Colorado’s Elections Chief Took on Trump. She Needed Extra Security As She Gave Birth
In late August, Colorado’s top election official, Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold, was admitted to the hospital for her scheduled C-section, as she and her husband were, naturally, thrilled about the imminent birth of Griswold’s first child. They had gone through unsuccessful IVF treatments, but were able to conceive a baby boy outside of the process.
But not long after entering the hospital on a Wednesday, for a stay that would ultimately last until that Sunday evening, the state’s highest ranking election official says she started to notice something strange. The presence of her armed security detail — a mix of Colorado State Patrol and private security personnel — suddenly “doubled,” Griswold tells Rolling Stone. New guards she didn’t recognize were swiftly added to her protective detail.
It would be days before she’d learn why this was happening, and whether it had anything to do with former President Donald Trump. Griswold had backed the effort to bar Trump from her state’s 2024 ballot due to his role in inciting the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
“Within hours of being wheeled into surgery, the Colorado State Patrol told my team they were doubling the time that they would be providing me with security,” Griswold says. “So security was literally sitting in front of the hospital room door and in front of the hospital as we spent the first hours and first days with our new baby.”
In a moment when the new mother should have been focusing solely on her recovery from surgery and on her newborn, she was left wondering: why?
“They don’t just put extended security coverage on you for no reason,” she says. “I suspected something was wrong.” While in the hospital, the Colorado secretary of state and her staff were initially informed by authorities that the boost in security was done to, in general terms, “make me more comfortable and accommodate my security requests,” she recalls. “It added a very real extra layer of stress… [and] concern about what was happening.”
Griswold, recounting how surreal these moments in the hospital were, says “it’s hard to describe” what the situation felt like. She had just delivered her newborn son. She was already checked into the hospital, even before the surge in security personnel, as “a confidential patient,” she says, due to preexisting safety concerns stemming from her public opposition to Trump’s attempt to subvert the American democratic order. But during these first days of her recovery, she remembers a very “disorienting” feeling of also not knowing why the men with guns, guarding her hospital room, were operating the way that they were.
It wasn’t until that Sunday, Griswold says, that she got a straight answer.
When she, her husband, and the new addition to their family arrived back at their home that evening, Griswold was drained and exhausted — but she “visually could see again that the security was increased at my residence, and at that point, I called and demanded to know what [was] going on,” the Colorado election official explains.
It was only then that Griswold was told that her security detail had been expanded because, “as I was being wheeled in to have this baby,” state and federal law enforcement officials were preparing to arrest a 45-year-old Colorado man, Teak Brockbank, for making violent threats against her and others. “I was a brand new mom and elsewhere in the state, this guy was being taken into custody for threatening to take my life.”
On August 26, the Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that Brockbank, an apparent Trump devotee, had been taken into custody and charged with making “detailed death threats against election officials, judges, and law enforcement officers.” Garland continued: “Violent threats against public servants are a danger to our democracy, and the arrest and charges announced today make clear that the Justice Department will see to it that perpetrators answer for their actions.”
The initial DOJ announcement about the case — part of the department’s broader Election Threats Task Force, established during President Joe Biden’s first year in office — did not mention Griswold by name. But her office had flagged his alleged online activity to law enforcement years ago, with his name being just one of a deluge of violent or credible threats made against her during Trump’s post-presidency.
According to documents her office shared with Rolling Stone, Brockbank allegedly wrote several messages specifically calling for Griswold’s execution, along with other Democratic officials, donors, and perceived allies. “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, which added: “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 a separate post, adding that “the only answer is for us to start executing these puppets … Death penalty is what these people have to get.”
The FBI claims Brockbank, a convicted felon, illegally possessed guns. The Justice Department alleges that Brockbank made serious violent threats in 2021 and 2022, and that at the end of last year, following the Colorado Supreme Court ruling that Trump could be kept off the state’s 2024 primary ballot (a decision the U.S. Supreme Court later nullified), he wrote in a private message: “Four judges in Colorado have removed President Trump from the ballot in Colorado. their names have been added to my list… their names have been moved to the front of my list.”
According to the government’s criminal complaint against Brockbank, in late May of this year, a judge “issued a second search warrant for Brockbank’s Apple iCloud account. Communications in the account reflected Brockbank’s continued interest in violence toward public officials as well as his ongoing and recent illegal possession of firearms.”
But by the time the 2024 election season had arrived, threats of this nature had become a common occupational hazard not just for Griswold, but scores of public officials and election workers across the nation — with numerous such threats explicitly fueled and inspired by Trump’s rhetoric and anti-democratic lies about the 2020 election being “stolen” from him.
The top Colorado election official explains how the ongoing salvos of threats and harassment have affected how she and her family conduct their daily lives. There are moments when her husband rethinks going on a jog outdoors. The family closes their blinds more often than they otherwise would. And an unknown vehicle passing and then briefly lingering on their street doesn’t feel the same as it would have several years ago.
She describes her daily security protocols and requirements as, without a doubt, the “most challenging thing” she’s dealt with in her time as secretary of state. But she says finding joy with her family and continuing to go about her life and work “become the resistance to this threat atmosphere.”
Trump, who has been the target of two high-profile assassination attempts this year, has a long history of encouraging, whipping up, and celebrating political violence. On numerous occasions, when the former president has been publicly or privately asked to condemn the political violence and the waves of threats carried out by his most radicalized followers, he has declined to do so.
In March, Rolling Stone reported on how Griswold alone had experienced a 600 percent uptick in these kinds of serious threats, ever since she backed the unsuccessful effort in her blue state to dump the twice-impeached former president from its ballot, citing his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results and cling to power.
It is common for law enforcement to surge or enhance existing security details based on the perceived increase in the threat level to a protectee; that can at times include situations surrounding the arrest of somebody who made credible violent threats against a protected public figure. Sometimes these enhancements are done even if out of an abundance of caution.
“We work in regular partnership with the Secretary of State’s Office and are aware of numerous messages received by her and her office. As per standard process, for the safety of those involved, we will not discuss the security arrangements of any individual,” Sergeant Patrick Rice of the Colorado State Patrol emailed in a statement on Friday.
Prominent election officials working in multiple states — including in critical battlegrounds that will determine who is inaugurated in Washington, D.C., in January — have been raising alarms about the unique threat environment ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump are competing in a stubbornly close race (according to various high-quality public and internal polls) that has all the potential to explode into a brutal post-election legal onslaught.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D), the top election official in that key battleground state, told Rolling Stone in January that the Biden Justice Department was failing to protect election workers from what he dubbed “domestic terrorism” and threats by pro-Trump extremists and others.
“As cautious a person as Attorney General Merrick Garland is, I think he is being far too cautious here, when it comes to these investigations and prosecutions of threats against election administrators and election workers,” Fontes said. “I have a lot of respect for the attorney general, but he is not being nearly aggressive enough on this threat, which is imperiling our democracy, and he and the department are not devoting nearly enough resources to it. This should be treated like the emergency that it is.”
As for Colorado’s secretary of state, Griswold consistently reminds the voters of her state that she refuses to be “intimidated,” despite a regular influx of gruesome-sounding phone calls, social media posts, and other messages. Since September 2023, she says she has received more than 1,000 death threats or violent threats. Election Day 2024 is now weeks away.
“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 says. “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.”
She continues: “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 … 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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