DENVER (AP) — A man who blamed exposure to far-right extremist content for motivating his online threats to kill Democratic election officials Colorado and Arizona was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison.
Teak Ty Brockbank pleaded guilty 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, who is now governor. He also threatened a Colorado judge and federal agents.
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.
His attorney described Brockbank as a “keyboard warrior” with no intent to carry out the threats. Brockbank spent time on social media sites like Gab and Rumble, the alternative video-sharing platform that has been criticized for allowing and promoting far-right extremism.
The sites delivered “the message that the country was under attack and that patriotic Americans had a duty to rise up and act,” said Brockbank attorney Tom Ward. Ward said Brockbank was drawn to the QAnon conspiracy theory and noted in a court filing that Michael Flynn and Roger Stone were prominent on Rumble.
Brockbank posted online that Colorado’s top election official should “Hang by the neck” and her former counterpart in Arizona should also be put to death.
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,” 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.
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.
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.
One such threat was against Griswold last year for her role in helping the prosecution of former Colorado clerk, Tina Peters. Prosecutors say he also 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.
Colleen Slevin, The Associated Press
