Colorado was preparing to fly in as many as 15 gray wolves from Canada when a letter from the Trump administration arrived last fall, sternly ordering the state to “cease and desist.” Then last month, the federal government upped the stakes, threatening to seize control of Colorado’s effort to reintroduce the predators to a state where their howls had nearly been silenced.
The intervention from Washington (which alleges Colorado violated an agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) has abruptly thrown a voter-approved wolf revival into disarray, essentially blocking the state’s ability to bolster a nascent population and raising doubts about the contentious program’s viability. While welcomed by many ranchers and other critics, the takeover warning baffled former senior agency officials and environmental groups. They called it a misinterpretation of the agreement, as well as an impractical idea from a federal agency that has lost 20 percent of its workforce over the past year and has historically encouraged state-led wildlife conservation.
Yet Colorado’s mostly Democratic leaders suspect a political motivation, one tied to President Donald Trump’s broad campaign to retaliate against their blue state and its governor, Jared Polis, over mail-in voting and the imprisonment of Tina Peters, an election-denying former county clerk and MAGA cause celebre. At stake, they say, are critical programs and state sovereignty. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser calls it a “revenge campaign.” Sen. Michael Bennet has deemed it a “coordinated attack,” while Sen. John Hickenlooper said Trump is “using a political squabble” over Peters as a “cudgel” against Colorado. “This is not a place where the federal government should be poking their nose,” Hickenlooper said of wolf reintroduction.
The state has been dealing with a flurry of hits ordered by the Trump administration. In September, Trump said Colorado’s mail-in ballots “played a big factor” in his decision to relocate the U.S. Space Command to Alabama. Three months later, he vetoed a long-planned pipeline to deliver clean water to conservative southeastern Colorado, and his administration announced it would dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a world-renowned institution in Boulder. In recent weeks, officials have canceled millions of dollars in transportation and energy grants, denied emergency aid to communities ravaged by wildfires and flooding, and frozen hundreds of millions of dollars for child care, food aid and other assistance for poor Coloradans.
Other blue states have also faced retributive wrath from the Trump administration, which asserts it has the right to consider partisan politics when considering federal funding cuts. But the jabs at Colorado have been accompanied by a steady stream of vitriol from the president, who has labeled Polis a “sleazebag” for leaving Peters behind bars. “If she is not released, I am going to take harsh measures!!!” he posted on Truth Social in August. On New Year’s Eve, he said he wished the governor and the Republican district attorney who prosecuted her would “rot in hell.”
Trump claimed in December to have issued a “full pardon” of Peters. But Polis and Weiser have pointed out what most educated observers already know-- presidential pardons are meaningless when it comes to state convictions. The White House declined to comment on how far it would go to ensure Peters’ release and whether its actions on the wolf program are related to her case. But we already know they are-- Trump is as obvious as dogs' balls.
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