New Member of Trump's January 6 Willard Hotel "War Room" Revealed; Discovery Leads to Revelation of a National Security Scandal

Trump's legal team admits it had a "war room" in a hotel frequented by insurrectionist leaders Alex Jones and Roger Stone during the insurrection. Its roster of attendees could now become a scandal.

Thanks to an incredibly sharp Proof reader, Proof can now identify a fifth member of Donald Trump’s January 6 “war room” inside the Willard InterContinental Hotel DC.

The identification has led, moreover, to a large volume of disturbing information about that war room, including how many individuals were inside of it on Insurrection Day, what sort of information it was processing, and what its purpose was. The answers to all of these questions are below, and they demand immediate additional investigation by both Congress and the FBI.

As a brief preface to these answers, Proof notes that the four individuals previously identified as members of Trump’s January 6 war room at the Willard Hotel include Trump-Ukraine scandal co-conspirator Robert Hyde, who allegedly plotted violence against the United States ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovich, as part of Trump’s plot to steal the 2020 presidential election via collusion with pro-Kremlin Ukrainian oligarchs and officials; Trump lawyers John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, the latter of whom recently saw his home and office raided by the FBI; and Michael Flynn-associated cybersecurity firm owner Russell Ramsland Jr., who was discussed by Proof in detail in a prior report here.

Proof can now add to these prior reports that there is overwhelming evidence of a fifth entrant to Trump’s “communications” center—as it has been described by Eastman—specifically far-right conspiracy theorist Joe Oltmann (pictured atop this article).

Oltmann in the Willard Hotel War Room

The photo from the war room used to identify Oltmann is below. It was originally published on Hyde’s Instagram feed, along with numerous pictures of Hyde with Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Tiffany Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Giuliani, Flynn, and countless GOP members of Congress.

ABOVE: Trump’s “war room” at the Willard Hotel on the evening of January 6. Trump lawyer John Eastman is standing in a doorway at the rear of the photo.

{Note: For those who haven’t yet read Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020), which contains a full chapter on Hyde’s ties to Trump and his inner circle, here’s a visual retrospective courtesy of some excellent research by Zach Everson, and here’s an article on Hyde from NBC News.}

An April 20, 2021 interview of Oltmann by far-right conspiracy theorist, attorney, and New Mexico State University professor David Clement—caught by the eagle eye of a Proof reader—led to the discovery and confirmation of Oltmann’s presence in Trump’s war room in the Willard Hotel, but also, as importantly, a series of critical and even harrowing revelations about what Team Trump was doing during the insurrection.

Eight major takeaways from the Oltmann-Clement interview are enumerated below, with (sometimes lengthy) interview transcript excerpts, as appropriate.

Revelations From the The Oltmann-Clement Interview

(1) Oltmann is a fake antifa activist.

According to Oltmann, he systematically “infiltrated” the loose-knit antifa movement as a far-right, politically motivated spy in the run-up to and after the 2020 presidential election.

Oltmann indicates that he attended meetings and was on conference calls between antifa members as part of a self-appointed sting operation intended to prove a massive left-wing conspiracy to steal the November election from Donald Trump. Oltmann is now being sued (see below) by Dominion Voting Systems engineer Eric Coomer for defamatory statements Oltmann made about Coomer, including claims that Coomer was a secret antifa militant aiming to steal the 2020 election. As NPR reported after Newsmax (run by longtime Trump confidant Chris Ruddy) retracted all its allegations about Dominion and Coomer, “Shortly after the election, Coomer became the subject of conspiracy theories that he had used his position at Dominion to manipulate votes for President Biden. He strongly denies those allegations. Coomer has been living in hiding for nearly six months after facing death threats. While he has dropped his suit against Newsmax, Coomer is still suing the Trump campaign and a number of campaign surrogates and pro-Trump media outlets, alleging defamation.”

