UPDATE: On Friday afternoon, a day after this story was published, 9News reporter Kyle Clark tweeted that Moore had pulled out of this event.
“A Ganahl spokesperson says the campaign agreed to participate prior to the inclusion of Oltmann and cancelled after seeing the flyer,” Clark tweeted.
Republican candidate for Colorado Secretary of State Pam Anderson criticized Moore for attending the event before it was announced Moore had pulled out.
“If this is true, no candidate should attend this and it should be cancelled,” Anderson tweeted. “Joe Oltmann is reprehensible and a conspiracy driven grifter. His violent rhetoric threatens democracy and the safety of election officials.”
Danny Moore, a Republican running to be Colorado’s next Lieutenant Governor, is appearing at an event next week with Colorado’s most extreme election conspiracist: QAnon-promoting militia leader Joe Oltmann.
The event is being held in Evergreen by two conservative groups, the Mountain Republican Club and the 285 Tea Party, on Tuesday, October 18.
Oltmann is the founder of FEC United, a controversial extremist militia that has pushed election fraud conspiracy theories that have been widely debunked by courts, election officials, and independent fact-checkers. Last year, Oltmann said that he wanted to see Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) — and other politicians who Oltmann disagreed with — killed.
In April the Colorado Times Recorder published a comprehensive timeline outlining Oltmann’s rise to power and the close ties between him, FEC United, and the Colorado Republican Party.
Moore has also pushed election fraud conspiracy theories, saying last year that the 2020 presidential election was a “Democrat steal.”
In July, after being chosen by Republican candidate for Governor Heidi Ganahl to be her running mate, Moore falsely claimed in a column for the Denver Gazette that he “always believed that Joe Biden was legitimately elected president.”
Throughout her campaign, Ganahl has tried to avoid discussing her stance on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. However, Ganahl refuses to explicitly denounce claims of fraud, continues to campaign with election deniers, and praises election fraud conspiracy groups.
