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[{"type":"text","text":"Trying out for the USA Luge Team....."}]

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Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>🚧 Bonus Video 2: Thursday, February 12, 2026 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Trying out for the USA Luge Team.....

Bonus Video 2: Thursday, February 12, 2026

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's general assignment reporter, Clair McFarland.

Clair McFarland

Executive

Government & Politics

[{"type":"text","text":"President Donald Trump pardoned Troy Lake on Friday."}]

The 65-year-old Wyoming diesel mechanic spent 

 for tweaking and removing emissions systems on ailing engines. He was originally sentenced to one year and one day in prison, but was released early to home confinement with an ankle monitor in September.

[{"type":"text","text":"He and his business Elite Diesel were also fined $52,000."}]

Though relieved to be free of the dismal prison in which he spent his 40th wedding anniversary and his 65th birthday, Lake 

 he’d spend the rest of his life as a convicted felon, unable to vote, hold public office, or possess or hunt with firearms.

He was standing in his kitchen when he noticed he had a voicemail, 

It was from U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, calling to congratulate Lake on receiving a full, complete, unconditional pardon 

Lummis said she found it shocking the pardon was even needed, in a copy of the voicemail Lake sent Friday to Cowboy State Daily.  

“But I just wanted to call and … let you know how very sorry I am that this even happened to you guys, but how delighted I am that the pardon has come through from President Trump,” said Lummis. “Thank you, take care, and 

started pacing his family home just outside of Cheyenne, his heart racing.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Then"},{"type":"text","text":" he wept."}]

“I don’t guess men are supposed to do that,” he said. “But it’s great. It’s news that, you know — I guess I look at it as, there are some good things that happen in the world.”

[{"type":"text","text":"The First Tears"}]

Meanwhile, Troy’s wife Holly Lake was driving on Interstate 25 south of Cheyenne when she got the call.

[{"type":"text","text":"She had to pull over to cry."}]

“These are the first tears I’ve shed over this whole thing since it all started,” Holly told Cowboy State Daily, reflecting on roughly six years of being investigated by the federal government after U.S. Environmental Protection Agency personnel first raided the family’s shop in 2018.  

Holly hadn’t let herself cry because, “I knew we had to get through this,” she said. “I had to be strong for everybody, I guess.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Troy Lake said the thrilling news makes him want to help others like him."}]

He said he hopes he can help anyone in the diesel industry or in the government who will listen to find ways to tune trucks for cleaner air — and to spark commonsense reforms to the systems and the laws around them.  

“We need to sit down and think about a more logical way of doing it, not putting people out of work,” he said, referencing the expensive emissions repairs that can cripple small trucking businesses and other diesel fleets.

[{"type":"text","text":"'Everyday People Won Today'"}]

Troy and Holly Lake in their separate interviews both thanked Trump, Lummis and 

 team, as well as the advocates who fought for their cause.

Troy said he’s amazed at his wife and family, who fought for a pardon while he was in prison, “helpless” to get word of his own case to the new administration.

Holly said she’s grateful for the numerous Wyoming lawmakers who urged the president to pardon her husband, “and all the people around the country who have backed us up. We found out who our friends are. It’s unbelievable.”

One of those is Jeff Daugherty, a Cheyenne-based political consultant and family friend who took up the Lakes’ cause for free because he saw Troy’s prosecution as unjust.

“Regular, everyday people won today. That feels good,” Daugherty told Cowboy State Daily in a Friday text message.

He added that the pardon is “a testament to the brave people who stayed with Troy,” including Lummis, Wyoming House Speaker Rep. Chip Neiman and 

, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, and Region 8 Administrator Cyrus Western.  

Neiman told Cowboy State Daily on Friday that he’d like to thank Trump, “for doing the right thing” and standing up for victims of government overreach.

“I appreciate all the efforts on behalf of everybody that was willing to put their name on the line for (Troy),” Neiman added.