Given that the key Trumpist conspiracy theory operative on January 6 was that antifa planned to show up to the U.S. Capitol in numbers to do pitched violent battle with both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers—an eventuality that many of the January 6 insurrectionists, per pending federal indictments, thought would be useful inasmuch as it arguably could justify then-President Trump invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 and declaring martial law—Oltmann’s claims that he infiltrated antifa prior to the attack on the Capitol raise questions about whether Trump’s Willard Hotel war room was feeding claims about antifa’s supposed plans to insurrectionists inside the Stop the Steal “movement.” Oltmann is the first member of Team Trump who has been identified as making claims of insider knowledge of antifa’s plans surrounding the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath. This topic was an obsession of Trump’s FBI, which worked with Proud Boy leader and Roger Stone “aide” Enrique Tarrio to gather intelligence about antifa; Trump himself, as, according to disputed claims by former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, Trump was so confident that antifa would show up at the Capitol on January 6 that he told the Pentagon that it would need to call out “10,000 troops”; and the Proud Boys, whose primary chant prior to attacking the Capitol on January 6 was, “Where’s antifa?”—as captured in the now-infamous Eddie Block video.

(2) Before January 6, Oltmann was in contact with influential figures in Washington.

Oltmann tells Clement that he flew to Washington, D.C. on “January 3 or January 4” of 2021 for “meetings”, indicating that these meetings had (a) been previously scheduled, (b) the persons with whom these meetings had been scheduled knew that Oltmann would be coming to D.C., and thus, presumably, (c) the persons with whom these meetings had been scheduled had some understanding of what Oltmann would say at any meeting, and believed this information important to have in Washington in early January. Given what we now know about who these meetings were with, and who Oltmann was scheduled to meet with who he never met with—see below for details—the fact that Oltmann had scheduled meetings with certain Team Trump agents prior to January 3, 2021 suggests there are digital or possibly telephonic communications available to be seized by the FBI regarding not just these meetings but plans by Team Trump to leverage the information allegedly held by Oltmann to bolster Trump’s plans for January 6. Indeed, as indicated below, Oltmann now claims that his contributions made it at least as far as the White House Ellipse stage on January 6—becoming part of the very Stop the Steal event that’s now accused of inciting an attack on the Capitol.

(3) Oltmann was a Stop the Steal associate who joined a Stop the Steal event in DC.

Oltmann spoke at the Rally for Revival at Freedom Plaza on January 5. He now says that at that event he gave a presentation of his “model” alleging election-rigging by Dominion. As noted below, Oltmann is being sued for claims he has made pursuant to this “model.” According to Oltmann, he spoke to “25,000 people” at Freedom Plaza; presumably, many of these individuals were the same ones who trespassed on federal grounds (in some instances, the Capitol building itself) approximately 18 hours later.

As previously reported by Proof, the Rally for Revival was as well-attended by high-profile insurrectionists as Trump’s speech at the Ellipse the next day. Among those who spoke alongside Oltmann were Flynn, Stone, George Papadopoulos, Alex Jones, Owen Shroyer, Ali Alexander, and Rogan O’Handley. Proof has also reported on (and videos have revealed) a “VIP tent” erected at Freedom Plaza for speakers and high-profile attendees of the event to mingle in. While we don’t yet know who Oltmann may have corresponded with in the VIP tent before he spoke, we do know that he would have had an opportunity to speak to nearly every major figure behind the planning of the march on the Capitol, and moreover that at least one of those figures (Handley) had just been at a secret meeting at the White House, while another (Flynn) had attended a war council at Trump’s “private residence” at Trump International Hotel (a claim by Charles W. Herbster that Flynn now denies, despite photographic evidence placing him on-scene), while another (Alexander) had just spoken with top Trump presidential adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle.

While we don’t know exactly who Oltmann met with on January 5—because thus far he refuses to say—we do know the general category of Team Trump agent he met with.

According to the Oltmann-Clement interview, beginning on January 5 (the day of the Rally for Revival), Joe Oltmann says that he

…started meeting with people, getting validated from people that are in the government, that had served in the government. They wanted to make sure that my math was good, that I wasn’t just some guy that was coming out with crazy ideas. And I told them—[regarding] the run-off election for Georgia [on January 5]—I told them what was going to happen. I told them, “This is what’s going to happen, the [voting] system [in Georgia] is going to shut down, it has to shut down to come back up [with fraudulent data], here’s how the system works in order to basically take people they [the alleged election thieves] know didn’t vote and…[create] fake ballots or phantom ballots.” And what do you think happened? The system went down, the system came back up, Republicans were in the lead, all of a sudden Republicans were not in the lead. And the Democrat wins.

The notion that on Insurrection Eve a fake antifa activist was meeting with “people in the government” and people who “had served in the government” is very disturbing, especially as—the next day—Trump’s agents, including some still in the government and some who had formerly served in the government, would be claiming that they had inside information suggesting antifa had attacked the Capitol, and perhaps even that this had justified the anger, confusion, and chaos that had unfolded at the Capitol.

