With a month to go until Inauguration Day, Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and a personal friend and diehard MAGA supporter of Donald Trump, says he’s poured more than $1 million of his own money into bankrolling efforts to nullify Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential race.
According to Lindell, who served as Minnesota co-chair for Trump’s re-election campaign, he’s been in direct contact this month with pro-Trump attorneys and conservative luminaries like Michael Flynn to talk “all about fraud.” He’s launched his own private “investigations and due diligence” into voting machines. And he is financially backing the post-election work of several legal teams and Trumpist lawyers, including Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, the latter of whom is a former top member of the president’s legal team.
“For Sidney, Lin, and the other legal teams and experts [examining allegations regarding Dominion voting machines], that’s about $650,000 total over the past month, and another $450,000 I put into the rallies in DC and elsewhere, for the ‘March for Trump’ tour and the Jericho March and Prayer Rally,” the MyPillow inventor and TV spokesman told The Daily Beast.
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As of Friday, Lindell says he’s convinced the sitting president will get a second term come early 2021, despite the Electoral College confirming President-elect Biden this week.
“When everybody sees the fraud, there’s not going to be any civil war—everybody on the left and even Trump-haters are going to go: ‘Wow, he really did win.’ They’re not going to be upset to the point of rioting, because they’ll see they didn’t win fairly,” Lindell said in an interview on Friday afternoon. “And let me tell you, a lot of people are going to go to prison for this. And I think there are evil Deep Staters involved in this, too… This president won by a lot, by a landslide! I know there was fraud. And I’m not just some pillow guy that they can mock out there. One thing I know is deviations. I look at numbers and charts every single day [for my business]. And now I apply that to voting margins.”
Lindell appeared at two rallies in Washington, D.C., dedicated to calling for the reversal of election results. At a Dec. 12 rally on the National Mall, Lindell laid out a complicated conspiracy theory he said he had learned from Powell. Lindell claimed that voting machines had originally been set to steal the race on Election Night, but Trump won so many votes that his popularity literally overwhelmed “the algorithms” and forced election officials to temporarily suspend counting so they could add in more fake votes for Biden.
“The algorithms of these machines that cheated the whole country could not keep up because he had got so many votes it broke the algorithms,” Lindell said.
Lindell and his pillow company are a major advertiser for Fox News, but he has used some of his time during rally appearances to attack the network for the outcome of the 2020 presidential contest.
”They had to be in on it,” Lindell said on Dec. 12, referring to a theory that Fox participated in a plot to rob Trump of an election win.
Wood and Powell have become the leading stars of the Trump dead-ender movement in the aftermath of the president’s loss, baselessly accusing voting-machine companies and state elections officials of being involved in elaborate global schemes to steal the election from Trump. Both lawyers have asked Trump supporters to fund their longshot legal efforts, with Powell taking donations to her law firm directly and Wood soliciting contributions to a group he calls the “FightBack Foundation.”
Lindell’s donations to Wood’s FightBack Foundation had already hit one stumbling block.
Wood’s group also handled legal fundraising for Kyle Rittenhouse, the accused Kenosha, Wisconsin shooter. When Rittenhouse was released from jail on a $2 million bail in November, Rittenhouse’s lawyers thanked Lindell, claiming that the pillow magnate and an actor had contributed a combined $200,000 to get Rittenhouse out on bond. But Lindell later said he had given the FightBack Foundation $50,000 for Wood’s election efforts, not anticipating the money would go to help Rittenhouse.
“The donation was not earmarked for specific use,” Wood wrote in a text message to The Daily Beast on Friday. “At the time, it was applied by the Foundations to the efforts to raise the $2M cash bail for Kyle Rittenhouse.”
Powell’s claims about the election have made her a star on the right, but the lawyer and supporters who echo her claims could soon face defamation lawsuits. Both Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, the two voting machine companies Powell has baselessly accused of an imagined plot to steal the election with late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, have laid the groundwork for legal fights.
Smartmatic demanded retractions from Fox News, One America News Network, and Newsmax on Dec. 14 for what it called “false and defamatory statements about the company,” while Dominion demanded on Dec. 17 that Powell retract many of her attacks on that company.
When asked Friday if he was concerned about companies potentially taking legal action against two of the pro-Trump lawyers he’s financially supporting, Lindell simply said, “I would add myself to the lawsuit” (though he expressed disbelief that any suit would ever be filed), and “I would go against Dominion and sue them for trying to steal our country.”
Since the election last month, but before the Electoral College affirmed Biden’s victory this month, some Trump associates and advisers had already gone on the record to say that the Rudy Giuliani-led legal blitz and other challenges to the legitimacy of the 2020 election were useless or misbegotten, and that it was time to move on from Trump’s one term in office.
But not Lindell. The staunch Trump ally goes as far as to say that Republicans are now focusing too much on the Democratic president-elect and his family, and that elected Republicans and conservative media figures who promote allegations of Hunter Biden-related scandal are falling for a Democratic ploy to distract from this year’s election results.
“Who cares about Hunter Biden? They should be focusing on this election fraud!” Lindell said. “Tell your Republicans to get off their butts and support their president… God chose Donald Trump for eight years, not four.”
He added, “Even if Biden is inaugurated, there’s no statute of limitations [on election theft]. Yes, I will keep investigating this, [even if he’s sworn in], and I’m not going to stop trying to get this out there to the American people.”
