Oltmann ought to know. The Castle Rock-based businessman has been at the center of a slew of defamation-related lawsuits stemming from an episode in late 2020, when he claimed that he had “infiltrated” an “antifa” group conference call and heard a Dominion Voting Systems employee named Eric say something like, “Trump is not going to win. I made [expletive] sure of that!”
Oltmann also showed screenshots from the Facebook page of Eric Coomer, Dominion’s then-director of Product Security and Strategy, fingering him as an internal saboteur who claimed to have fixed the 2020 presidential election.
Coomer and Dominion both denied Oltmann’s election-rigging claims, and Coomer filed several lawsuits against conservative personalities and organizations that repeated Oltmann’s assertions, including Oltmann himself. (Coomer is no longer with Dominion.) And the Denver-based Dominion filed its own defamation lawsuits, including one that Fox News settled for $787 million.
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This ongoing storm of litigation makes Oltmann a recurring character in mainstream news, most recently popping up when a federal judge paused a $1,000 daily fine against Oltmann for failing to testify in one of the lawsuits until the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals weighs in. In that particular case, Coomer is suing an Oklahoma podcaster who platformed Oltmann’s assertions about him.
Prior to his election-denial claims, Oltmann had made headlines when he funded a series of protests demanding an end to COVID stay-at-home orders in Colorado and launched a political organization, FEC United (for “Faith, Education and Commerce”), to advocate for conservative political candidates in races small and large across Colorado. He also started a podcast, recording from a studio in the Denver suburbs.
In an online alternative media universe, Oltmann and his Conservative Daily podcast (distributed on video via YouTube imitator Rumble) are featured alongside MAGA heavyweights like Rudy Giuliani and pillow dealer Mike Lindell as well as other MAGA martyrs, many of whom have been either banned or demonetized by mainstream platforms.
Oltmann’s show is advertiser-supported, with regular appearances from Lindell hawking pillows, Lindell hawking a tome of advice on collecting precious metals, and Oltmann hawking supplements. It’s nearly impossible to calculate Oltmann’s reach, given the various tentacles of audio and video distribution, but he tells Westword that it’s “10 to 15 million people, depending on how you do the math.”
On Rumble alone, Conservative Daily has nearly 40,000 followers, and individual episodes rack up 3,000 to 5,000 views on average.
Conservative Daily itself doesn’t bubble up much into the mainstream press, unless it’s to note Oltmann’s extremist claims on the show. The Southern Poverty Law Center collected a list of Oltmann quotes advocating violence, and a 2022 Washington Post profile of Oltmann noted his “violent rhetoric” in its headline.
For example, Oltmann spoke of “executions of traitors” on the show, then claimed to just be “joking” about hanging Jared Polis when he suggested the governor “stretch that rope."
Oltmann's formula of hyperbolic bluster is the modern incarnation of what was born on talk radio — hyper-partisan name-calling, but with a more violent tone than is allowed over the airwaves.
So when Oltmann announces in an interview with Westword that he’s switching up his formula for the podcast, turning away from politics and partisanship, and going so far as to change its name to ax the word “conservative,” a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted.
Now starring Tina Peters
In October, former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters, convicted of several charges related to allowing an associate of Lindell's to access the Mesa County election system, was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison along with six months in county jail by Judge Matthew Barrett. But she was still appearing on her Oltmann-produced show, The Truth Matters With Tina Peters, through the end of December — though she’d been in the Mesa County jail since her sentencing.You read that correctly: Tina Peters was broadcasting her internet show, with Oltmann as her interlocutor, from the Mesa County Detention Center, sometimes several times a week.
Peters appeared in her jail-issued orange jumpsuit, still recognizable with her platinum white hair and eyeliner, from the day room of the jail, using Zoom’s blur effect to cover her environment. The show, in which Oltmann converses from his studio with Peters over a video connection, focused on Peters’s claims of election malfeasance.
Peters is not an employee of Oltmann's, he says, though he adds, “I’m not really at liberty to say what she does and doesn’t get paid for. I do support her.”
Oltmann and Peters launched The Truth Matters while the case against her was progressing, well before she surrendered to authorities in October. That could have halted production, but Oltmann didn’t let that stand in his way. “I don’t think anybody had asked the question” of whether an inmate can regularly appear in recorded broadcasts, he says.
“The rules are: No live broadcasting or simulcasting can exist in a conversation, but there are no rules that prevent us from having a conversation with Tina while she’s in jail, as long as we pre-record that and then play it at a later time, which is what we did,” Oltmann says.
Mesa County Sheriff’s Office public information officer Wendy Likes confirms that Peters’s video appearances with Oltmann on his Rumble channel didn't violate any policies. “Every inmate in a general population is issued a tablet where they can do video visits,” Likes says. Those tablets can be used for video visits if they’re docked in the day room and the visits are pre-paid.
She adds that it’s “unknown” whether any other inmates at the Mesa County jail are producing recordings for broadcast, though most have access to the same visitation rights as Peters.
“It was just a sensible solution, [I] checked into it, made sure that we were within the confines of the law, that we weren’t going to do anything to disrupt,” Oltmann says. “As much as I despise the system itself, you still have to play by those rules.”
