The Troubling Associations of Insurrection-Week Trump "Command Center" Participant Joe Oltmann—the Man Who Tried to Convince the State Department to Overturn the 2020 Election on Insurrection Day

From Eric Trump to the State Department, paramilitaries to pro-Trump rappers, Trump lawyers to Stop the Steal, this portrait of the ties of an invitee to an Insurrection Week "war room" is telling.

Introduction

On March 13, 2020, a man named Joe Otto took to his podcast, Conservative Daily, to call COVID-19 a “fake story” and assure his listeners that the “real pandemic” was the “mental midget-ness” of a society that—he said—celebrates the idea that “everyone is a victim.”

Joe Otto—real name Joe Oltmann—has now spent the last year identifying himself as the victim of everyone from local Colorado politicians to “antifa journalists”, from mask mandates to the author of Proof, who Oltmann (communicating under his real name) has accused of lying about him in this Proof article, thereafter threatening to “sue [me]…out of existence.”

Sidebar: A Personal Note

When Proof gave Oltmann a chance to offer corrections, he said it was a “lie” to call Rudy Giuliani’s suite of offices at the Willard Hotel in DC a “war room”, though it was described as such by Oltmann associate and Trump lawyer John Eastman, who appears alongside Oltmann in the war room photo below:

According to Eastman, Trump’s legal team “had a war room at the Willard Hotel [in Washington] kind of coordinating all of the communications [during the week of the insurrection in January 2021].…[it was in] a suite of offices.”

Oltmann also calls it a “lie” to say that the above photograph was taken on January 6 (he contends that it was January 7). Robert Hyde, the Trump associate in the green oval above, dates the war room photo he posted to his Instagram on January 7 as being from “last night” (i.e., January 6):

{NB: In the three-photo series posted by Hyde, all individuals who appear in multiple of the three photos are wearing the same clothes, confirming that Hyde dates the series to January 6.}

But Joe Oltmann’s recent message to Proof did not merely confirm that Oltmann was in Trump’s war room at the Willard on both January 6 and January 7, it also included statements about U.S. domestic politics that give a good sense of the components of Oltmann’s political militancy. These include, apparently, QAnon adherence (“women and children are in fact being trafficked because of the thirst of the radical left to victimize our society”; “The left represent the most vile part of our society…[t]hey are pedophiles, rapists and closet racists”); the implication that progressive politics can and should be criminalized (“The left are in fact terrorists.…everything single thing they touch they destroy”); a fanatical commitment to Trump’s “Big Lie” alleging an international hacking and vote-rigging conspiracy that explains Joe Biden’s landslide election victory last November (“The [2020] election was in fact stolen, and Dominion [Voting Systems] is in fact a massive fraud on the American people and subverted the will of our nation”); and hostility to the free press (accusing Proof of “prop[ping] up…radical leftist terrorists” and “stir[ring] up leftist trash” by reporting on preparations for the events of January 6, 2021).

While some of Oltmann’s accusations were less militant and more juvenile than these—such as falsely accusing me of being an “atheist”, and telling this author (a longtime public interest attorney, public school teacher, anti-student-debt activist, voting-rights activist, presidential historian, indie journalist, and editor at a nonprofit press) “I have done more in my life to help others in impoverished and economically disadvantaged environments than you and fifty of your closest friends could even think of doing”—the undertone of threat in Oltmann’s language is unmistakable, including a mysterious promise of forthcoming “documentation on [Dr. Anthony] Fauci”, “election audit results” that will prove a murky global plot against Donald Trump, and a “reckoning” of uncertain dimensions that Oltmann will only say relates to “eighty million pissed off Americans…stand[ing] up.” Whether this last threat is a reference to violence is unclear, though given Joe Oltmann’s associations (see below), the possibility can’t be excluded. Indeed, at one point in his attacks against Proof Oltmann told me that I “need a muzzle”—a piece of equipment used to forcibly control an animal—and that I will soon get one if I don’t start parroting Trump’s version of “truth.”

Oltmann has also indicated that, while he doesn’t “advocate” for violence, if “the [left-wing] propaganda [in America]” doesn’t “stop”—which term (“propaganda”) Oltmann appears to use to refer to any reporting with which he personally disagrees—there will be “violence” and “blood [will be] spilled.” You can watch this troubling remark below:

Proof later discovered that some of what it had been sent by Otto/Oltmann was in fact boilerplate rage, as another recent Facebook message from the Coloradan includes identical language, indeed directing the same sentiments at the sitting President of the United States as to this Substack publication. After calling President Joe Biden “a piece of trash”, Oltmann says “The left are liars”, “they are everything they say they are fighting against”, and “they [the left] are pedophiles, rapists and closet racists”—all phrases sent to this author on the same day (see below). {NB: In speaking of Joe Biden, Oltmann did add, “The shear [sic] amount of evil they [leftists] represent is unmeasurable.”}

So Who Is Joe Otto/Joe Oltmann?

