A Nebraska man pleaded guilty Thursday to threatening the Colorado Secretary of State on Instagram last year, the first conviction resulting from the work of a Justice Department task force aimed at combating harassment of election officials.
Federal prosecutors said: Travis Ford, 42, of Lincoln, Neb., was facing up to two years in prison for the social media posts. Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat with whom Republican allies of former President Donald J. Trump have argued over her oversight of the election, including the 2020 presidential election, identified herself as the target.
The task force, created last year in response to a growing number of threats against election officials, has so far made three criminal cases public. One of the others involves a Texas man accused of sending election-related threats to officials in Georgia; the third is about a Nevada man who authorities say made threatening phone calls to an election officer in the Nevada Secretary of State’s office. Both cases are pending.
The threats against Mrs Griswold started last August when she wished her partner a happy birthday on her personal Instagram account. A torrent of insults flooded the answers section, some calling her a traitor and others more ominous in their tone.
Two posts in particular upset Mrs. Griswold’s office, which they reported to law enforcement. The first referred to George Soros, the billionaire investor and donor to the Democratic Party, accused by the political right of having undue influence over elections.
“Do you feel safe? You should not. Do you think Soros will/can protect you?”
About ten days later, the same account left another, more menacing comment in the same photo.
“Your security detail is far too flimsy and incompetent to protect you,” the comment read. “This world is unpredictable these days…anything can happen to anyone.”
Griswold’s office confirmed the authenticity of the posts, which appeared on Instagram on Friday and were quoted in Justice Department court documents. The posts were removed later in the day by Meta, the social media company that owns Instagram and Facebook, after an investigation by DailyExpertNews. The company did not immediately comment.
A lawyer for Mr. Ford, who remains at large and is expected to be sentenced on October 6, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
In a statement announcing that Mr. Ford had pleaded guilty, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said on Thursday the Justice Department would not tolerate such threats.
“Threats of violence against election officials are dangerous to people’s safety and dangerous to our democracy,” said Mr. Garland.
Ms. Griswold, who wants re-election this year as Colorado’s top election official, said she would never be stopped from doing her job.
“Election officials across the country have faced mounting threats,” said Ms Griswold. “It’s heartwarming to see the Justice Department taking these threats seriously and prosecuting people who threaten election officials based on the big lie.”
Like many Democrats responsible for voting, Ms. Griswold has been embroiled in a series of legal feuds with Republican election officials in several counties.
In May, a Colorado judge sided with Ms. Griswold in a lawsuit against Tina Peters, a pro-Trump election supervisor who is running for secretary of state in the Republican primary. The judge blocked Mrs. Peters to oversee this year’s election in Mesa County after she was indicted in March on charges of tampering with voting equipment after the 2020 election.
Ms. Peters, who clings to conspiracy theories that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump, will appear on the top line of the Republican primary on June 28. She is not the only pro-Trump election official to have accused Ms. Griswold of violating voting equipment in Colorado.
In April, Dallas Schroeder, the Elbert County clerk and recorder, was ordered by a judge to supply all external copies of a voting machine hard drive that he had recognized with a scanning device before a software update in August 2021. of Foreign Affairs. †