Official who tried to kick Trump off ballot gets death threat while giving birth: report

Colorado's Secretary of State Jena Griswold says she has received more than 1,000 violent threats since last year after backing an effort to keep Donald Trump off her state's ballot for his role in the Jan.6 insurrection.

Griswold has been targeted with phone calls and other menacing communications for at least a year and, in August, her security detail was suddenly "doubled" while she was in a hospital giving birth to her first child as state and federal law enforcement prepared to arrest 45-year-old Teak Brockbank for threatening to "execute" her, reported Rolling Stone .

“I was a brand-new mom and elsewhere in the state, this guy was being taken into custody for threatening to take my life," Griswold said.

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Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Aug. 26 that Brockbank, a convicted felon and an apparent Trump supporter, had been arrested and charged with making “detailed death threats against election officials, judges, and law enforcement officers.”

“Once these people start getting put to death then the rest will melt like snowflakes and turn on each other, and we will just sit back [while] the worst of them get pointed out and we put them against the wall as well,” read one post by Brockbank. "So those of us that have the stomach for what has to be done should prepare our minds for what we all are going to do!”

“People like the secretary of state of Colorado [and] the secretary [of] state of Arizona have to be put to death,” he allegedly wrote in another post. "The only answer is for us to start executing these puppets … Death penalty is what these people have to get.”

Griswold insists she will not be “intimidated,” and she blames the former president for the wave of threats she and other officials have faced.

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“It’s honestly infuriating that this is the atmosphere that Donald Trump has created for women in office and election officials across the country,” Griswold said. “Of course, not everybody is going through this experience of heightened threats while you’re giving birth, but it just permeates your life in such a real way that even in the most intimate moments, you may not be able to escape it… The MAGA threat environment follows us through every step of life.”

“The bitter irony [is] that Trump and MAGA Republicans continue to say they care about families and life, but I can tell you as a new mom and election official, they don’t support either of those identities," she added. "Folks who are trying to intimidate election officials out of our jobs, [they] cannot win. We cannot give up … You cannot allow Trump and the far right to take control of your life.”

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