So who is Joe Otto/Joe Oltmann, besides a Trump supporter who appears to—much like others involved in the Willard Hotel war room on January 6, including Eastman, Hyde, Rudy Giuliani, Maria Ryan, Christina Bobb, Russell Ramsland Jr., and, per Oltmann, as many as twenty-three other people—accuse anyone who disagrees with him of being a secret member of what he calls a “terrorist” group (i.e., antifa)?

Joe Oltmann is a tech millionaire who resigned his position at PIN Business Network while he was in Washington working in Trump’s war room during Insurrection Week. More importantly for the investigation Proof is now conducting regarding wealthy, powerful, and or influential individuals in any way associated with any of the events of Insurrection Week, Oltmann is a co-founder of FEC United (“Faith, Education, and Commerce United”), which has in the past issued joint statements with—and presently shares a website with—the United American Defense Force (UADF), which advertises itself as “offering protection and support when first responders are unwilling or unable to fulfill their civic duties.”

In the event this sounds to you a little bit like an armed vigilante operation, it’s not precisely that—but certainly adjacent to it. In addition to providing an “entirely volunteer-operated network of medical teams across the country who are able to provide urgent and necessary care to those injured in the midst of the chaos [caused by antifa]” the UADF has a “parallel mission…to create an entirely volunteer-operated network of individuals who are prepared and coordinated to defend and protect UADF medical units at all costs.”

Lest you wonder if “at all costs” might include the use of force against antifa, it most certainly does: the UADF notes (emphasis supplied) that “various levels of benefits of membership include insurance protection for use of force; discounts on ammunition; medical supplies; hard goods; soft goods; weapons, tactical, and CPR/first aid training, as well as public safety notifications.”

On December 31, 2020, approximately 96 hours before arriving in Washington to stay at the Willard—the photo below is Oltmann’s view of Freedom Plaza from his room at the Willard on January 5—Oltmann posted on Facebook that “the fight is on”, an eerie presaging of the bloody rage that erupted at the Capitol on Oltmann’s third day in DC.

After the domestic terrorists’ unsuccessful assault on the Capitol, Oltmann, by his own admission, headed to Trump’s war room the very next day (January 7). As Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani prepared his January 7 or January 8 address blaming the entirety of the Trumpist attack on the Capitol on antifa, Oltmann was apparently preparing to double down on his own crusade against the loose-knit anti-fascist movement, recording a video on January 26 in which he angrily asserted that “I’m going to double down every single day until we eliminate antifa. Until we eliminate these leftist radicals that are terrorists.” The irony of the fact that less than three weeks earlier Oltmann had been inside what he called the “command center” of an effort to overturn a democratic election—which broader effort, if not Oltmann’s efforts specifically, incited a domestic terror attack on the seat of our government—appears to have been lost on Oltmann.

While Oltmann did all he could to get close to President Trump during Insurrection Week, it wasn’t his first brush with the Trump family. In October 2020, Oltmann’s FEC United received a recorded message of support from Donald Trump’s son, Eric Trump:

The Radicalizing of Otto/Oltmann—and Why It Matters

While Oltmann’s recordings from spring 2020 are unsettling, his summer 2020 efforts to “infiltrate” antifa odd, and his fall 2020 support for Trump’s campaign unsurprising given his belief in the fraudulence of a COVID-19 pandemic that has now—including the undercount measured by the New York Times and the IHME—killed approximately 1 million Americans in just 15 months, following Biden’s landslide victory in the 2020 presidential election Oltmann’s public postings took a far darker turn.

In a video Oltmann posted on December 31—the same day he declared publicly that “the fight is on,” and shortly before flying to Washington—he exhibits an irrational belief that “on January 20th [2021], he [Trump] will be the next president”, adding that “We didn’t elect Joe Biden. Joe Biden was not the choice of the people.” He also continues his attacks on science, questioning whether America has a pandemic—“Do we? Do we?” he taunts—even as he admits to having had COVID-19 and getting “very, very ill.” Nevertheless, Oltmann insists that, instead of a pandemic, what the United States is experiencing now is a large-scale “manipulation of the American people.”