But after she complained about security threats, Peters was transferred from the Mesa County Detention Center to the Larimer County Jail late in 2024; she last appeared from the Mesa County jail on The Truth Matters on December 17.
Promised Oltmann: “You’ll see Tina return. There’s a lot of maneuvering that is happening coming into 2025.”
Oltmann believes there’s common ground to be found in advocating for Peters’s release from jail. “It’s hard to ignore Judge Barrett’s behavior in all of this and some of the things that he did," he says of the judge who sentenced her. "Even some of the most politically left-aligned lawyers have come out and basically said, ‘This is a miscarriage of justice.’”
He says he’s “disgusted by what they’ve done to Tina” and then asks: “Is there really a left and a right? Is there really a Republican or Democrat, or is it just a bunch of idiots who are running around causing chaos and the rest of us just become fodder for it?”
Hence the promises that the podcast is changing.
Crude and shrewd
A few days later, Oltmann puts his chief marketing officer on the phone, who reveals the new name of the show: Untamed.Untamed is certainly an edgier, slicker branding than Conservative Daily, but the name alone doesn’t promise less partisan content. However, that promise is coming from Oltmann and his team.
“We just want a platform that promotes free speech,” says Josh Shave, the marketing executive. “At the end of the day, we really want to bring a community together. The goal of this is: We don’t care what football team you’re on. We don’t care what side of the aisle you’re on.”
As for advocating for Peters, “I don’t see Tina any different than I do the injustice against someone that gets abused by a police officer," Oltmann says. "I want to give people a voice.
“Prior to 2020, nobody ever called me left, right, green, yellow, purple,” he continues. “There was never this divide that was happening now, strictly what’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong. And now we’ve mixed those two together in the same salt and pepper shaker, so it’s really difficult to divide what you should and should not support. It’s caused a lot of division in our communities.”
Oltmann, who participated in pro-police rallies in 2020 while Black Lives Matter protests were happening across the country, says he wants to “push towards ‘How do I have a better dialogue?'”
He insists that before 2020, he would call himself a centrist. “I’m like the Elon Musk conservative,” he says. “I’m just right there in the middle to hang out with people. And then it turned into right-wing extremists, which is absurd.”
Election integrity remains a focus. In the first ninety days of the Trump administration, Oltmann predicts the country will see an end to mail-in ballots and that election officials like Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold will be held accountable. “And that’ll get us to a place where now we can start talking about sports," he says.
“We have to start healing,” Oltmann adds, sounding like an intentional parody of the political left.
The sound and the fury
Oltmann and his team haven't offered a precise date for the launch of the rebranded podcast as Untamed, though he’s been mentioning upcoming changes on Conservative Daily.On one recent show, Oltmann brings up avowed white nationalist Nick Fuentes. “Man, I gotta tell you something,” he says of the self-described “proud incel.” “You guys have built up a reputation around this guy, and I went back and just watched a bunch of stuff — I felt like a little fanboy.”
But then the kinder, gentler, less partisan Oltmann does attempt a clarification: “I don’t agree with everything that he says."
He is more up front about his intentions on January 1. About ten minutes into that show, Oltmann reveals, “I’ve got a brand-new podcast that I’m launching in 2025, brand-new. I’m literally going to change the name of my podcast and I’m going to move towards having conversations like I want to. … I want to talk to people who I don’t agree with and that I do agree with, and I want to hear their perspective.”
Beyond that statement, though, there’s little to indicate a change of tone in Oltmann’s programming, or a change of heart for his confrontational and accusatory on-air persona.
The new year brings with it the Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas and the attack in New Orleans, both of which are fodder for Oltmann right out of the gate. He pivots from announcing the new show to criticizing the Black female FBI spokesperson in New Orleans as a “DEI hire” after she stated that the bureau wasn’t yet calling the event a terrorist attack.
“The reality of it is this is a mostly white country, and mostly white countries, frankly, are the ones that are being asked to assimilate, assimilate to, and, and bow down and kowtow to things that happened 100 years ago," he continues. "And frankly, there are racists on both sides, Black people and white people.”
Oltmann segues from that to: “Anytime a white person says that I'm proud to be white, right, or disagrees with you, you go straight to racism.” But a minute later, he adds, “You got white liberal women that, frankly, are just retarded.”
Talk is cheap
One week before Trump's inauguration, one week after the anniversary of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Oltmann's podcast is still called Conservative Daily and his opinions don't sound particularly tame. "There's an obligation to pardon every single one of them," he says of those charged in connection with the J6 insurrection, responding to JD Vance's recent suggestion that only nonviolent protesters be pardoned.And suddenly, Tina Peters is back, now speaking from Larimer County Jail. She talks with Oltmann about the denial of her most recent appeal, and claims that county clerks are on Dominion's payroll.
Oltmann goes to break when Peters's visitation time expires, then returns to talk about a good point that white nationalist Nick Fuentes made on X. But soon Peters is back on the show, using her jail-issued tablet to make more unrepentant claims about the corruption of the system.
Untamed seems an appropriate rebrand for Oltmann's show, but conservatively speaking, it's hard to believe he's about to trade owning the libs for nonpartisan dialogue and "healing."