[{"type":"text","text":"Came Out Swinging"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Lummis championed Lake’s cause in Washington, D.C."}]

She was outspoken to Cowboy State Daily about her support for Lake 

 to pardon the Wyomingite. Last month, 

 Congressional legislation to free delete mechanics from prison and legalize the practice.

“Calling to tell him tonight that he’d been pardoned by President Trump was a truly joyous moment, and I am grateful to President Trump for standing up for those wronged by the Biden administration’s weaponization against working Americans,” said Lummis in a Friday text statement sent via her senior communications adviser.

That was a reference to the fact that, though the Lakes’ shop was raided by EPA investigators in 2018 under the first Trump administration, the case did not turn into a criminal prosecution until Biden’s presidency.  

She said she’s grateful for the pardon, and said Lake was targeted “simply for keeping diesel engines in school buses, ambulances, and fire trucks running in our tough Western weather.”

This case, said Lummis “is yet another example of how federal agencies have been weaponized by Democrat administrations against hardworking Americans. I’ll continue fighting to ensure this kind of government abuse never happens again.”

[{"type":"text","text":"When The Engines Guttered"}]

Troy Lake got his first requests to alter diesel emissions controls in about 2007, and continued until about 2020.

That was during an era in which the federal government tilted quietly from imposing civil penalties on diesel “delete” mechanics, to prosecuting them criminally and putting them in prison.

Because Lake was for years the go-to mechanic for desperate diesel drivers and owners — and other mechanics seeking guidance — the U.S. District Court for Colorado and its corresponding federal prosecutor’s district decided to make an example of him, his sentencing transcript says.

He was sentenced Dec. 5, 2024, to one year and one day in prison, and fined.

He reported to prison Feb. 10 and remained at the FCI Florence correctional complex in Colorado most of this year, where he became instrumental to the prison’s diesel shop.

[{"type":"text","text":"Right Off The Lot"}]

In about 2007, customers started approaching Lake because their trucks had problems “brand new off the lot,” recalled Troy Lake’s son TJ, who was in high school at the time.

That coincided with the EPA tightening emissions standards on heavy diesel trucks in 2004, and again in 2007.

Removing or “deleting” emissions control systems wasn’t Troy Lake’s main business at that time. Not even close. He ran a successful shop with six service trucks and jobs in the gold mining industry, Holly Lake told Cowboy State Daily. 

“But customers of ours, quite a few of them, would buy new trucks every year and start running into those issues — and they’d ask Dad if he could fix it,” said TJ. “And we found a way.”

The culprits at that time were systems in trucks that recirculated exhaust into the engine’s “breathing,” or intake air supply.

They were built to limit exhaust particles. They also slashed engines’ lifespans by feeding them filthy air: “Like you’re breathing in your own fart,” said TJ. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Troy Lake disabled those systems. "}]

His ability to do so spread via word of mouth and customers came to him, no advertising needed, TJ recalled. 

In the years that followed, manufacturers started adding diesel particulate filters to meet emissions standards. Then they added selective catalytic reduction filters and called for diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), a chemical treatment, usually urea-based, used to reduce nitrogen oxide output.

As the EPA heightened its emissions restrictions and manufacturers built more complex filtration and recirculation systems around them, Troy Lake’s “deletes” grew more sophisticated too.

Other mechanics had Troy finish their own deletions. They sounded him for help on tricky problems, and they referred their customers to him, court documents say.

[{"type":"text","text":"It’s Everywhere"}]

Troy Lake was a regional leader for deletions, but the procedure itself is commonplace, even rampant, Troy’s defense attorney Richard Kornfeld said at the sentencing hearing.

That's a notion lifelong trucker Cole Stevens, whose family owns Oklahoma-based Stevens Trucking, noted in his own interview with Cowboy State Daily when the outlet first broke Troy Lake’s story Aug. 2.

Stevens is an industry expert who doesn't know and hasn't worked with Troy Lake.

