Colorado man who threatened election officials asks for leniency in sentencing

DENVER (AP) — Teak Ty Brockbank posted online that Colorado’s top election official should be executed and her former counterpart in Arizona should also be killed.

But Brockbank, who faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced Thursday for making online threats, is asking for leniency. He says he made those posts when he was drinking heavily and socially isolated, spending his evenings consuming conspiracy theories online.

Brockbank pleaded guilty in October to one count of transmitting interstate threats between September 2021 and August 2022 against Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold and former Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, now the state’s governor, as well as against a Colorado state judge and federal law enforcement agents.

Under a plea deal, prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges against him for having firearms he was barred from possessing because of a previous conviction or for online threats he made later. One such threat was against Griswold last year for her role in helping the prosecution of former Colorado clerk, Tina Peters. They also say he threatened judges on the Colorado Supreme Court after they removed Donald Trump from the state’s ballot. The U.S. Supreme Court later restored Trump’s name to the ballot.

Brockbank, who was has been behind bars since he was arrested in August 2024, is asking to be sentenced to the time he has already served plus three years of supervised release and possibly six months in home detention or in a halfway house. That’s less than is recommended by federal sentencing guidelines but Brockbank’s lawyer, Tom Ward, said that sentence would allow him to get unspecified treatment.

In a court filing in support of the request, Ward said Brockbank was a “keyboard warrior” with no intent of carrying out his threats. Brockbank spent time on social media sites like Gab and Rumble, the alternative video-sharing platform that has been criticized for allowing and sometimes promoting far-right extremism.

Ward said Rumble and Gab repeatedly delivered “the message that the country was under attack and that patriotic Americans had a duty to rise up and act,” he said.

“His engagement with extremist content online was driven not by a malicious character, but by a misplaced desire for belonging and a tendency to not question others’ underlying motives,” Ward wrote.

The filing did not specify which ideas Brockbank was drawn to but it noted that Michael Flynn and Roger Stone were prominent on Rumble.

Prosecutors want U.S. District Judge S. Kato Crews to sentence Brockbank to three years in prison, in part to deter others from threatening election officials.

“Threats to elections workers across the country are an ongoing and very serious problem,” wrote Jonathan Jacobsen, a Washington-based trial attorney for the Justice Department’s public integrity section.

Under the Biden administration, the department launched a task force in 2021 to combat the rise of threats targeting election officials. Brockbank’s conviction in the fall was one of over a dozen convictions won by the unit.

At the time, the longest sentences handed down was 3.5 years in prison in two separate cases involving election officials in Arizona. In one case, a man who advocated for “a mass shooting of poll workers,” posted threatening statements in November 2022 about two Maricopa County officials and their children, prosecutors said.

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’s office.