DENVER – 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.
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.
Brockbank apologized in court for his “ugly posts” and said he has turned away from the fear, hate and anger that he found online that derailed his life.
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’s public integrity section, pointed out that the threats continued during a period when Brockbank wasn't drinking.
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,” Jacobson wrote.
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 sentence handed down was 3½ 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.
