About
Joe Oltmann is a Colorado businessman and failed car salesman who rose to national prominence when he falsely claimed to have evidence of a Dominion Voting Machines employee telling Antifa members he had helped rig the 2020 election against Donald Trump.
Relatively unknown outside of Colorado business and legal circles—he has been involved with at least 52 court cases in the state—Oltmann’s unsubstantiated claims about Dominion employee Eric Coomer eventually reached as high as former Trump attorney and election conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell and may have even been heard by the former president himself.
January 6, 2021
- On. Jan. 5, 2021, Oltmann spoke at the Rally for Revival, where he reiterated false claims of hacking of voting machines, ballot harvesting, and stolen votes. He was introduced to the crowd as a “data expert.” Oltmann was the final speaker at the event, and walked the crowd through a diagram that he said detailed “the big con” of election fraud. Oltmann’s presentation was disjointed and confusing, but centered on claims of ballot harvesting and manipulating votes through machines that were connected to the Internet—a claim which has been repeatedly been debunked by elections officials.
- Oltmann told listeners on Facebook that he was present in the Willard Hotel War Room on Jan. 6, 2021 with the “legal team” of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Oltmann said he was in Washington, D.C., for most of the week prior to Jan. 6 but was never present on Capitol grounds.
- Also on Jan. 6, Oltmann and Matthew DePerno, a Trump-backed candidate for Michigan attorney general who has been accused of trying to tamper with voting machines in the wake of the 2020 election, met with at least one State Department official, Robert A. Destro. DePerno also claims to have met with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s staff.
The Big Lie
- On Nov. 9, 2020, Oltmann appeared on the Conservative Daily podcast, of which he is co-host, and under the pseudonym “Joe Otto” first made a claim that a Dominion Voting Machines employee had admitted to rigging votes in favor of Joe Biden. Oltmann claimed to have listened in on an “Antifa conference call” and heard the employee, Eric Coomer, proclaim that “Trump is not going to win. I made effing sure of that.” Coomer is suing Oltmann and others, and a Colorado judge ruled in May the lawsuit will proceed.
- In December 2020, a Colorado election official and former county GOP chairman, Chuck Broerman, received a request from a state Republican official to speak with Oltmann about his election fraud claims. Broerman found Oltmann’s evidence of fraud “vague,” and thought Oltmann “was trying to buffalo me that he knew more than he did,” Broerman told the Washington Post.
- As news of Oltmann’s alleged exposing of Coomer reached as far as the Trump White House, former and current Trump legal staff like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani glommed on to the claims. Powell used Oltmann’s claims about Coomer in failed election lawsuits in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin.
- Immediately following Jan. 6, Oltmann said he was forced to resign from his position at a technology company due to his association with election deniers such as Giuliani. He turned the setback into an opportunity, reinventing himself as a full-on election denier, feeding conservative listeners a diet of increasingly violent, fascistic content.
- Oltmann continues to push election conspiracy theories on his podcast and, ostensibly, through his Colorado political organization, FEC United, which has ties to the powerful Republicans in the state.