DENVER (AP) — A man accused of repeatedly threatening to kill the top elections officials in Colorado and Arizona as well as judges and federal law enforcement agents pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of making interstate threats.
Teak Ty Brockbank, 45, of Cortez, Colorado, acknowledged he made online threats to kill people “out of fear, hate and anger” before entering his plea. The details of what exactly he admitted doing were contained in court documents that were not immediately made public.
Brockbank, who has been jailed since his Aug. 23 arrest, faces up to five years in prison when he's sentenced on Feb. 3.
Brockbank had previously pleaded not guilty but his lawyer, Thomas Ward, notified the court earlier this month that he wanted to change his plea. Ward declined to comment after the hearing.
According to a detention motion, Brockbank told investigators after his arrest that he's not a “vigilante” and hoped his posts would simply “wake people up.”
Investigators say Brockbank began to express the view that violence against public officials was necessary in late 2021 and proceeded to make multiple threats against Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold and former Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, now the state's governor, and the others.
Brockbank criticized the government's response to Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk convicted this year for allowing a breach of her election system inspired by false claims about election fraud in the 2020 presidential race, according to court documents. He also was upset in December 2023 after a divided Colorado Supreme Court removed Donald Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot.
In one social media post in August 2022, referring to Griswold and Hobbs, Brockbank allegedly said: “Once those people start getting put to death then the rest will melt like snowflakes and turn on each other,” according to copies of the threats included in court documents. Griswold and Hobbs were not named as among those allegedly targeted by Brockbank when he was first arrested but were identified as victims in evidence unsealed in September.
The investigation was launched 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 allowing and sometimes promoting far-right extremism, according to court documents.
Brockbank also allegedly posted in October 2021 that he could use his rifle to “put a bullet” in the head of a state judge who had overseen Brockbank's probation for his fourth conviction for driving under the influence, calling the judge a “Nazi,” prosecutors said in an Aug. 27 motion asking that Brockbank be kept behind bars while prosecuted.
Prosecutors also say Brockbank posted in July 2022 that he would shoot without warning any federal agent who showed up at his house. Prosecutors said a half dozen firearms were found in his home after his August arrest, including a loaded one near his front door, even though he can't legally possess firearms due to a felony conviction of attempted theft by receiving stolen property in Utah in 2002.
And although Brockbank was charged for threats allegedly made between September 2021 and August 2022, prosecutors say he's kept it up since then.
In December 2023, after Trump was removed from Colorado's presidential primary ballot, Brockbank allegedly told his stepfather in a text that he was adding the four judges who backed removing Trump to “my list.”
And this July, prosecutors say, Brockbank continued to threaten Griswold because her office triggered the investigation of Peters by notifying authorities about the data breach in 2021. Griswold also has been outspoken nationally on elections security and has received threats in the past over her insistence that the 2020 election was secure.
Peters was sentenced to nearly nine years behind bars this month for allowing access to the county’s election system to a man affiliated with My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell — a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election. Authorities investigated separate threats made against her trial judge, Matthew Barrett. Most of the messages appear to have been strongly worded opinions but none appeared to rise to the level of a crime, Mesa County Sheriff's Office spokesperson Wendy Likes said Tuesday.
Brockbank was prosecuted by the Justice Department's Election Threats Task Force, announced by Attorney General Merrick Garland to protect workers who have been subject to increasing threats since the 2020 election.
In 2022, a Nebraska man pleaded guilty to making death threats against Griswold in what officials said was the first such plea obtained by the task force.
FILE - Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, speaks prior to signing the repeal of the Civil War-era near-total abortion ban, May 2, 2024, at the Capitol in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Matt York, File)
FILE - Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold speaks in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, Feb. 8, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Kamala Harris said Wednesday that recently reported comments Donald Trump made to his longest-serving chief of staff offer a window into who the former president “really is" and the kind of commander in chief he would be.
In interviews with The New York Times and The Atlantic published Tuesday, John Kelly warned that the Republican nominee meets the definition of a fascist and that while in office he suggested that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler “did some good things.”
Harris repeated her increasingly dire warnings about Trump’s mental fitness and his intentions for the presidency.
“This is a window into who Donald Trump really is, from the people who know him best, from the people who have worked with him side by side in the Oval Office and in the situation room,” Harris told reporters outside the vice president's residence in Washington.