Just so, the fact that a man who was then falsely claiming, of an election that had not even concluded yet—the Georgia runoff election, in which counting continued past midnight on January 5—that it was rife with election fraud, had access to the very individuals who would be inciting violence at the Capitol both that evening and on Insurrection Day is extremely concerning. While investigators don’t yet know precisely what was done with Oltmann’s information, Oltmann himself makes clear what the information was and the high level within Trump’s inner circle to which it ascended.

{Note: There is little purpose in trying to guess who Oltmann met with on January 5, especially as—see below—we know many of those with whom he met the following day, but it is worth noting that Trump’s top national security adviser, Flynn, is both someone who “had served in the government” and was on January 5 working closely with the very individuals Oltmann was also in communication with, including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Michael Lindell has said that he spent the three days prior to January 6 in the company of both Flynn and Giuliani, underscoring that the two men were consistently together during this period. As for Powell, she has now admitted that everything she told America and Trump about election fraud was a lie.}

(4) On Insurrection Day, Joe Oltmann was deep inside Donald Trump’s inner circle.

Whereas Oltmann is decidedly vague about who he met with on the day he spoke at the Rally for Revival—notably, an event that featured numerous insurrectionist leaders now under federal investigation—he is far more forthcoming about with whom he met on January 6, when his level of access to the corridors of power intensified to the point that he was conferring with people he seems to presume (and indeed many Americans presume) will neither be questioned by the FBI nor face any consequences for their actions prior to, during, and after the armed assault on the Capitol that they incited.

Oltmann says the following of his high-level-meeting “dance card” in the morning of January 6, prior to Trump’s speech at the Ellipse:

I was meeting with everyone. I met with everyone. I met with [Rudy] Giuliani. I met with other people that wanted to go through [election] validation. [Trump lawyer] John Eastman came up [to where the meeting was]. In fact, the things he [Eastman] said from the [Ellipse] stage after {NB: he actually spoke before} President Trump, were all things he got from me. All of it. The whole model, and what happened [in the 2020 election]. I gave that to him.

It should be underscored that Coomer sued Oltmann and the Trump campaign in 2020, meaning that the members of the Trump campaign who used Oltmann’s “model” for the purpose of (per Oltmann) further inciting those about to march on the Capitol did so knowing that model was currently the subject of a defamation case that remained unresolved as of January 6, but had already led to a public retraction by one far-right media outlet (Newsmax). While we do not yet know for certain what other purposes the information was put to, some of it can be easily guessed at, given that Giuliani, Alexander, certain of the attendees at the Trump International war council, and even Donald Trump himself spent January 5 and January 6 trying to convince U.S. senators to oppose the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. That Oltmann was permitted into Trump’s inner circle of advisers to spread information Trump’s own confidant Chris Ruddy had already backed away publicly many weeks earlier is truly extraordinary.

(5) By midday on Insurrection Day, Oltmann’s access had ascended to a new level.

With respect to the attack on the Capitol—whose first stage unfolded between 1PM and 2:15PM ET on January 6—Oltmann says this of what he was doing at the time:

I was actually at the State Department meeting with—{NB: he momentarily stops himself}—in a Faraday box {NB: a Faraday “cage” is an enclosure used to block electromagnetic fields, and is often used to protect communications from intercept}. While everything was happening on the Capitol, I was nowhere near the Capitol. I was actually inside [Trump’s] government showing them models—that this is what happened [in the 2020 election]. And they said, “Well, why would anyone have a [voting] system that doesn’t have to be validated?” I said, “Exactly.” He [sic] couldn’t believe it. They could not believe what I was actually putting in front of them. And they said, “Well, if this is true, we are at—{NB: he momentarily stops himself}—in essence, this [Biden’s victory] is a coup.” And I was like, “Well, that’s what I would call it.”

If true, Oltmann’s account is deeply alarming. It suggests a component within the U.S. Department of State was willing to meet a conspiracy theorist in a secure location, and to do so as the Capitol was under attack by a mob inspired in part by that man’s claims.

