{"id":22055,"date":"2025-05-29T20:20:52","date_gmt":"2025-05-30T02:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/cortez-man-who-threatened-to-kill-colorado-election-official-gets-prison\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T22:11:34","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T04:11:34","slug":"cortez-man-who-threatened-to-kill-colorado-election-official-gets-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/cortez-man-who-threatened-to-kill-colorado-election-official-gets-prison\/","title":{"rendered":"Cortez man who threatened to kill Colorado election official gets prison"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Colorado
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold speaks in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Feb. 8, 2024, in Washington. (Manuel Balce Ceneta\/Associated Press file)<\/span>dur-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

DENVER \u2013 A judge sentenced a Cortez man who blamed exposure to far-right extremist content for motivating his online threats to kill Democratic election officials in Colorado and Arizona to three years in prison Thursday, saying the penalty for such \u201ckeyboard terrorism\u201d needed to be serious enough to deter others from doing the same.<\/p>\n

U.S. District Judge S. Kato Crews said that threats against election and other government officials are on the rise and people need to remember that differences need to be worked out through the democratic process, not violence.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe public must not accept this as the norm,\u201d he said in handing down the sentence for Teak Ty Brockbank.<\/p>\n

Brockbank pleaded guilty<\/a> in October to making threats between September 2021 and August 2022 against Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold and former Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs<\/a>, who is now governor. He also threatened a Colorado judge and federal agents.<\/p>\n

Brockbank apologized in court for his \u201cugly posts\u201d and said he has turned away from the fear, hate and anger that he found online that derailed his life.<\/p>\n

Federal prosecutors sought three years in prison for Brockbank. He asked for leniency, saying he made the posts when he was drinking heavily, socially isolated and spending his evenings consuming conspiracy theories online. Jonathan Jacobson, a Washington-based trial attorney for the Justice Department\u2019s public integrity section, pointed out that the threats continued during a period when Brockbank wasn\u2019t drinking.<\/p>\n

His attorney described Brockbank as a \u201ckeyboard warrior\u201d with no intent to carry out the threats. Brockbank spent time on social media sites like Gab and Rumble, the alternative video-sharing platform<\/a> that has been criticized for allowing and promoting far-right extremism.<\/p>\n

The sites delivered \u201cthe message that the country was under attack and that patriotic Americans had a duty to rise up and act,\u201d said Brockbank attorney Tom Ward. Ward said Brockbank was drawn to the QAnon conspiracy theory<\/a> and noted in a court filing that Michael Flynn and Roger Stone were prominent on Rumble.<\/p>\n

Brockbank posted online that Colorado\u2019s top election official should \u201cHang by the neck\u201d and her former counterpart in Arizona should also be put to death.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors said in a court filing that a prison sentence was warranted in part to deter others from threatening election officials.<\/p>\n

\u201cThreats to elections workers across the country are an ongoing and very serious problem,\u201d Jacobson wrote.<\/p>\n

Under the Biden administration, the department launched a task force in 2021 to combat the rise of threats targeting election officials. Brockbank\u2019s conviction in the fall was one of over a dozen convictions won by the unit.<\/p>\n

At the time, the longest sentence handed down was 3\u00bd years in prison in two separate cases involving election officials in Arizona. In one case, a man who advocated for \u201ca mass shooting of poll workers,\u201d posted threatening statements in November 2022 about two Maricopa County officials and their children, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n

In the other, a Massachusetts man pleaded guilty to sending a bomb threat in February 2021 to an election official in the Arizona Secretary of State\u2019s office.<\/p>\n

Brockbank, who has been in custody since his arrest in August 2024, asked to be sentenced to time served plus three years supervised release and possibly six months in home detention or a halfway house.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges against Brockbank for having firearms he was barred from possessing because of a previous conviction or for online threats he made later.<\/p>\n

One such threat was against Griswold last year for her role in helping the prosecution of former Colorado clerk, Tina Peters<\/a>. Prosecutors say he also threatened judges on the Colorado Supreme Court after they removed Donald Trump from the state\u2019s ballot. The U.S. Supreme Court later restored Trump\u2019s name to the ballot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brockbank blamed exposure to far-right content for motivating his online threats<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22056,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[168,28],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-22055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-crime","tag-headlines"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22055"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77560,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22055\/revisions\/77560"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22055"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=22055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}