according to the transcript. “I’ve never even imagined something like it. The very idea that the president of the United States or the executive office of the president would target a state because they don’t feel that the state and its administrators are in line with the current administration’s priorities is phenomenal.”
It’s worth emphasizing that the gambit — what was effectively an extortion plot, hatched by the White House against an American state — proved effective. In mid-May, Polis succumbed to pressure and announced his commutation for Peters, a convicted felon who illegally tried to use her office in pursuit of pro-Trump election conspiracy theories.
But the fact that the scheme worked doesn’t make it any more defensible. This is a story in which the White House appears to have helped orchestrate a plot against a state because it was reluctant to free one of the president’s favorite criminals.
Impeachment efforts have been launched over less.
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