It also means that, in the middle of a national emergency, key officials (both whoever the “he” Oltmann refers to was, and whoever the “they” were) were not at their posts helping to ensure the security of the federal government but were conspiring with those who considered the joint session of Congress then in a state of interruption at the Capitol to actually be a “coup.” It’s unclear what level of State Department official would have ready access to a Faraday cage or be of sufficient authority that Oltmann would agree to name two of Trump’s personal lawyers to Clement but not his contacts at State, but it is not difficult to imagine who among Trump’s high-ranking allies there may have agreed to take a meeting with Oltmann at the urging of Trump’s legal team.

An additional concern here is the matter of who arranged Oltmann’s meeting at State. After the spectacle and scandal of the Trump-Ukraine scandal, what State Department official would have the gall to secretly work with Giuliani (again) to try to fraudulently undermine a U.S. election? This is exactly what Trump had been impeached for the first time; in that case, Giuliani had worked with Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman, and—perhaps not coincidentally—the aforementioned Robert Hyde to try to interfere with the 2020 presidential election, and moreover had done so with the assistance of a State Department agent, Kurt Volker. The news that Rudy Giuliani and his contacts at State were reenacting the very events that had led to Donald Trump’s first impeachment in January 2020 as the January 6 insurrection was still unfolding is genuinely astonishing.

(6) In the evening of January 6, Oltmann returned to the Willard and Rudy Giuliani.

The photo of the Willard Hotel war room above appears to have been taken, if what Hyde says about it is accurate, in the evening of January 6, during what now appears to be Oltmann’s second trip (at a minimum) to that space. Per Oltmann, after his trip to the State Department at midday on Insurrection Day,

I met with Giuliani again. I said [to Giuliani], “Listen…” There had already been reports that he [Trump] could sign the Insurrection Act. There’s a lot of things that he could have done—[that] President Trump could have done—but I do think that the reason that he didn’t do those things is because he does care deeply about the American people. If he would have signed the Insurrection Act, if he would have actually instituted a full investigation [of the 2020 election], if he would have signed an executive order making sure they looked into those things [the voting machines]—if he had, he would have destabilized financial markets [and] held people’s jobs hostage. A lot of bad things could have happened in our society. So I think what President Trump did is he just lived to see another day and let it play out.

Now in hindsight, I wish he wouldn’t have done that. But when I met with President—{NB: he momentarily stops himself}—when I met with Mayor Giuliani on [the evening of January] 6th, I was like, “Look, just put me in front of President Trump and I’ll walk you through [everything]. Because I can walk through this very easily with President Trump.” And what’s interesting about all this is that there were people that stopped me from having those meetings with President Trump on [January 7th]. So I was sticking around—which was the day after [the insurrection]—[and] they were literally standing in the way saying, “We definitely don’t want Joe to get in front of President Trump.”

So on [January] 7th, I was set to—Mayor Giuliani and others had arranged for me to have a meeting with President Trump. I get a phone call [at] 11[PM] in the morning, 9[AM] Denver time {NB: Oltmann is from Colorado and his business is in Colorado} from someone I had hired at my [Colorado] company just as the election was wrapping up, around election time….[and I told him], “I have stuff I need to do in DC”…I walked back into the room [Giuliani’s suite of offices at the Willard], it was basically a command center, there were 25 to 30 people. They were working on DNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] reports and making sure they were gathering all the intelligence on foreign interference. There was a rush at that point to get all of the information necessary to take the next step to prove all the election fraud. And by the way, there’s so much proof it’s—what I had was a small piece of a really big puzzle [that had been gathered in the Willard command center].

Note: What Oltmann describes here appears to be a serious national security breach.

The fact that Trump’s agents erected a “command center” with 25 to 30 people in it—at a hotel hosting insurrectionist leader Roger Stone and (for a time) Michael Flynn and insurrectionist leader Alex Jones—and that, inside that center, during an armed attack on the U.S. Capitol, Giuliani was using State Department contacts to recreate the sort of election interference his client Donald Trump had already been impeached for once, is incredible enough. But here Oltmann seems to say that in this command center hosting 25 to 30 persons, including individuals with checkered pasts and no security clearance like Robert Hyde, was an array of “DNI reports” and “intelligence on foreign interference.” If true, it is a new and significant national security scandal.

