May 30, 2025 09:43 AM UTC

PSA: Don't Threaten Public Officials, Even For Donald Trump

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• by: Colorado Pols

As AP’s Colleen Slevin reports via the Durango Herald, a gentleman from Cortez with the eminently Colorado name Teak Ty Brockbank was sentenced yesterday to three years in the federal pokey after making conpiracy theory-inspired death threats against Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold that contained the requisite specificity to go beyond free speech (here’s looking at you, Joe Oltmann) and constitute a felony crime:

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 “keyboard terrorism” needed to be serious enough to deter others from doing the same.

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.

“The public must not accept this as the norm,” he said in handing down the sentence for Teak Ty Brockbank.

KDVR’s Maddie Rhodes has some of the details from Mr. Brockbank’s plea deal:

The United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado said according to the plea agreement, Brockbank posted a message in 2022 referring to separate election officials in Arizona and Colorado and then stated: “Once those people start getting put to death then the rest will melt like snowflakes and turn on each other. . . . This is the only way. So those of us that have the stomach for what has to be done should prepare our minds for what we all [a]re going to do!!!!!! It is time.”

Brockbank’s defense wasn’t a denial of what he had said, but instead he claimed to have been “brainwashed” by the election conspiracy theories that sprang multitudinous from Donald Trump’s refusal despite the lack of any proof even all these years afterward to accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. And since Trump is President again and has pardoned all kinds of people who did all kinds of crimes on his behalf including storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, why shouldn’t Teak Brockbank get off the hook for threatening to hang the Secretaries of State in Arizona and Colorado?

The secretary’s office said Brockbank and his counsel argued that he was “brainwashed” and influenced by online conspiracies. He​ also asked for leniency, citing Trump’s pardons after Jan. 6. [Pols emphasis]

But as it turns out, the federal prosecutors on this case have not yet been replaced by Trump political cronies, and still recognize the importance of prosecuting people who make threats that endanger the electoral process and the officials responsible for carrying it out:

Prosecutors said in a court filing that a prison sentence was warranted in part to deter others from threatening election officials.

“Threats to elections workers across the country are an ongoing and very serious problem,” Jacobson wrote. [Pols emphasis]

Unlike the conviction of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters on state charges stemming from her criminal plot to hack voting machines in her failed attempt to prove the 2020 presidential election was stolen, Brockbank’s federal case could be subject to derailment from Washington should the matter appear on the radar of Trump’s personal attorney Attorney General Pam Bondi. After Trump’s pardoning of even the violent January 6th rioters in the pursuit of rewriting the history of the ignominious end of his first term, intervention in the case of Teak Ty Brockbank and his threats to hang election officials cannot be ruled out.

But it would also be another terrible precedent, set by a President who at this point undeniably condones political violence.

If there are any moral boundaries left not to be crossed by this administration, we hope this is one.