The lawsuit against Lindell and two of his companies, MyPillow and FrankSpeech, a streaming video platform, was filed by former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer in 2022. It accuses Lindell of a targeted defamation campaign sparked by an accusation Colorado podcaster Joe Oltmann made on his Conservative Daily Podcast on November 9, 2020, shortly after media organizations began calling the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden.
First, cybersecurity expert Harri Hursti appeared in a video deposition, recalling Lindell's Cyber Symposium held in South Dakota in August 2021. A slew of election deniers, including Oltmann and Peters, came together there to share their collective evidence that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. Lindell was touting the exposition of PCAPS, or packet captures of election data, but Hursti called it "random garbage" and "smoke and mirrors."
The plaintiff's attorneys then introduced two video depositions by Peters, the first from November 7, 2022. In that video, Peters is asked dozens of questions about her relationship with Lindell, her statements about Coomer, the Cyber Symposium, and her own experience administering elections.
Peters answered none of those questions, while her attorney repeated off-camera: "I'll advise my client to decline to answer on Fifth Amendment grounds." Earlier in the week, Lindell had called 9News anchor Kyle Clark "smug," but Peters epitomized the term in her silence, her deposer even remarking on her "wry smile."
Peters did answer questions in the second deposition, from November 2023. Asked if she had any evidence that made her confident that Coomer rigged the 2020 election, she responded, "I don't spend my days seeking out evidence or anything else pertaining to Eric Coomer. I'm not interested in Eric Coomer. I don't care what he does or did or whatever — that's up to him and god to sort it out."
Peters also testified she was unaware of who paid for her legal representation, or the cost of her attorneys. "I don't handle those matters, that would be questions for the Lindell legal fund," she said.
Pressed to name just one person responsible for malfeasance in the 2020 presidential election, Peters replied, "No, I'm not going to start naming people who'll sue me if I start saying they rigged the election."
After a lunch break, Joe Oltmann was called to the stand. Oltmann is central to Coomer's lawsuit against Lindell, and is a co-defendant (with the Donald Trump for President campaign) in another defamation suit filed by Coomer. On November 9, 2020, on his Conservative Daily Podcast, Oltmann said he had infiltrated an "antifa conference call" in September 2020 where he heard someone named "Eric," referred to as "the Dominion guy," say Trump wouldn't win the election, and that he had "made fucking sure of it."
First, Coomer's attorney established that Oltmann and Lindell were — at least until recently — business associates. Lindell's media company, formerly called FrankSpeech (now Mike Lindell Media Corporation) was built on Oltmann's tech, but the two had a falling out earlier this year. Oltmann testified that Lindell personally owed him $3 million, while FrankSpeech owes his company $900,000.
Videos were shown of Oltmann issuing veiled threats to Coomer, like, "I know he drives a truck, I know his truck's parked at his house. We know where he is." Oltmann denied that Coomer was surveilled at his request, but alleged others took the initiative to follow Coomer. "He has lots of enemies in Salida who don't much care about Eric Coomer, so we'd get updates regularly," Oltmann said.
If anyone thought Oltmann would recant his antifa conference call story, or his belief that Coomer was instrumental in rigging the 2020 presidential election — which is among the primary tenets of the Big Lie — well, they haven't paid much attention to Oltmann.
Joe Oltmann is the source of the conspiracy theory at the heart of Lindell's defamation trial
Conservative Daily / Untamed
Coomer's team introduced podcasts, social media posts and emails where Oltmann expressed uncertainty that the person on the antifa call was Coomer. Oltmann countered that his advisors were insisting he couch his certainty with terms like "allegedly," but he stopped saying "allegedly" in the months after the initial November 9, 2020, podcast.
Oltmann's handwritten notes that he says he took during the "antifa conference call" were introduced into evidence, where a handful of soon-to-be pertinent names were scribbled — not just "Eric," but also "Tay."
Coomer's lawyer, Brad Kloewer, ended his direct examination of Oltmann by accusing him of making up the entire antifa conference call narrative. "You refuse to identify who got you on that call, you won't identify the source — it's that you can't identify the source because the whole thing is made up, isn't it?" Kloewer demanded.
"No, you're wrong," Oltmann replied.
Lindell's lawyer, Chris Kachouroff, then took over questioning on cross- examination, when Oltmann took the opportunity to say of Lindell: "He has a lot of people around him, a lot of people take advantage of him, and, frankly, Mike is his own worst enemy."
On Friday morning, Kachouroff addressed the claim by Coomer's attorney that Oltmann invented the antifa conference call. "I learned last night that Tay Anderson can corroborate [the call]," Oltmann said before the judge called the attorneys to sidebar.
Anderson is a former Denver Public Schools board member who was elected at age 21 in 2019, and was also an activist in the Black Lives Matter movement — which Oltmann conflated with antifa on the stand.
Anderson filed an affidavit for Coomer's lawsuit against Trump's 2020 campaign, in which Oltmann is a codefendant.
In the affidavit, Anderson recounted how a local right-wing rabble rouser had been harassing BLM protests, and said that he'd arranged a Zoom call with progressive activists to address his behavior. "I participated in the zoom conference call to discuss how to counter his tactics peacefully," Anderson swore. "I was generally familiar with all of the call participants.
"During that call, no one mentioned 'Eric from Dominion' and I am not familiar with anyone who would meet that description," he continued. "I do not know Eric Coomer, nor have I ever met him. In all my time working in the community, I never heard the name Eric Coomer."
On redirect examination by Coomer's attorney, Oltmann was agitated and testy, calling someone a "pedophile" before Judge Nina Y. Wang called a sidebar and admonished Oltmann personally.
Coomer's lawyer ended the redirect with a video of Oltmann saying election riggers "should be put to death if found guilty of the crimes."
The trial resumes Monday, June 9, with defendant Mike Lindell expected to take the stand Monday and Tuesday.