Did Team Trump share classified intelligence with insurrectionists pre-insurrection as a means of inciting them—and those to whom they’d be speaking at Stop the Steal events—to storm the Capitol? If so, this could mean federal conspiracy charges (18 U.S. Code § 371) for (a) anyone in the ODNI who gave the reports to Trump’s legal team, (b) anyone in the ODNI or outside of it (to include Donald Trump himself) who authorized the giving of such reports to people not entitled to see them without first declassifying them, (c) anyone in the Willard Hotel “war room” who accessed these records while knowing them to have a classification status they could not meet, and (d) anyone in the Willard who orally or otherwise shared such “reports” and “intelligence” with those leading the march on the Capitol in an effort to further embolden them to trespass on federal grounds and interrupt federal officials (members of Congress) in the midst of core constitutional duties (the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory).

(7) The security breach Giuliani orchestrated got much worse as January 6 wore on.

It wasn’t just that Hyde and Oltmann and 20 or more others—not including Giuliani, Eastman, and Russell Ramsland, Jr.—were in a nonsecure hotel room close by Roger Stone’s hotel room with DNI “reports” and foreign “intelligence,” it’s that some of the engagements Giuliani was secretly having with the Trump administration on January 6 were shared with (at a minimum) Joe Oltmann. As Oltmann told David Clement of his extensive interactions in the Willard Hotel war room on the evening of January 6, 2021,

You have Chad Wolf [then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security]—they found out about, down in Georgia, that there was a shredder truck full of ballots, [and] they {NB: unclear who “they” refers to} took control of that shredder truck with those shredded ballots. They—I—{NB: he momentarily stops himself} the information we have on that is that that’s credible and they [Chris Krebs and CISA] said it’s not. We have pictures of it. But yet the woman that actually came forward and said “I have the pictures” had somebody knock at their front door literally within hours of having a conversation with me about how she’s scared for her family. And Chad Wolf writes a text message to someone saying, “There’s nothing [DHS] can do about it [because] it’s out of our jurisdiction.”

We’re talking about the election for the United States president. And yet they’re having jurisdictional fights over, “Well, it’s not in our [jurisdiction]—I [Wolf] have to hand it over.” And then they hand those ballots in Georgia back over to the [Georgia] Secretary of State [Brad Raffensperger], [who] does what with it? Destroys them [the ballots]. Even though the law states—in most states—that you have to keep ballots for twenty-four months. Election records.

That Oltmann, a civilian and far-right conspiracy theorist, would be privy to likely-encrypted communications from the Secretary of Homeland Security in the midst of an attack on the U.S. Capitol is shocking—especially as Oltmann had, the night before, been an invitee of an insurrectionist group (Stop the Steal) and been in contact with an unknown number of insurrectionists. Indeed, this further begs the question, “If Trump lawyer John Eastman says that the purpose of the Willard Hotel war room was to ‘coordinate communications’, precisely who were he and Giuliani receiving communications from and sending them to?” Oltmann here confirms at least three entities that Giuliani was receiving information from, which information he was then sharing with a fake antifa activist and a conspiracy theorist with no security clearance:

1. The United States State Department

2. The United States Department of Homeland Security

3. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence

In the midst of an armed insurrection against the government of the United States, these may well have been—the Pentagon excepted—the three federal entities one would least want leaking sensitive reports, intelligence, and/or texts to individuals with dodgy associations and no security clearance. But this appears to be at least part of what the Willard Hotel war room was set up to accomplish. In his comments above, Oltmann indicates that Giuliani shared multiple communications from the Secretary of Homeland Security with him—and indeed possibly all 25 to 30 people in the war room at that point, including Robert Hyde—and then shared an unknown number of communications between the war room’s occupants and the State Department.

Given the controversial installation of top Trump agents and longtime Giuliani allies at the Pentagon prior to January 6—namely Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the former of whom was in Giuliani’s secretive “BLT Prime Team”, which sought to work with Ukrainian agents to steal the 2020 election for Trump (see Proof of Corruption)—raises the possibility that the Willard Hotel war room was also receiving intelligence from the Department of Defense on January 6. If any such information, whether from the Pentagon or the other departments mentioned above, was then distributed to any of those involved in the attack on the Capitol as it was happening, the odds of charges of seditious conspiracy against members of Trump’s inner circle rise significantly.

(8) Oltmann’s access to the levers of power in Washington only increased after the attack on the Capitol, as he was thereafter granted access to the president himself.

Given all of the foregoing, one might think that after the death of Ashli Babbitt and several other Trump voters on Capitol Hill, and after the death of U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, Oltmann’s access to highly sensitive government information and top federal officials would’ve been not just curtailed but eliminated. Instead, the opposite occurred. As Oltmann explains to Clement,

On that Friday or Saturday [January 8th or 9th] I was supposed to meet with President Trump. I don’t know if it even would have happened, given that the people who work for President Trump had stepped in front of it [the meeting] and said, “No, we’re not going to let you meet with President Trump.” Namely, [Trump chief of staff] Mark Meadows [was trying to block the meeting].”

