What did Donald Trump do today?

He threatened to punish Americans living in Colorado if the state didn't free a supporter who committed crimes on his behalf.

Trump continued his attack against American election systems today, this time in the form of a threat to the state of Colorado if they didn't release a woman, Tina Peters, who committed election crimes on his behalf. She was convicted on ten counts, including four felonies, and is in the first year of a nine-year prison sentence.

In a post to his private microblogging site, Trump demanded that Peters be "let out of jail, RIGHT NOW" calling her an "old woman." (Peters, 69, is ten years younger than Trump—who is also a convicted felon.) He said that he would take "harsh measures" against the state of Colorado if she weren't freed.

Trump, who has no authority to demand that states ignore their own laws or jury verdicts, did not specify what "harsh measures" he had in mind. 

In her role as Mesa County clerk, Peters signed off on a routine post-election audit on November 19, 2020, certifying that a random check of paper ballots against vote tabulating machines had returned no errors. But she became convinced by the conspiracy theories about a stolen election that Trump and his other supporters were promoting in a desperate attempt to keep him in power. In May of 2021, she ordered surveillance cameras guarding voting machines turned off, then gave a QAnon conspiracy theorist named Conan Hays stolen credentials to "inspect" them. Peters lied to other county officials about Hayes' identity.When Hayes released video and data that he had downloaded from the machines' on-board software to the internet, Peters lied again about her involvement and falsely claimed that the reveal of the data (which included passwords that could have been used to further tamper with Mesa County election results) were not a "big deal." 

The voting machines Peters allowed to be tampered were ordered replaced by the county's all-Republican board in order to comply with Colorado's strict ballot security laws. This cost taxpayers more than $800,000.

Her crimes during the 2020 election cycle weren't even Peters' first brush with tampering with election results. In 2019, she left 574 ballots uncounted in a drop-off ballot box in a heavily Democratic area of her district. When this was discovered, she called it an "error."

Trump using his power to reward people who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election is nothing new: he called the convicted criminals who stormed the session of Congress where Joe Biden's win was certified "hostages," and then pardoned them immediately after returning to office—including those who attacked and injured police. He's even appointed some of them to high-ranking positions in the Justice Department.

Why does this matter?

• Rewarding people who break the law on your behalf is textbook fascism. 

• People who abuse their powers of office and commit crimes, especially for political reasons, should be punished.