The Colorado shakedown
By 
It was widely known that this was happening, but this administration doesn’t try to hide it:
As President Trump fumed late last year over Colorado’s imprisonment of Tina Peters, a convicted election denier, a White House special assistant organized an urgent “brainstorm call.”
The goal, outlined in an email sent to officials at five federal agencies, was to “prioritize Colorado for the purposes of ensuring grants and federal support are in line with administration priorities,” the assistant, Emily Underwood, wrote on Dec. 15.
“Please come prepared to discuss immediate actions that your department or agency can take with respect to Colorado,” Ms. Underwood added.
The next day, 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.
The email, which was first reported by The Denver Post, does not mention Ms. Peters, and it has not been publicly released. Its contents were read aloud in a Denver courtroom as part of a Colorado lawsuit against the Trump administration, and The New York Times reviewed a copy of the hearing transcript.
Judge R. Brooke Jackson of U.S. District Court expressed shock at the revelation.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Judge Jackson 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.”
In a functional political system (LOL) this would be yet another impeachable and removable offense. And hey, whatever happened to the Sovereign Equal Dignitude of the states?
Needless to say, this makes Jared Polis’s unreciprocated capitulation even worse than it was on its face.