"Almost everybody I know that’s like a conservative, three-quarter-ton owner deletes their just, regular day-to-day pickup trucks," he said.

But because his business is so high-profile, added Stevens, he doesn't indulge in the practice.

"When the federal government started to regulate all these emissions deals, there’s all these evaporators and all these sensors that are just overkill; it actually makes the engines burn so hot you actually have way more engine problems," he said.

It's tough to tell if the new systems' particulate treatments are worth the damages they've wrought on the industry and the hazards they've caused, he said, because the major manufacturers have sunk billions of dollars into them to appease what Stevens cast as a rushed government pipe dream — "and nobody's doing any tests for non-DEF systems anymore. Nobody's making that argument." 

The pardon, which Holly sent Friday to Cowboy State Daily, grants Troy Lake a full and unconditional pardon.

It also pardons Elite Diesel Service, which was criminally prosecuted. The text reads:

“Be it known, that this day, I, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, Pursuant to my powers under Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution, Have Granted unto the individual named below a full and unconditional pardon.”

Troy Lake pardon 4 11 7 25

<title>🚧 Trump Pardons Cheyenne Diesel Delete Mechanic Troy Lake | Cowboy State Daily</title>

President Donald Trump pardoned Troy Lake on Friday. The 65-year-old Wyoming diesel mechanic spent seven months in federal prison for tweaking and removing emissions systems on ailing engines. When he got the news, he wept. 

Trump Pardons Cheyenne Diesel Delete Mechanic Troy Lake

Because he removed emissions controls from diesel engines, a 65-year-old Wyoming man is bracing for his sixth month in federal prison.

Troy Lake will also live out the rest of his days as a convicted felon, unless he receives a pardon from President Donald Trump.

Lake’s wife Holly and son TJ both hope the president does just that. Holly and others have been writing letters to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials, urging them to recommend Troy Lake for a presidential pardon. 

Recent changes in the regulatory landscape fuel that hope. The president’s administration 

 to relax rules around tailpipe emissions.

But tampering with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-required emissions systems remains a federal felony.

Lake pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act on June 12, 2024.

He was sentenced Dec. 5, 2024, to 12 months and one day in prison, and he and his business Elite Diesel were together fined $52,500.

Troy Lake reported to prison Feb. 10 and remains at the FCI Florence correctional complex in Colorad

where he’s instrumental to the prison’s diesel shop.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Breakdown"}]

Through his business Elite Diesel, Troy was for years the go-to mechanic for over-the-road truckers and others running diesel engines, according to multiple trucking business owners who spoke with Cowboy State Daily.

Troy Lake disabled those systems. His ability to do so spread via word of mouth and customers came to him — no advertising needed, TJ recalled. 

The business spent around $350,000 on research and development. That wasn’t just for performing the deletes, but for determining how the techs could make the engines run even cleaner through their tuning, said Holly. They spent $325,000 on an EPA test bench.

And they put more than $1 million into other sophisticated equipment like engine and chassis dynamometers. But those don’t count strictly as investment into deletion technology, Holly clarified, since the shop used them for numerous other jobs.

Other mechanics had Troy finish their own deletions. They sounded him for help on tricky problems, and they referred their customers to him, court documents say.

He performed or helped with at least 344 deletes from 2017 through 2020, according to testimony transcribed at Troy’s sentencing hearing.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"The Raid"}]

On Oct. 18, 2018, the federal government under Trump’s first administration executed a search warrant on the Elite Diesel shop, which was then based in Windsor, Colorado.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"To the Lakes, it was a raid."}]

“It looked like a military operation,” Holly recalled.

Black SUVs converged on the block; agents emerged “in tactical gear” and rifled through the business, the equipment, the personnel files, she said.

The Lakes and an Elite Diesel employee were eating at the local Olive Garden at that time, said TJ, who was then working remotely for NASA while also helping at the diesel shop.

