Trump threatened Colorado funding as ‘punishment’ over Tina Peters, judge finds

By Matt Cohen

Former Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters looks on during her sentencing for her election interference case at the Mesa County District Court Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Grand Junction, Colo. (Larry Robinson/The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel via AP)

A federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s threat to cut Colorado’s SNAP benefits, finding that it appeared to be retribution over the state’s refusal to pardon convicted election denier Tina Peters. 

In the preliminary injunction granted Monday, U.S. District Court Senior Judge R. Brooke Jackson, an Obama appointee, wrote that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s threat in December to withhold millions of dollars in federal funding to Colorado’s SNAP program violated the Spending Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

On December 18, 2025, Gov. Jared Polis (D) received a one-page letter from the USDA saying that because of alleged widespread fraud throughout the state, five counties in Colorado had to recertify more than 100,000 households for food assistance within 30 days, or else the USDA would withhold millions of dollars in federal funding for the state’s SNAP program.

But the timing was not a coincidence. Jackson noted that the SNAP recertification letter “did not arrive in a vacuum” — instead, he said, it came shortly after Trump issued a legally meaningless “pardon” to Peters, and amid a “barrage of threats and actions designed, by all appearances, to punish Colorado.” That included an Oval Office presser where Trump attacked Polis and called him “weak and pathetic” for not freeing Peters. 

“This larger context gives the game away; the pilot project seems to be about punishment and nothing more,” Jackson wrote.

Among the other components of Trump’s punishment of Colorado was the announcement that the administration was moving to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research — a 60-year-old federal climate and environmental research center in Boulder. 

On Monday, leadership of the longstanding lab filed a lawsuit alleging a near identical accusation to what Jackson said in his ruling: the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the weather lab in Boulder were retribution against Colorado officials for not freeing Peters.