Many Americans, including many religious Christians like Oltmann, had surprisingly little reaction to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans throughout 2020. For Oltmann, the explanation for this apparent indifference to post-womb human life was easy enough to summarize, with the conspiracy theorist accusing “Democrats” of causing the deaths of “220 million people globally”—this is not a typo—by advocating for social distancing measures in the face of a pandemic. {Note: Joe Oltmann’s accusation against the Democratic Party equates, mathematically, to a claim that his political opponents killed nearly 3% of all human life on Earth in just eight months. Oltmann does not explain in detail how social distancing measures could kill 220 million—or even a thousandth of that.}

Lest it seem that Oltmann’s view of the pandemic is decidedly more radical than his view of alleged 2020 election fraud, it is not. In his December 31, 2020 video, Oltmann explains that the “fight” he is prepared for is akin to “Normandy” (a battle in which 6,603 Americans died) or the climactic scene from the movie Braveheart, which depicts The Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297—a battle that resulted in over 6,000 men killed or wounded. And lest anyone doubt that Oltmann’s view of the violent battle that he saw coming days before the armed assault on the Captiol involved the federal government, in the same video Oltmann declares the federal government “more corrupt” than any of the governments in the “sixty-five countries” he’s visited worldwide. “As we go into 2021, I’m going to continue to fight. And I don’t care what the consequences are….I [am] willing to sacrifice everything.” Oltmann’s implication that he is willing to die to try to keep Biden from office mirrors Ali Alexander’s January 5 “Victory or death!” chant. Both Alexander and Oltmann spoke at the Rally for Revival in Freedom Plaza on January 5.

Oltmann’s unsettling militarism matters because of where he spent Insurrection Day—at the heart of the United States State Department, trying to execute a preemptive coup of the incoming Joe Biden administration.

Joe Otto/Oltmann on Insurrection Day

Oltmann claims that Robert Hyde lied—for reasons Oltmann doesn’t elaborate on—about his photo of the Willard Hotel war room being from Insurrection Day, even though it was date-stamped “January 7” and Hyde said in his comment on the photo that (as he would presumably be in the best position to know) it was from “last night.” So where will Oltmann admit to being on Insurrection Day? The answer is no more reassuring.

In a January 11, 2021 livestream on Facebook, Joe Oltmann not only makes numerous apparently deliberate misstatements about the attack on the Capitol on January 6—alleging that only a “couple dozen” people breached the Capitol, despite the United States Capitol Police putting the number at approximately 800—but also gives new details about his actions on that day, some of which appear extremely significant.

Having arrived in Washington on Monday, January 4, Oltmann says that on January 6 he met with “leadership” at the United States State Department. Per Oltmann,

We discussed and went through all of the proof [of election fraud], step by step, piece by piece. We built reports that could be used by the National Security Director [sic]. I was able to look and actually see all the raw files—all information that came out of the Antrim County [MI] voting machines—for Dominion [Voting Systems]. I was able to analyze that information. I was able to send that information on to other “red teams,” [so] that they could analyze that information to prove that the information in the first group of people—again, this is the only time we got access to voting machines which [are] up in Antrim County, Michigan—to prove that what the first team actually discovered about the Dominion system is true. {NB: from Google: “a red team is a group that plays the role of an enemy or competitor, and provides security feedback from that perspective.” Note that Oltmann’s reference to a “National Security Director”—a position that doesn’t exist outside USAID—may intend to refer to Trump’s then-National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien.}

Given his one-step-removed connection to a militia group, and his public statements possibly indicative of a willingness to engage in acts of violence, it is unclear who at State would have agreed to let Oltmann “see all the raw files” from voting conducted in a Michigan county in 2020, let alone to then transmit that information to unnamed associates off-site. It is unclear if such possession or transmission would be legal.

While in his January 11 video Oltmann clearly says that he would “never advocate for violence”, one of the most striking statements in the same video—“I hope that we aren’t at the place yet that we have to do the same thing that BLM and antifa did for six straight months during [last] summer” (emphasis supplied)—suggests otherwise. As noted previously by Proof, Oltmann has also, since January 11, implied that the appropriate response to antifa is violence, saying in a May video (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.

Hyde’s claim that Oltmann was in the Willard war room on January 6, and Oltmann’s claim that he was in the Willard war room on January 7, and the possibility that—given that Oltmann was (per his Facebook) in the Willard on January 5 and stayed in DC “all week”—Oltmann was also in the war room at other times, receives some new indirect corroboration in Oltmann’s January 11 video. Apparently referring to Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, Oltmann says,

I spent an enormous amount of time [during Insurrection Week] with people who are constitutional attorneys. I got to meet with Mayor Giuliani. I got to meet with Mayor Giuliani’s team. I met with other people that will remain nameless—because I don’t want to name-drop—but that were working on election integrity.

Oltmann’s unwillingness to name the entrants into Trump’s January 6 war room (other than Giuliani) mirrors precisely the unwillingness of far-right activist James Sullivan to identify anyone from the war room he worked with other than Giuliani. As Proof has noted, after the armed rebellion at the Capitol, no one who had participated in the Willard Hotel war room broadcast from that location other than Giuliani, who due to his ongoing (at the time) representation of then-president Donald Trump arguably had a protection against interrogation by federal law enforcement—by virtue of attorney-client privilege—other war room participants didn’t have. Eastman’s claim that he was Trump’s attorney on Insurrection Day is of relatively recent vintage, and may indeed be an effort to cloak Eastman in the same protection from having to reveal Trump’s communications with the Willard that Giuliani (at least arguendo, momentarily putting aside the well-established “crime-fraud” exception to attorney-client privilege) enjoys.

