The Denver Post headline Friday called it a “smoking gun” — an email revealed in federal court last week that directly links Donald Trump’s bloody war against Colorado to his campaign to free election grifter Tina Peters from prison.
The state wants the not-exactly-cooperative Trump administration to hand over relevant records and documents. Trump, of course, refuses — can you Dr. Fauci fans see the irony here? — to turn over anything that might be in any way incriminating. I wonder if he’s hiding the records in an airport storage container or maybe a Mar-a-Lago closet.
But there’s more to this smoking-gun story than Trump’s record of stonewalling.
There’s even more to this story than a federal judge saying there’s no room for memos like this in “our democracy.”
I’m not making any promises, but the email could, if the stars are ever properly aligned, offer a glimpse into the future, to that day when (or if) Trump and his MAGA team are finally sent packing.
It gives me some small hope, anyway, that a time may come when the thoroughly corrupt enterprise that is Trump’s second administration — even more so than his first — is called to account.
If Democrats take back the House and/or the Senate in November, committee hearings could start the process. But for now, what we have is the courts.
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As you may know, there’s an ongoing case that Colorado has brought against the Trump administration, arguing the state has been victim of Trump’s “retaliation” — I call it his revenge tour — for failing to obey his demands to release a “brave and innocent Patriot who has been tortured by Crooked Colorado politicians.” (Oh, he doesn’t like Colorado’s mail-in voting, either. Trump is now asking the Supreme Court to stop mail-in voting throughout the country for the midterms.)
The “Patriot” in Trump’s telling was Peters, who since her early release, has dined with Trump at the White House and continued to preach that our country’s election system is rigged. By the way, if you’ve seen the photos of her at the White House, she didn’t look sickly or old or anything but living the dream.
And at least one of the “Crooked Colorado politicians” was Gov. Jared Polis, who eventually did reduce Peters’ sentence, of course, thereby freeing her from prison years early. But that’s another sad story.
Back in the pre-censure days when Polis was still holding firm, Trump said if Peters wasn’t released that “harsh measures” would follow. And, of course, they did, in rapid succession.
We know that much. Trump has admitted as much. But knowing something and proving it in court, with punishment offered, can be entirely different things.
The email in question — sent under the heading of “brainstorm call” from Emily Underwood, a deputy assistant to the president — notified officials from five government agencies that they should be “prepared to discuss immediate actions that your department or agency can take with respect to Colorado.”
”The purpose of the call,” Underwood wrote in an email posted at 2:43 a.m. on Dec. 15 of last year “is to prioritize Colorado for the purposes of ensuring grants and federal support are in line with administration policies.”
In other words, she wanted, presumably at Trump’s request since it was the middle of the night, everyone prepared to do their worst.
Later that day, Trump called Polis “weak and pathetic.” Trump had already delivered his fantasy pardon, knowing presidents can’t pardon people convicted, as Peters was, of state crimes. Trump had also called Polis directly, presumably to threaten him and Colorado directly.
And just days after the smoking-gun email — sent to officials from energy, transportation, interior and agriculture departments as a well as the Office of Management and Budget — came the deluge.
See if you can follow the cascading waters here.
Transportation and Energy together cut hundreds of millions of dollars in Colorado funding. Agriculture took it another step — remember, cruelty is the point — threatening Colorado’s SNAP payments to families of food-needy children. In other words, if Peters isn’t released, no food for you. No clean water for southeastern Colorado. No emergency relief funding for the Western Slope. No National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) for Boulder.
The war was definitely on for all to see, as Colorado joined California and Minnesota and other defiantly blue states on Trump’s ever-widening battlefield.
“It’s extraordinary,” said David Moskowitz, Colorado’s deputy solicitor general, according to a transcript of the Tuesday hearing that the Denver Post had reviewed. The extraordinary part, he said, was that “the scheme was run directly out of (the Executive Office of the President.)”
Does any of that sound familiar? Is it any wonder that Moskowitz went for the “smoking gun” reference for the email?
When Nixon was president, I used to say I knew exactly where to stand on almost every moral issue — which was 180 degrees from where Nixon was standing.
Trump, of course, makes Nixon look like a piker.
U.S. District Court Senior Judge R. Brooke Jackson, who is overseeing the case, clearly knew what the email represents. According to the transcript, he was shocked, and it’s usually not that easy to shock a federal judge — although a quick scan of the daily headlines should have been enough to offer up at least a few hints.
In any case, Jackson said the implicating email “makes no sense in our democracy” and ordered the administration to hand over more records.
We’ll see how that works out. (Prediction: It won’t. Not without judgments from higher federal courts than Jackson’s, and probably not even then.)
But Judge Jackson read the email aloud from the bench, saying “I’ve never seen anything like it. The very idea that the president of the United States 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.”
Later in the hearing, he would say the “extraordinary memo … is something that I never conceived of before.”
He added: “This is not the country I think we live in.”
But this is the country we live in, as shocking as it may be. As I said, it’s all there for everyone to see.
And every day — you don’t need a smoking gun to understand this — it only gets worse.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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