They watched the operation in horror from a video surveillance application on their cellphones, he added.

U.S. Attorney’s Office staffer Rebecca Weber, the federal prosecutor who secured Troy’s prison sentence six years later, characterized it as a fruitful operation.

“And what that search warrant revealed and later investigation revealed was that Elite Diesel was really the epicenter in this region for heavy-duty emissions tampering,” said Weber.

The investigation led to eight other “intermediary diesel shops” where techs would remove emissions systems hardware from trucks.

Doing that would throw the computer systems of the trucks off and send the truck into “limp” or disabled mode.

“But Elite Diesel and Mr. Lake knew how to rewrite that code to override that limp mode,” Weber continued. “And that is not knowledge that most other people and most other truckers around the country have.”

She reasoned that the court should make an example of Troy Lake. 

Depending on the operation, said Weber, Elite Diesel would charge about $2,000 per delete and brought in roughly $800,000 by doing them.

That was enough to yield a profit, but it was also offset by the shop’s investments and expenses, Holly countered in her own interview.

Troy Lake was a regional mastermind for deletions, but the procedure itself was commonplace, even rampant, Troy’s defense attorney Richard Kornfeld said at the sentencing hearing.

That's a notion lifelong trucker Cole Stevens, whose family owns Oklahoma-based Stevens Trucking, noted in his own interview with Cowboy State Daily. 

Stevens is an industry expert who doesn't know and hasn't worked with Troy Lake. 

But because his business is so high-profile, added Stevens, he doesn't indulge in the practice. 

"When the federal government started to regulate all these emissions deals, there’s all these evaporators and all these sensors that are just overkill; it actually makes the engines burn so hot you actually have way more engine problems," he said. 

It's tough to tell if the new systems' particulate treatments are worth the damages they've wrought on the industry and the hazards they've caused, he said, because the major manufacturers have sunk billions of dollars into them to appease what Stevens cast as a rushed government pipe dream - "and nobody's doing any tests for non-DEF systems anymore. Nobody's making that argument." 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Moving To Wyoming"}]

After the search operation at Elite Diesel, four years of pregnant silence passed.

“We didn’t hear hide nor hair from them until 2022, really,” said TJ. “We kept more in contact with them, letting them know we were moving the business operation.”

The Lakes moved Elite Diesel to their home state of Wyoming.

Troy was born in Newcastle and raised in Rawlins, where his dad ran an automotive shop. The Lakes lived for years in Dubois, Wyoming public records show.

By 2023 under President Joe Biden’s administration, federal prosecutors were reaching out — seeking information from Troy on how he performed the deletes and pressuring TJ to get a defense attorney himself, TJ said.

Troy haggled with federal authorities to keep TJ and one of Elite’s employees from being charged, the son recalled.

The father also explained the deletions to the EPA, Kornfeld had said in court.

“They were looking for a silver bullet on how to tell if a truck has been deleted or not, but they don’t even know what they’re looking for,” said TJ. “They have no idea.”

Troy Lake was charged in the U.S. District Court of Colorado on April 12, 2024, with conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act.

That’s a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, or a fine calculated by doubling any “gross gain” from the operation.

Criminal stigma and the pressure of the case both took a toll on the shop.

By December, Elite Diesel was “a shadow of its former self,” Weber said in court.  

Rumors circulated that Elite Diesel was closed, though it wasn’t. That also ate into the Lakes’ savings for Troy’s legal defense, Holly recalled.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Going Away"}]

U.S. District Court Judge Regina Rodriguez handed down Troy’s 12 month and one day sentence Dec. 5.

Rodriguez noted at that hearing that she’d served prior as counsel for engine manufacturer Cummins.

It was a fact the Lakes and some of their customers cast as significant: since a common feeling among truckers is that government requirements of costly, high-maintenance emissions systems cripple small business owners and small shops, whereas large manufacturers can absorb the cost shock.

