Earlier this year, out Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) commuted the sentence of Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk and MAGA conspiracy theorist who was sentenced to years in prison for tampering with voting machines.
And new evidence shows that the White House held a “brainstorm call” with several federal agencies to discuss imposing “harsh measures” on Colorado to pressure the state to release Peters.
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MS NOW’s Steve Benen cites New York Times reporting that the administration announced, a day after the call, that it would be “canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for Colorado projects.” Trump later vetoed a bill to “bring clean water to the southeastern part of Colorado,” according to Benen, and said he did so because Polis is a “bad governor.”
The Times reported that the Trump administration “vowed to dismantle a leading climate and weather research center and rejected disaster relief for rural counties hammered by floods and wildfires” that happened to be located in Boulder, Colorado.
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Now, an uncovered email confirms that the brainstorm call took place. The email, from White House special assistant Emily Underwood, organized the call to “prioritize Colorado for the purposes of ensuring grants and federal support are in line with administration priorities.”
“Please come prepared to discuss immediate actions that your department or agency can take with respect to Colorado,” she wrote.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” US District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson said in a hearing last Tuesday where the email was revealed. The email itself has still not been publicly released and reporting on it is based on court documents. “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.”
In May of this year, Polis commuted Peters’ sentence, defying the recommendation of his own clemency board. The move was controversial enough to prompt the Colorado Democratic Party to censure him, and his commutation of Peters’ sentencing, at the time, seemed inexplicable.
Even Donald Trump said that it was his bullying – not Polis’ clemency – that freed Peters, saying that Peters “came to the White House to thank me for getting her released from prison in Colorado.”
The White House denies that the email has anything to do with Peters but is not saying what the email was about.
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