The comments from Kelly, the retired Marine general who worked for Trump in the White House from 2017 to 2019, build on past warnings from former top Trump officials as the election enters its final two weeks.
Kelly has long been critical of Trump and previously accused him of calling veterans killed in combat “suckers” and “losers.” His new warnings emerged as Trump seeks a second term vowing to dramatically expand his use of the military at home and suggesting he would use force to go after Americans he considers “enemies from within.”
“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” Kelly recalled to the Times. Kelly said he would usually quash the conversation by saying “nothing (Hitler) did, you could argue, was good,” but that Trump would occasionally bring up the topic again.
In his interview with the Atlantic, Kelly recalled that when Trump raised the idea of needing “German generals,” Kelly would ask if he meant “Bismarck’s generals,” referring to Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor who oversaw the unification of Germany. “Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals,” Kelly recalled asking Trump. To which the former president responded, “Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.”
Trump’s campaign denied the accounts. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Kelly had “beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated.”
Harris said Wednesday that Trump admired Hitler's generals because he “does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution, he wants a military that is loyal to him. He wants a military who will be loyal to him personally.”
Polls show the race is tight in swing states, and both Trump and Harris are crisscrossing the country making their final pitches to the sliver of undecided voters. Harris' campaign has spent considerable time reaching out to independent voters, using the support of longtime Republicans such as former Rep. Liz Cheney and comments like Kelly's to urge past Trump voters to reject his candidacy in November.
Harris’ campaign held a call with reporters Tuesday to elevate the voices of retired military officials who highlighted how many of the officials who worked with Trump now oppose his campaign.
“People that know him best are most opposed to him, his presidency,” said retired Army Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson.
Anderson said he wished Kelly would fully back Harris over Trump, something he has yet to do. But retired Army reserve Col. Kevin Carroll, a former senior counselor to Kelly, said Wednesday that the former top Trump official would “rather chew broken glass than vote for Donald Trump.”
Before serving as Trump's chief of staff, Kelly worked as the former president's secretary of homeland security, where he oversaw Trump's attempts to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Kelly was also at the forefront of the Trump administration's crackdown in immigration policy that led to the separation of thousands of immigrant parents and their children along the southern border. Those actions made him a villain to many on the left, including Harris.
When Kelly joined the board of a company operating the nation's largest detention center for unaccompanied migrant children, Harris wrote during her 2019 run for president that he "was the architect of the Trump Administration’s cruel child separation policy. Now he will profit off the separation of families. It’s unethical. We are better than this.”
When she was in Miami for a primary debate in June 2019, Harris was also one of a dozen Democratic presidential candidates who journeyed south of Miami to the detention center. There, they protested against the Trump administration’s harsh treatment of young migrants, including calling out Kelly for serving on the board of the company behind the site in Homestead, Florida, after he left the Trump administration.
In his interview with the Times, Kelly also said Trump met the definition of a fascist. After reading the definition aloud, including that fascism was “a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader,” Kelly concluded Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Kelly added that Trump often fumed at any attempt to constrain his power, and that “he would love to be” a dictator.
“He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,” Kelly told the Times. Adding later, “I think he’d love to be just like he was in business — he could tell people to do things and they would do it, and not really bother too much about whether what the legalities were and whatnot.”
Kelly is not the first former top Trump administration official to cast the former president as a threat.
Retired Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Bob Woodward in his recent book “War” that Trump was “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.” And retired Gen. Jim Mattis, who worked as secretary of defense under Trump, reportedly later told Woodward that he agreed with Milley’s assessment.
Throughout Trump's political rise, the businessman-turned-politician benefited from the support of military veterans.
AP VoteCast found that about 6 in 10 military veterans said they voted for Trump in 2020, as did just over half of those with a veteran in the household. Among voters in this year’s South Carolina Republican primary, AP VoteCast found that close to two-thirds of military veterans and people in veteran households voted for Trump over former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Trump's toughest opponent in the 2024 Republican primary.
Associated Press writers Linley Sanders in Washington and Adriana Gomez Licon in Miami contributed to this report.
FILE - President Donald Trump listens to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, right, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Oct. 10, 2018. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
FILE - President Donald Trump walks in to the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, Nov. 1, 2018. Chief of Staff John Kelly is at right. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
FILE - White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, right, leans in to talk with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, June 27, 2018. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
FILE - President Donald Trump talks with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly after he was privately sworn in during a ceremony in the Oval Office in Washington, July 31, 2017. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
