One candidate explained with a straight face how Elon Musk sent a strike team to Serbia to save American democracy.
The Douglas County Republican Party hosted a gubernatorial forum Friday night intended to showcase the party’s serious candidates. Instead, it offered a window into how far conspiracy claims have moved into the mainstream of one of Colorado’s most reliably Republican strongholds.
Four candidates took the stage at Kirk Hall on the Douglas County Fairgrounds: state Rep. Scott Bottoms, Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell, podcaster Joe Oltmann and Army veteran Jason Clark. The $25-per-plate event drew roughly 150 attendees for an evening of pizza, a firearm auction, and pitches from candidates seeking to lead Colorado.
What the crowd heard instead was a sitting state legislator predicting sedition indictments against the secretary of state and attorney general, and a podcaster claiming Elon Musk sent a “strike team” to stop Serbia from stuffing American ballot boxes. The two found broad agreement throughout the evening, including that Colorado should abandon its nationally recognized mail-in voting system.
Clark drops out, endorses Bottoms
Douglas County Republican Chairman Robin Webb said candidates invited to participate had to have raised more than $38,000, be registered Republicans, and pledge to go through the assembly process. State Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Weld County Republican considered one of the top-tier candidates in the race, is pursuing the petition route to the ballot and was not invited.
The evening’s first surprise came before the questions even started. Clark, a West Point graduate making his third run for governor, used his five-minute introduction to announce he was quitting the race and endorsing Bottoms.
“My campaign has not gotten any traction. I think Scott is the person to do this,” Clark said, adding that Bottoms “is passionate, he’s competent, he knows the Constitution.”
Sedition predictions and threats to jail the AG
What followed tested the limits of that “knows the Constitution” endorsement.
Bottoms, who represents House District 15 in Colorado Springs and sits on the Appropriations Committee, told the audience that Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Attorney General Phil Weiser “will most likely be indicted here in the next couple months” for sedition.
Oltmann wasn’t far behind. He told the crowd Griswold and Weiser are “facing going to prison,” and on his campaign website, he has written that as governor, he would have Griswold imprisoned on his first day in office.
There is no public evidence of any federal sedition investigation into either official. Sedition requires proof of conspiracy to overthrow the government or oppose its authority by force. Administering elections and enforcing state law do not meet that threshold.
Bottoms’ threats against Weiser extended beyond elections. He promised to jail the attorney general if Weiser resisted federal immigration enforcement.
“If somebody like Attorney General Weiser tries to stand in the way of that, we will put him in jail too,” Bottoms said, to applause.
Colorado’s attorney general is independently elected, and a governor has no legal authority to order the arrest of another statewide elected official.
45,000 cartel members
Bottoms framed that immigration rhetoric around an extraordinary claim: that “40 to 45,000” Venezuelan cartel members are currently in Colorado. He said they are primarily in rural communities, “running kids or running drugs.”
Federal prosecutors have charged 30 people in connection with Tren de Aragua activity in Colorado, including eight alleged gang members, in a case built on a nine-month undercover investigation. Law enforcement has identified no more than a few dozen confirmed members and associates statewide. The number Bottoms cited is a figure that would encompass most of Colorado’s Venezuelan immigrant population, not just gang members.
Serbia, stolen elections and mail-in ballots
Oltmann, host of the Conservative Daily podcast, was central to originating false claims about Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer that fueled national election-fraud narratives after the 2020 election. A federal jury last year found MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell liable for defamation over statements built on Oltmann’s story and ordered him to pay $2.3 million. Coomer’s defamation case against Oltmann is still pending. Newsmax and Salem Media, owner of Denver’s 710 KNUS, have both settled with or retracted claims about Coomer.
At the forum, Oltmann went further.
“I can tell you this, President Trump doesn’t win if Elon Musk doesn’t send a strike team out to stop Serbia from putting election ballots inside of our election in the United States,” Oltmann said. He added that Musk was at Mar-a-Lago at “5:30 in the afternoon, before the election even finished, and said, it’s done. Trump won.”
The claim echoes a fringe theory, amplified by Trump on Truth Social, that Dominion routed votes through Serbian computers and that Musk intervened to block them. There is no credible evidence for any part of this. Colorado has spent the years since 2020 dealing with the fallout of election-denial stunts, from Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters’ criminal conviction over breached voting machines to a steady stream of debunked fraud claims from figures like Oltmann.
Oltmann also claimed he had “proved” elections were stolen through a recent court deposition. He appeared to be referring to a January deposition in Coomer v. Byrne, a separate defamation case in Florida, in which Coomer acknowledged routine job functions, such as meeting with foreign-based Dominion employees about equipment and software.
