To understand the stark danger behind the Trump administration’s latest scheme to inflict revenge on people, places and organizations that have held the president and his acolytes accountable for their corrupt and criminal actions, you have to return to the 2020 election.
While Trump racked up a catalog of charges for his legal, malfeasant and other dubious acts during his first four years in the Oval Office, his criminal pièce de résistance was his dogged attempt to undermine and overthrow the 2020 presidential election, which he lost.
Trump went on in January of 2021 to conspire with hundreds of insurrections and criminals who beat and injured police officers in an attempt to overtake the U.S. Capitol and overthrow the election. Colorado courts held Trump accountable for the crime, upholding Republican-led efforts to keep him off the 2024 ballot. That’s because as an insurrectionist, he was unqualified to run for commander in chief.
Along the way to 2024, however, former Mesa County Clerk and Trump disciple Tina Peters was dogged into criminal court. Her fate was sealed after investigators determined she had surreptitiously allowed election conspiracy theorists access to election equipment and systems in an overcooked scheme to prove non-existent election fraud — in a county that has thrice voted for Trump.
A darling of the Trump MAGA campaign and former guest at Mar-a-Lago, Peters’ scam, scheme and self-destructive testimony landed her in state prison for nine years.
Since re-election, Trump has made good on promises to free convicts who committed a wide range of crimes to support his efforts to retake the White House. He recently publicly instructed what is supposed to be the independent U.S. Department of Justice to find a way to free Peters from her felony bars as thanks for backing Trump’s corruption.
There’s no need to wait for historians years from now to hold these horrific acts to the light of ethics, morality and justice. They are already astonishingly corrupt as they role out live, daily, from the Trump White House.
But as corrupt as his “get out of jail free” scheme has been for his criminal toadies and sycophants, Trump has now surpassed even himself in government corruption.
At the end of May, the Trump Department of Justice, posing as guardians of the Voting Rights Act, sent a demand to Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold for all election records from the 2024 presidential and congressional contests, according to reporting by Colorado Public Radio.
Griswold was key to pursuing investigations and justice for Colorado residents to out Peters for the crimes she’d committed.
It’s not lost on Griswold, nor anyone, that the timing of the demand — so bizarre and outrageous that no one in Colorado has ever heard of anything like it — is hardly coincidence.
Trump, speaking through his social media posts, has demanded that his independent Department of Justice to find a way to free Peters from prison. She was convicted on state charges, beyond the reach of the presidential pardons he’s bestowed on a couple of thousand other convicted hoodlums, thugs and insurrectionists.
“A week later, we received the inquiry from the DOJ. We have also seen the DOJ try to intervene in her appeals. Ultimately, we don’t know if it’s that, but that’s where my mind instantly went,” Griswold told CPR in an interview last week.
Former GOP Arapahoe County Clerk Matt Crane, who now heads the state’s association of county clerks, also commented to CPR on the suspicious nature of the demand.
“In 25 years of working in elections in Colorado, I’ve never seen a request from the DOJ or heard of a request from the DOJ as expansive as what this is,” Crane said.
It’s not just more eye-rolling Trump theatrics. Crane and others say the demand affects massive amounts of data. Colorado taxpayers, in every one of the state’s 64 counties, will have to spend money to support Trump’s bogus snipe hunt on the backs of federal taxpayers supporting the Department of Justice.
There’s no doubt that the scheme is at best a petulant and insidiously mean move of revenge against a state and election officials who had the temerity to hold Peters accountable for her crimes. At worst, the stunt is a corrupt intrigue meant to actually find a way to get Peters off from her rightfully imposed prison sentence or even work some new election corruption into Colorado, and possibly other states.
The courts may have little power to stop this deceit and expose what and who’s behind the scheme. Residents from Colorado, and citizens from across the nation, of all political factions, must appeal to both Republicans and Democrats in Congress who can also clearly see the danger of Trump’s subterfuge.
Either the House or the Senate, or both, should open an immediate investigation into how and why the DOJ is working under the conceit of civil rights voting powers to press into national elections that Trump has provenly and repeatedly not only lied about but has been charged in trying to undermine for his own benefit.
If no one else, Colorado’s four Republican members of Congress have a duty to their own district constituents, and all state residents, to keep the administration from undermining and endangering the election, justice and democracy.
There’s nothing to see here and as long as we keep our mouths and records closed, that will continue to be true. If I was sure that everything was on the up and up, I would welcome having fresh eyes take a look, but it sounds like maybe there’s something there.
Such as what? How many courts have had their time wasted on this judicial snipe hunt?
For that matter, have you ever worked an election? Seen how ballots are handled, how they’re counted? Saying U.S. elections are “fixed” is only to demonstrate one’s own ignorance.
It just keeps going. Both sides using every tactic possible to get back st the other. We just resist these corruptions of our legal system by either side. Unlike most of Biden’s corruption, Trump is blatantly obvious. Both corrupt.