That Oltmann had discussed dates for his meeting with President Trump, and says that it was “supposed” to happen—meaning it had been scheduled—strongly suggests that one of the figures with whom the Trump war room at the Willard was in contact was Trump himself, perhaps no surprise given that at least two members of his legal team were using the Willard as a “command center.”

How Radical Is Joe Oltmann?

The Oltmann-Clement interview gives many indications, beyond the core facts of the former’s absurd conspiracy theories, regarding how radical Oltmann was and is—and therefore how potentially dangerous it was for him to have had access to sensitive government communications during the January 6 insurrection. It is not merely that Oltmann calls the then-incoming president-elect “an empty shell of a man”, as he’s certainly entitled to that opinion; it’s not simply that Oltmann told Clement that, due to supposed election fraud in the 2020 election, America had by January 6 become a “communist society” (though this certainly indicates a desire for the radical overhaul of American society on the day of an armed rebellion against the U.S. government); and it’s not merely that Oltmann associates with a radical like David Clement, who during the interview called animated Disney films “communist stories” and a “form of idolatry” so severe it required him to cancel his family’s Disney+ subscription. Both Oltmann and Clement are entitled to their fringe opinions on politics or anything else.

Rather, what’s terrifying about the Oltmann-Clement interview is the exchange below, which concerns what the two men think should have happened before, during, and after the 2020 presidential election—and what they wish, in retrospect, had happened.

Keep in mind, as you read the text below, that Clement is a professor who teaches law and who refers to himself as a “former prosecutor.” {Note: Readers may have to read the below exchange twice or more to fully understand the enormity of what Clement is proposing here, without any pushback from Oltmann. Bolded, below, are the most shocking components.}

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DAVID CLEMENT: I think there was a way [for Trump] to sign off on the executive order [to prevent election fraud in 2020] in a way that didn’t feed the media narrative. And I think it had to be done [pre-election], quietly. I think it had to be done like November 4th or 5th. Because if we have the information—if we have the raw data, and I’m assuming someone has the raw data—then you’ve got foreign interference, you’ve got an act of war. And if at that point there was a way to surveil and run the [2020] elections in a way that was completely transparent, the information being provided [on the final vote tallies] wouldn’t be to the—in my opinion—CIA-backed media companies, but you [the White House] are the one providing information to the American people. And you [Trump] also have the ability to take over some of the communications systems [in the United States]. Now I know the optics of that would look terrible, but that’s only in the event that these media companies that have been compromised are still able to transmit.

So I’ve kind of war-gamed this in the back of my head, as a former prosecutor, what would have been the best way. But I think, at some point, what you [Oltmann] mentioned was very accurate: there’s no way that you could change the optics of “a desperate man trying to lay claim to a throne he wasn’t entitled to.” So I know I kind of threw a lot at you, but [is there] anything you can share with my listeners about—[in] 20/20 hindsight—whether it was contact with the president, or contact with people close to him?

JOE OLTMANN: Yes. So let me start this by saying that my eyes were opened in January when I was in Washington, D.C. Now, I’ve done some stuff, where I’ve worked in the Middle East and Africa…I understand what propaganda looks like. I understand what indoctrination looks like. But I’m going to tell you that it’s very difficult for President Trump to make those decisions when the people around him are the most compromised. And to be able to look on the inside—looking in—and on the outside looking in, and seeing so many bad actors, I’ll call them, in the GOP, “RINOs” instead of Republicans, right, people who stand up and say you’re a friend while you’re stabbing Caesar [Trump]. That’s what we were dealing with in January.

We were dealing with a compromised group of people that don’t understand what courage is.

I always say, courage is more contagious than fear. I wish I would’ve gotten the opportunity to shake President Trump and say, “Listen, you have fought this fight for the last four years”, but what happens is when he turns around…he doesn’t have the confidence of people around him, and you have media companies and tech companies that are able to weaponize against the American people, that are able to falsify [data] and create fact-checkers that are lying to the American people, that [are] able to de-platform [people] and take information down. When you start dealing with all of that—keep in mind, I was de-platformed by Twitter. And then [they] lied and said I had multiple accounts….I was one of the first people they [Twitter] shut down. I think two weeks after the [2020] election. It was the second week of November [2020].