Byrne’s attorneys framed the admissions as evidence of conspiracy. The filing itself does not allege fraud. Dominion has a software development office in Serbia, and Coomer testified that Serbian employees could remotely troubleshoot equipment in the company’s Denver office, standard corporate IT support, not access to voting machines in the field.
None of this deterred Bottoms, who has pushed unfounded fraud claims since his first days at the Capitol. On the opening day of the 2025 legislative session, Bottoms led a group of six House Republicans who voted against certifying Colorado’s election results, alleging without evidence that a leak of voting system passwords had compromised the vote. It was the first time Colorado lawmakers had challenged election certification in that way.
He aligned with Oltmann on elections all night. Both called for eliminating voting machines and mail-in ballots. Both declared Colorado’s elections corrupt. Each time, the audience applauded. It was one of several issues where the state legislator and the conspiracy podcaster found themselves in lockstep.
“Your vote does not count. As long as you have mail-in ballots, as long as you have machines, your vote is nothing,” Bottoms said. “Once I’m governor, no mail-in ballots, no machines, hand count, voter ID, all of this stuff will be instituted day one.”
Colorado’s universal mail ballot system, implemented in 2013 with bipartisan support, is widely regarded as a national model. It maintains paper trails, uses signature verification and conducts bipartisan risk-limiting audits in every county after every election. More than 3 million Coloradans cast mail ballots in the 2024 election. Republican voters use the system at the same rates as Democrats. Both Bottoms and Oltmann are asking those voters to use that system to elect them.
Getting the basics wrong
Bottoms made a series of assertions about Colorado governance that are contradicted by his own committee’s work and the public record.
He claimed Colorado has never passed a balanced budget. The state constitution requires one every year, as explained on the Colorado Senate Republicans’ website. Bottoms serves on the House Appropriations Committee, which oversees this process.
He promised to eliminate all property taxes, calling them unconstitutional. Oltmann agreed, telling the crowd, “you should not be renting your house from the government.” Property taxation is explicitly authorized in Article X of the Colorado Constitution and has been since statehood in 1876. Property taxes fund every school district, fire protection district and county government in Colorado. Eliminating them would require a constitutional amendment approved by voters.
Scapegoating transgender Coloradans
Bottoms’ false claims extended beyond fiscal policy. In a discussion of gun violence, he claimed that “almost all” school shootings in the past decade involved someone who “is transgender or directly transgender associated.” The data on Colorado’s school shooters does not support this claim. He made the assertion while arguing against gun restrictions, framing the issue as one of mental illness and gender identity rather than firearms access.
He also said taxpayers are “paying for transgender surgeries” on children. Children’s Hospital Colorado has stated it has never provided gender-affirming surgical care to patients under 18. Denver Health stopped offering such surgeries to minors in early 2025.
Representatives of Protect Kids Colorado had a table at the back of the room collecting signatures for three anti-transgender ballot initiatives due to the secretary of state’s office by Feb. 20.
Mikesell strikes a different tone
Mikesell, the Teller County sheriff who was sued by the ACLU over his office’s cooperation with ICE, was nonetheless the only candidate who consistently pushed back on the evening’s most extreme claims.
On property taxes, he said, candidates cannot simply promise to eliminate them without a plan. “You have to have money to be able to do life, health and safety,” he said.
On elections, Mikesell challenged the stolen-election narrative directly, warning that telling voters their ballots don’t count suppresses Republican turnout. “If we continue talking about this, we are alienating voters throughout Colorado because they won’t vote,” he said.
The crowd’s energy, however, was not with the sheriff. The loudest applause of the evening went to Bottoms and Oltmann.
The Douglas County question
Douglas County is the only major Denver-metro county that backed Donald Trump in 2024 and is home to some of the GOP’s most active donors. Its Republican central committee was the single largest county-level contributor to the state party in at least one recent reporting period, contributing nearly $17,000 in a single month in 2024. This was not a fringe gathering in a tiny rural county. This was the suburban heart of Colorado Republicanism.
Oltmann told the crowd he runs a data company and that “the data shows that most of the state is conservative.” Election results tell a different story. Republicans haven’t won a governor’s race in Colorado since Bill Owens in 2002, back when people were buying the first iPod.
On Friday night, the two candidates who drew the loudest applause from Douglas County’s Republican base were a state legislator who promised to jail a fellow elected official and a podcaster found liable for defamation over his election-fraud claims, who has publicly called for Democratic statewide officials, including Secretary of State Jena Griswold, to be tried for treason and hanged.
