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.

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Donald Trump may agree to drop his massive $10bn lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the launch of a $1.7bn fund to compensate people he says were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration, according to reports.

The case is the latest example of how Trump has taken over the justice department – which typically operates at arm’s length from the White House – and deployed it for his own ends.

Among other people, more than 1,500 January 6 rioters would be eligible to receive compensation from the fund, ABC said. The treasury department’s Judgment Fund, a pool of taxpayer funds reserved to pay out court judgments and settlements, would allegedly become the vehicle for Trump’s self-styled victim compensation fund.

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Thousands of people from across the country descended on Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, on Saturday. They arrived by bus, by car and by plane to gather for the All Roads Lead to the South rally, following the supreme court’s Louisiana v Callais decision last month, which essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act and severely limited protections against voting discrimination.

Organized by a coalition of national and local civic engagement groups, the rally took place outside the Alabama state capitol building, in the same plaza where the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches – three nonviolent demonstrations in support of Black voting rights – are enshrined.

“We’re here, Montgomery, not at a stopping point, but at a starting point,” Steven L Reed, mayor of Montgomery and the first Black person to hold the position, told the crowd. “We’re here in this city because of the spirit, because of the courage and because of the commitment of our forefathers and foremothers who got us to this point.”

Following the supreme court decision, Republican-led states rushed to redraw their voting maps in ways that weaken Black political power. Tennessee and Florida have already passed new maps, while Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia seem poised to follow. Mississippi temporarily paused redistricting efforts, with the state’s governor promising to revisit the issue soon.

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After several months of heated arguments over whether the Democratic National Committee (DNC) should release its autopsy report on the 2024 election, the dispute has neared a boiling point. With one recent media appearance after another, the DNC chair, Ken Martin, has set off fierce criticism and even derision, while offering notably illogical explanations for keeping the autopsy secret.

As the controversy simmers, no one has more at stake than the party’s latest standard-bearer. Kamala Harris, apparently preparing for another run, leads in polls for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. One of the last things she needs is a widely publicized narrative from the DNC about failures of her 2024 campaign. A maxim from George Orwell applies: “who controls the past controls the future” and “who controls the present controls the past”.

At present, Martin is holding firm to his announcement last December that he would not fulfill his promise to make the autopsy public. That was a boon to Harris, but this spring’s escalating uproar over the decision has given her reason to distance herself from it.

Last week, NBC News reported that Harris was “signaling that she has no problem with a public airing of what went wrong last time – telling donors she believes the Democratic National Committee should release its buried autopsy of her failed 2024 campaign, according to a person who has heard the conversations”.

But Harris hasn’t made any public statement that she believes the autopsy should be released. Her “signaling” is evidently an effort to disassociate herself from the taint of Martin’s unpopular decision without openly opposing it.

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