In mid-December, an assistant to President Donald Trump summoned officials from several federal agencies to a meeting so they could discuss what to do about Colorado.
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Under the subject line “brainstorm call,” Emily Underwood asked officials from five agencies to join a call later that day “prepared to discuss immediate actions that your department or agency can take with respect to Colorado.”
“The purpose of this call is to prioritize Colorado for the purposes of ensuring grants and federal support are in line with administration priorities,” Underwood, a deputy assistant to the president, wrote to officials from the departments of energy, transportation, interior and agriculture, as well as the Office of Management and Budget.
The email was sent at 2:43 a.m. on Dec. 15, hours before Trump publicly castigated Gov. Jared Polis as “weak and pathetic” over the continued imprisonment of former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters.
The Underwood email was disclosed publicly during a hearing in Denver on Tuesday as part of a Colorado lawsuit alleging retaliation by the Trump administration that state officials argue was motivated by the president’s frustration with Peters’ incarceration and by the state’s mail-in balloting system.
According to a transcript of the hearing reviewed by The Denver Post, a senior state attorney said the email amounted to a “smoking gun”: In the days that followed Underwood’s note, several agencies included in the email announced adverse actions against Colorado, canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and moving to close a renowned climate lab in Boulder.
“It’s extraordinary,” David Moskowitz, Colorado’s deputy solicitor general, said during the Tuesday hearing in U.S. District Court. The state had requested the hearing — and produced the email — in an effort to force the Trump administration to turn over more records. “And it’s extraordinary because the scheme was run directly out of (the Executive Office of the President).”
The White House on Thursday denied that the Underwood email was related to Peters. A spokeswoman did not comment on the record for this story, other than to direct questions about grant funding to the budget management office.
Throughout the fall, tension had mounted between the state and Trump administration.
In November, Colorado prison officials had rejected a request to transfer Peters, a Trump ally who was serving a prison sentence for facilitating a plot to give a third party access to secure election equipment. Trump had called Polis, demanding Peters’ release. (In May, Polis reduced her sentence and released her early.)
The Justice Department’s pardon attorney told Trump ally Steve Bannon that federal officials were putting “the right kind of pressure” on the state to secure Peters’ transfer; Trump had also promised “harsh measures” if the former clerk remained incarcerated.
Four days before Underwood’s email, the president issued Peters a symbolic pardon.
Within days of that “brainstorm call,” a conservative media outlet reported that the Department of Energy was cutting $615 million in funding intended for Colorado. The Department of Transportation said it would end $109 million in grant funding to the state. The Office of Management and Budget moved to shutter the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. Federal emergency officials rejected disaster relief funding for fire-scarred areas on the Western Slope. The Department of Agriculture ordered the state to swiftly re-certify 100,000 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients within 30 days.
Before the month was out, Trump vetoed legislation that would have brought clean water to parts of the state.
Underwood’s email appeared to leave the federal judge overseeing the case aghast. According to the transcript, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson said the administration’s apparent targeting of Colorado “makes no sense in our democracy,” and he ordered the Executive Office of the President to turn over more documents and records to the state.
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“I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never even imagined something like it,” Jackson said of the email, which he read aloud in court. “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.”
“That’s not the country I think we live in,” he said later in the hearing.
In a statement Thursday, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser called the email “shocking” and said it proved that “the White House orchestrated an unconstitutional scheme to weaponize the federal government to attack and punish Colorado for its lawful decisions over elections and our criminal justice system.”
Polis spokeswoman Ally Sullivan said in a separate statement that the Trump administration “has taken a number of actions that have negatively impacted Coloradans and our communities. If those decisions were based on political retribution against Colorado, we hope the courts will provide relief to Colorado.”
Sullivan did not respond to specific questions about the timing or substance of Polis’ call with Trump last year.
Officials in Colorado and elsewhere have long argued that the Trump administration has used the regulatory and financial powers of the federal government to target states that have run afoul of the president and his priorities. The lawsuit that produced the email was initially filed over allegations that Trump had moved U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs because of the state’s mail-in balloting system. Last month, that they’d terminated clean energy grants for several states, including Colorado, “based solely on the political identity” of those states.
During Tuesday’s hearing, lawyers for the state said they wanted the president’s office to turn over evidence, including records of oral or written communication, that may further prove that Colorado was targeted for unconstitutional retaliation. Moskowitz, the deputy solicitor general, said that the state has already received evidence that showed there was a “mad scramble” after the Dec. 15 meeting to “immediately identify actions against Colorado.”
He said the USDA had acknowledged that it had proposed its SNAP review after the call. The Energy Department, he said, held a “high-level mandatory (meeting) … to discuss what they were going to do.” That same day, the Interior Department “immediately requested … a compilation of all outstanding grants to Colorado or any entity simply located in Colorado.”
The hearing was about evidence discovery, and Adam Fox, the Justice Department attorney representing the Trump administration, largely did not respond to statements about the email, though he did not dispute its reported contents.
He argued that the state’s requests for more information from the president’s executive office were overly broad and burdensome, and that the state hadn’t first exhausted other avenues to get evidence that may help its case.
Jackson was largely unmoved. He asked Fox whether there “were so many written communications about actions or threats against Colorado that it’s an undue burden to even try to find them all.”
He ordered the federal government to comply with most of the state’s requests for additional evidence. He said he understood that the government should be protected from turning over information, particularly if it’s sensitive, to anyone who files a lawsuit against the president.
“But these are extraordinary times we’re talking about, and this is an extraordinary memo,” Jackson continued. “And it’s very troublesome to this court. And I think it would be very troublesome to most people if this were broadcast in The Denver Post, for example. This is something that I have never even conceived of before.”
The New York Times contributed to this report.
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