By james art DENVER (AP) — A Colorado man repeatedly made online threats to kill top election officials in his state and Arizona — both Democrats — as well as a judge and law enforcement officials, according to a guilty plea he entered Wednesday.
Tick Ty Brockbank, 45, admitted to a federal judge in Denver that his comments were made “out of fear, hatred and anger” as he sat dressed in a khaki prison uniform before pleading guilty to one count of interstate threat transmission. He faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced on February 3.
The Brockbank case is the 16th conviction secured by the Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force, which Attorney General Merrick Garland formed in 2021 to combat an increase in threats targeting the voting community.
“As Election Day approaches, the Department of Justice’s warning remains clear: Anyone who unlawfully threatens an election worker, official or volunteer will face consequences,” Garland said in a statement.
Brockbank did not elaborate Wednesday on the threats he made, and court documents outlining the plea agreement were not immediately released. His attorney, Thomas Ward, declined to comment after the hearing.
However, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Colorado said in a statement that the plea agreement included threats made by Brockbank against election officials — identified in the evidence as Colorado Secretary of State Jenna Griswold and former Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, now the state’s governor.
Griswold has been outspoken nationally about election security and has received threats in the past for her insistence that the 2020 election was secure. Her office says she has received more frequent and more violent threats since September 2023, when a group of voters filed a lawsuit trying to remove former President Donald Trump from the Colorado primary.
“I refuse to be intimidated and will continue to ensure that every eligible Republican, Democrat and unaffiliated voter can cast their vote in our elections,” Griswold said in a statement released after Brockbank’s request.
Investigators say Brockbank began expressing the view that the violence against government officials was necessary in late 2021. According to the arrest warrant, Brockbank told investigators after his arrest that he was not a “vigilante” and hoped that his posts will simply “wake people up”. He has been in jail since his Aug. 23 arrest in Cortez, Colorado.
Brockbank criticized the government’s response to Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk convicted this year of allowing a breach of her election system inspired by false allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential race, according to court documents. He was also upset in December 2023 after a divided Colorado Supreme Court removed Trump from the state presidential primaries.
In an August 2022 social media post, referring to Griswold and Hobbs, Brockbank said, “Once these people start getting killed, the rest will melt like snowflakes and turn on each other,” according to copies of the threats included in the court documents. In September 2021, Brockbank said Griswold should “hang by the neck until she’s dead dead dead,” saying he and other “everyday people” should hold her and others accountable, prosecutors said.
Brockbank also posted in October 2021 that he might use his rifle to “put a bullet” in the head of a state judge who was overseeing Brockbank’s probation for his fourth drunken driving conviction, according to the plea agreement , prosecutors said.
Prosecutors say Brockbank also admitted to posting in July 2022 that he would shoot without warning any federal agent who showed up at his house. Prosecutors previously said in court documents that half a dozen firearms were found in his home after his arrest, including a loaded one near his front door, even though he cannot legally possess firearms because of a felony conviction for attempted theft by receiving stolen property in Utah in 2002.
The investigation began in August 2022 after Griswold’s office notified federal authorities of posts made on Gab and Rumble, an alternative video-sharing platform that has been criticized for enabling and sometimes encouraging far-right extremism, according to court documents.
And although Brockbank only pleaded guilty to threats made between September 2021 and August 2022, prosecutors say he made more since then.
In December 2023, after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump should not be on the state’s primary ballot, Brockbank allegedly told his stepfather in a text that he was adding the four justices who had supported Trump’s removal , to “my list”. The US Supreme Court later put Trump back on the ballot.
And this July, prosecutors say, Brockbank continued to threaten Griswold because her office triggered the Peters investigation by notifying authorities of the 2021 data breach.
Peters was sentenced to nearly nine years behind bars this month for allowing access to the county’s election system to a man associated with My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell — a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were rigged , to steal the election. Authorities were investigating separate threats against her judge, Matthew Barrett. Most of the messages appeared to be strongly worded opinions, but none appeared to rise to the level of a crime, Mesa County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Wendy Lykes said Tuesday.
In 2022, a Nebraska man pleaded guilty to making death threats against Griswold in what officials said was the first such charge received by the Election Threat Task Force.
The Justice Department’s longest sentences to date — 3.5 years in prison — were handed down in separate cases involving Arizona election officials. In one case, a man who advocated “mass shootings 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.
Another man was sentenced Monday to 30 months in prison for sending threatening messages to a Maricopa County election Instagram account.
___
Associated Press writer Alana Durkin Richer in Washington contributed to this report.
Colleen Slevin, Associated Press