….

So going through this process, we have a compromised [U.S.] society. We have a compromised environment. Tech companies are more powerful than the government. And they are representing the interests in the government that are not the American people’s interests. In other words, we [citizens] don’t have a say….there is [sic] no ethical or moral standards [in America]. Our standard is to put a “heroin shoot-up station” on every corner and make sure people have a safe place to shoot up heroin….it’s crazy. It’s bizarro world.

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To be clear, what you read above was an “officer of the court”—a bar-admitted lawyer—outlining a “war-game” scenario he believes President Trump should have followed prior to the election in 2020, which scenario would have ended American democracy and established a dictatorship in the United States (as well as the end of the free press). And in response to such a proposed plot, a man who was one of the few admitted into Trump’s Washington “command center” in the middle of an armed insurrection had nothing to say about it except the above, which can only be described as “approving.”

Conclusion

It is easy to think of Joe Oltmann as merely (a) a co-defendant, with Giuliani and the Trump campaign, in a lawsuit filed by Eric Coomer of Dominion Voting Systems, and (b) a man who somehow gained access to rooms, people, and intelligence he had no right to see, but who nevertheless isn’t, finally, a proponent of violent action against the federal government. Indeed, when Clement closes his interview with Oltmann by asking a charged question—“Where does the fight need to be taken?”—Oltmann’s response, while extremist, does not include a suggestion of any violence whatsoever:

We [Trumpists] just don’t understand the power that we have. We’re like an elephant with a string tied to our foot that’s tied to a fence that’s not even in the ground, yet we stand still. There’s the power of “no.” “No, I’m not going to accept the election results. No, I’m not going to get a vaccine.” We have a choice. That choice is not anything they can take from us. They can’t force anything upon us if we decide to use the word “no.” Second, you’ve got to start paying attention, because they [Democrats] have been doing this {NB: what “this” is remains unclear} for decades. But we have muscle memory. It’s not that hard to go back. We just have to stand up and recognize the things they [the Democrats] are doing in our society to destroy everything we represent as a country. Critical race theory. Gender fluidity. Letting 1% rule our country….we’ve allowed them to take away our voice. But we can get away from that. All’s [sic] we have to do is buycott [sic] and boycott, on the business side. Use your dollars to tell a better story on what part of our society should survive.

And yet, a preliminary investigation into Oltmann’s activities since the insurrection raises significant red flags. In this thirty-second video from last month, Oltmann says the following (emphasis in original):

Step out! This weekend, step out and make your voice heard! Take ten of your friends, and step out. And if antifa shows up [at any rally you coordinate], mmmm—I’m not going to tell you what to do to antifa. I’m gonna tell you what I would do to antifa. But I’m not going to tell you what to do to antifa. But step out and do something. Finally stand up and take a stand. Let them see the three million people that showed up on January 6 to go against this fraud, this coup of our nation.

Significant in the above is not only an impossible-to-miss public call for violence against antifa; not only an impossible-to-miss lauding of the events of January 6; not only the use of military terminology (“coup”) to describe the supposed illegitimacy of the Biden administration; it’s not even the obvious fact that however radicalized Joe Oltmann is now, after the humbling experience of watching the Capitol be destroyed by an armed mob, he was probably more radicalized the morning of January 6, before that sobering event had occurred; it’s that what Oltmann is discussing above is exactly what he would have been discussing in Trump’s Willard Hotel war room on January 6:

1. A an alleged violent plot by antifa;

2. in support of a “coup” of the Trump administration;

3. that would prop up an illegitimate Biden administration;

4. requiring a violent response;

5. by an extremely large group of angry and determined Trump supporters.

It’s difficult to believe that the messages coming out of the Willard command center on January 6 were much different in character, design, or philosophy from what we now hear from Joe Oltmann five months later. And given that between 20 and 25 other individuals were in that suite of offices on January 6, and that we have no idea who the people were—beyond knowing that Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Mark Finchem, Owen Shroyer, Michael Flynn, a number of since-indicted Oath Keepers, and up to “fifty” others of note (per Stone’s suite-mate Kristin M. Davis) were at the Willard on January 6—one cannot feel sanguine about the future discoveries investigators are sure to make about what was going in Team Trump’s nerve center as the Capitol was stormed.

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