Did Oltmann Meet Roger Stone at Freedom Plaza, the Willard Hotel, or in Trump’s War Room at the Willard?

Did Oltmann make contact with Roger Stone at the Rally to Save America on January 5—a Stop the Steal event at which both were VIP guests, speakers, and inhabitants of the event’s “VIP tent”—or during the two days that both men were guests at the Willard? Does the fact that Oltmann’s only video from the January 5 rally focused on Stone’s speech hold any significance? We don’t know. But Proof can identify an odd connection between the two men that relates to the Rally to Save America. At that event, Oltmann filmed himself with Trumpist “rapper” Forgiato Blow, who would later be infamously filmed dancing and rapping with Roger Stone at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2021. An audio transcript of the January 5 video reveals not just a social exchange between Oltmann and Blow but an implication that either they’d spoken before, were planning to dine together on Insurrection Eve, or both:

JOE OLTMANN: All right, so I’m up [on stage] next [after Roger Stone]. I[’ve] got to show everybody how they stole it [the 2020 presidential election].

FORGIATO BLOW: He’s going to go out there and do his thing! And then after, he’s going to take me out to eat!

OLTMANN {laughing}: This guy! {points at Blow}

BLOW {to Oltmann}: We gotta get something to eat!

OLTMANN {to the camera}: You know who he is! Needs no introduction!

BLOW {to the camera}: Forgiato Blow! What’s up, baby!

ABOVE: Forgiato Blow (l) and Joe Oltmann (r) at Freedom Plaza on January 5.

While Forgiato Blow being a mutual acquaintance of Roger Stone and Joe Oltmann doesn’t establish contact between the latter two men, their opportunity to meet during Insurrection Week by both proximity and mutual acquaintance can now be confirmed.

Two stills from the video Oltmann took of Roger Stone at Freedom Plaza are below.

Joe Otto/Oltmann After Insurrection Day

Neither the seven deaths associated with Insurrection Day, the 140 injuries suffered by law enforcement at the U.S. Capitol, the millions of dollars of property damage there enacted by domestic terrorists, nor the smearing of blood and feces on the building’s walls in any way chilled Oltmann’s ardor for overturning the results of the free and fair 2020 presidential election—an election that Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security officially determined was “the most secure” in the nation’s history.

In a January Facebook video billed by Oltmann as “round two” of his post-insurrection comments, and an “update” on his prior Facebook livestream, Oltmann admits that he spent January 20 through January 24 “in Florida meeting with a strong group of people who just want truth….We had great meetings. We talked about what the path forward looks like. How do we stand together. I’ve had some great conversations with people all over the country on what this movement actually looks like, and how do we divest…[from] Big Tech.” Oltmann does not expound on who The Florida Group includes (for instance, the former President of the United States) or what it is plotting, but he notes—as if to imply that, in his ongoing war against Donald Trump’s political opponents, anything goes—Democrats “evil people” and “sociopaths.”

Conclusion

It’s essential that America understands the treacherous militancy of the men and women who gathered at the Willard Hotel during Insurrection Week, including both those who can be confirmed as entering what Oltmann called the Trump legal team’s “command center” at the Willard and those who are strongly suspected of having done so due to their own statements and photographic and video evidence—including oddball Trump political adviser Sebastian Gorka, Trump-Russia scandal figure Boris Epshteyn, and far-right activist David Harris Jr. Proof is now working to confirm the presence of these three men in the Willard war room, as well as investigating whether other infamous members of Trump’s legal team, including legal advisers Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing—the latter of whom was recently raided by the FBI—were also present. John Eastman describes what Joe Oltmann calls a command center as not just a “war room” but also a “communications coordination” space, which suggests that on January 6 information was not just flowing into the room but was emanating from it as well. Understanding the militancy of the messages that may have been exiting the Willard Hotel on Insurrection Eve and Insurrection Day, especially if they pertained to Oltmann’s longtime obsession—accusing antifa of things it wasn’t even present to do—a possibility strongly suggested by Giuliani’s remarkably fast broadcast of false claims about supposed antifa leader John Sullivan masterminding the January 6 insurrection.

By the same token, the militancy of a man—Joe Otto/Oltmann—who had the ear of the “leadership” of Donald Trump’s State Department on January 6, possibly including (we can’t yet know) Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is an urgent national security issue that Congress must investigate via a House Select Committee. Proof is committed to continuing to gather accurate, reliable, fully sourced data on all those in positions or physical locations of command, control and/or coordination during Insurrection Week.

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