Rodriguez declined Thursday to comment, via her court's office. 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office of Colorado also declined to comment.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"A Call From Prison"}]

On July 20, Troy called Cowboy State Daily from FCI Florence.

The phone reception was dismal and the call truncated. Static interference and blips of silence were due to the call being monitored as per prison policy, Troy noted.

Troy and Holly’s 40th wedding anniversary passed April 20. His 65th birthday was June 8.

He said he goes outside several times a day, “unless we’re locked down.” The food is questionable, but he’s allowed to work in the prison camp’s diesel shop.

And he’s good at it, according to a letter bearing the signature of the prison’s automotive worker supervisor Bobby Knutson.

“He treats every piece of equipment as if it were his own and holds himself to a personal standard,” says the letter, which Holly Lake provided to Cowboy State Daily. 

The outlet was unable to contact Knutson directly by publication time, but was able to confirm that he's a U.S. Bureau of Prisons employee. 

The prison’s diesel particulate filter on the prison’s Blue Bird bus broke, and Troy “took the lead on resolving this complex issue,” the letter says, adding, “I wholeheartedly support Inmate Lake’s request for a pardon."

As for Troy, he said he’s surprised at how quickly his deletion career escalated.

“I wasn’t trying to be, like, a Robin Hood or anything,” he said. “I was just trying to help people — and the word got out all over the country that I could do it right. Because that’s a lot of it.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"The ’09 Paper"}]

 finding that greenhouse gases threaten public health and the welfare of future generations.

New motor vehicles drive that danger, the paper added. Agency rules aimed at mitigating the hazard followed.

Diesel exhaust is a mixture of gases and particulates, some of which cause cancer when tested in animals, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration 

The Trump Administration is now seeking to rescind the EPA’s 2009 finding.

Cyrus Western, the new EPA administrator overseeing Wyoming, Colorado and other mountain states under Trump’s second administration, declined this week to comment to Cowboy State Daily.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Calves On The Interstate"}]

For Wyoming-based livestock hauler Duane Rankine, Troy Lake’s modifications were literally lifesaving for hundreds of calves.

He hauls livestock “from coast to coast,” running hard across tough terrain, he said.

When his three brand-new trucks kept breaking down and leaving him at the mercy of warranty issues and recurring repair costs, Rankine grew frustrated.

But not as frustrated as in 2020, when his machine’s emissions system entered a heated regeneration, or burn, mode as he scaled Elk Mountain in southeast Wyoming with 120 head of baby calves in tow.

That’s when the system cooks the caught exhaust particles to burn them down into gas and ash, a process Rankine characterized as trading one form of waste for another, and overheating a valuable engine in the process.

The truck nearly caught fire. Purple smoke billowed from under the hood, Rankine said.

He was able to get the rig off the road, arrange for alternate transportation and get the calves to Texas as planned, he said.

That’s when Rankine decided to spring $3,000 to have Troy tune the engine after Rankine himself removed the filter, he said.

To replace the whole filter system “and make the truck run like the government … wants you to, it’s $27,000” after labor, he said.

Other Elite Diesel customers, like Kaycee-based cattle hauler Mark Malli and trucker-turned-rancher Cody Clark, echoed those frustrations with the emissions systems in their own interviews. They both touted the better fuel mileage and longer engine life of a post-deletion machine. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Even In Wyoming"}]

Deletion prosecutions aren’t common in Wyoming, but they aren’t unheard of.

Troy Lake IMG 5648 8 2 25

<title>🚧 Wyoming Man In Prison For Removing EPA-Mandated Filters Seeks Trump Pardon | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A 65-year-old Wyoming man is in federal prison for pulling EPA-mandated emissions systems from ailing diesel engines. As the Trump administration inches toward reversing those mandates, Troy Lake's family is pushing for the president to pardon him.

Wyoming Man In Prison For Removing EPA-Mandated Filters Seeks Trump Pardon

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