Colorado attorney general expands lawsuit to challenge Trump 'revenge campaign' against state

Nick Coltrain, The Denver Post on Jan 8, 2026

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DENVER — Attorney General Phil Weiser on Thursday expanded a lawsuit filed to keep U.S. Space Command in Colorado to now encapsulate a broader “revenge campaign” that he said the Trump administration was waging against Colorado.

Weiser named a litany of moves the Trump administration had made in recent weeks — from moving to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research to putting food assistance in limbo to denying disaster declarations — in his updated lawsuit.

He said during a news conference that he hoped to reverse the individual cuts and freezes and to win a general declaration from a judge that the moves were part of an unconstitutional pattern of coercion.

“I recognize this is a novel request, and that’s because this is an unprecedented administration,” Weiser, a Democrat, said. “We’ve never seen an administration act in a way that is so flatly violating the Constitution and disrespecting state sovereign authority. We have to protect our authority (and) defend the principles we believe in.”

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, began in October as an effort to force the administration to keep U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs. President Donald Trump, a Republican, announced in September that he was moving the command’s headquarters to Alabama, and he cited Colorado’s mail-in voting system as one of the reasons.

Trump has also repeatedly lashed out over the state’s incarceration of Tina Peters, the former county clerk convicted of state felonies related to her attempts to prove discredited election conspiracies shared by the president. Trump issued a pardon of Peters in December — a power he does not have for state crimes — and then “instituted a weeklong series of punishments and threats targeted against Colorado,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit cites the administration’s termination of $109 million in transportation grants, cancellation of $615 million in Department of Energy funds for Colorado, announcement of plans to dismantle NCAR in Boulder, demand that the state recertify food assistance eligibility for more than 100,000 households, and denial of disaster relief assistance for last year’s Elk and Lee fires.

In that time, Trump also vetoed a pipeline project for southeastern Colorado — a move the House failed to override Thursday — and repeatedly took to social media to attack state officials.

The Trump administration also announced Tuesday that he would suspend potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of low-income assistance to Colorado over unspecified allegations of fraud. Those actions were not covered by Weiser’s lawsuit, though he told reporters to “stay tuned” for a response.

Weiser, who is running for governor in this year’s election, characterized the attacks as Trump trying to leverage the power of the executive branch to exercise unconstitutional authority over how individual states conduct elections and oversee their criminal justice systems.

In a statement, a White House official pushed back on Weiser’s characterization.

“President Trump is using his lawful and discretionary authority to ensure federal dollars are being spent in a way that (aligns) with the agenda endorsed by the American people when they resoundingly reelected the President,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.

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