About
Joe Oltmann is a Colorado businessman who gained national attention when he claimed to have evidence of a Dominion Voting Machines employee telling Antifa members that he had helped rig the 2020 election against Donald Trump.
Oltmann is relatively unknown outside of business and legal circles in Colorado—where he has been involved with at least 52 court cases—but his unsubstantiated claims about Dominion employee Eric Coomer eventually reached as high as former Trump attorney and election conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell and perhaps the president himself.
January 6, 2021
- On January 5, 2021, Oltmann spoke at the Rally for Revival as a “data expert” and reiterated false claims of hacking of voting machines, ballot harvesting, and stolen votes while walking the crowd through a diagram that he said detailed “the big con” of election fraud. His presentation—the last at the rally—was disjointed and confusing, but centered on claims of ballot harvesting and manipulating votes through machines that were connected to the internet—a claim that was repeatedly debunked by elections officials.
- Oltmann told listeners on Facebook that he attended the Willard Hotel War Room meeting on January 6 with Giuliani’s “legal team” and said he was in D.C. for most of the week but was never on the grounds of the Capitol.
- That day Oltmann and Matthew DePerno, a Trump-backed candidate for Michigan attorney general who was 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.
The Big Lie
- On November 9, 2020, using the pseudonym “Joe Otto,” Oltmann first made a claim on the Conservative Daily podcast he hosts 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 purported to have heard the employee, Eric Coomer, proclaim that “Trump is not going to win. I made effing sure of that.” Coomer sued Oltmann and others for defamation.
- In December 2020, Chuck Broerman, a Colorado election official and former county GOP chairman, received a request from a state Republican official to speak with Oltmann about his election fraud claims. Finding that the evidence of fraud sounded “vague,” Broerman told the Washington Post that Oltmann “was trying to buffalo” him into believing that he had more information than he did.
- As news of Oltmann’s alleged exposing of Coomer reached as far as the Trump White House, legal advisors 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 January 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, fascist content.
- Oltmann continues to push election conspiracy theories on his podcast and, ostensibly, through his Colorado political organization, FEC (Faith, Education and Commerce) United, which has ties to powerful Republicans in the state.