Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert suggested that Donald Trump blocked funds for a clean drinking water project in her state over the prosecution of election denier Tina Peters.
Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, commuted Peters’ nearly nine-year prison sentence on Friday, ordering her release on 1 June. The former Colorado county clerk had allowed unauthorized people to access voting records amid efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, in which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Boebert welcomed the commutation the same day, taking some credit, but giving even more to Trump.
“I’m proud of the relentless pressure my office and I applied, working hand-in-hand with President Donald Trump, to highlight Tina’s case and demand fairness,” the congresswoman wrote. “This outcome would not have been possible without the continued pressure and advocacy from President Trump who always knew Tina deserved fairness under the law.”
In comments to 9News Denver on Friday, Boebert also said that she hoped the release of Peters would convince Trump to stop blocking funds for a federal project to bring clean drinking water to Colorado. “We were told that Tina was the reason we couldn’t get water,” Boebert said, an apparent reference to Trump exerting on Colorado’s governor the same kind of pressure he put on Ukraine’s president in 2019, when he withheld congressionally mandated military aid to try to force Ukraine to open a sham investigation into Joe Biden. Trump was impeached for that scheme in 2019.
In January, the president had vetoed a bill that would have funded a drinking water project in Boebert’s Colorado district, after it passed the House and Senate unanimously. Boebert, like all other Colorado lawmakers, had supported the bill, which would have supported clean water for 50,000 people in the region.
Trump cited financial concerns, but Boebert pointed out on the House floor that Trump supported the project before he promised retaliation against Colorado for keeping Peters in jail and Boebert joined the effort to force the administration to release files on Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sexual offender Trump socialized with for nearly two decades.
When the House of Representatives upheld Trump’s veto at the time, she criticized her colleagues, but not the president.
“I am disappointed to see the lack of leadership, the amount of people that will fold, that will cave, that will not take a stand,” Boebert said. “This is a bill that in policy, no one in that chamber disagreed with. This was purely political and it’s very unfortunate.”
“Folks are afraid of getting a mean tweet or attacked. And I came here to deliver for my constituents,” Boebert said.