MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s been in legal hot water for a while now, with voting tech firms Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic both suing him earlier this year for defamation over his ceaseless lies about voter fraud.
And things just got even worse for the pillow pitchman.
On Wednesday, Lindell’s lawyers filed a copy of the search warrant the FBI had used to seize the bedding tycoon’s phone when agents confronted him at a Hardee’s drive-thru in Mankato, Minnesota on Sept. 13.
The filing was part of Lindell’s lawsuit against the Justice Department demanding that the phone and whatever data the government may have accessed on it be returned to the pillow merchant.
The search warrant revealed that Lindell is now a subject in the DOJ’s probe into Colorado’s Mesa County clerk Tina Peters, who was indicted by a county grand jury earlier this year for her alleged plot to breach Dominion voting machines in a bid to bolster Trumpworld’s voter fraud conspiracy theories. Data from those machines got leaked to right-wing circles online after the breach, and surfaced at a “cyber symposium” held by Lindell.
According to the warrant, the feds are investigating Lindell, Peters and other “co-conspirators” for identity theft, intentional damage to a protected computer, and conspiracy to commit those two crimes.
The “co-conspirators” identified in the warrant have all been mentioned in connection to Peters’ voting machine breach. They include prominent Big Lie activist Douglas Frank, Sherronna Bishop (who served as Colorado GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert’s campaign manager), ex-pro surfer Conan James Hayes, Belinda Knisley (Peters’ former deputy) and ex-elections manager Sandra Brown.
Like Peters, Knisley and Brown have already been indicted in the county investigation into the breach. Peters has pleaded not guilty.
The warrant also mentioned unnamed co-conspirators who are “known and unknown to the government.”
Lindell and Peters, both diehard supporters of ex-president Donald Trump, have become allies in a ceaseless campaign to spread voter fraud lies claiming that the 2020 election had been hacked and rigged against Trump.
In fact, Peters was speaking at Lindell’s clownish “Cyber Symposium” in August when Colorado’s secretary of state announced an investigation into the county clerk.
The leaked data from the breached voting machines was presented at the so-called symposium, but there weren’t indications that Lindell was directly involved in Peters’ scheme.
As he was announcing his encounter with the FBI several hours after it took place last week, the cushion tycoon mentioned that the agents had asked him about Peters.
Lindell reaffirmed that part of the incident in a New York Times interview, saying that the agents had asked him “if I gave her any money after the symposium.”
The pillow seller also walked back his previous claim that he’d poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Peters’ legal defense fund directly.
Lindell told the Times that he hadn’t directly given her money — he only thought (mistakenly) that he’d done so because “I was financing everything” (“everything” being election-related legal battles) “back then.”
Now Lindell is trying to make the DOJ give him his phone back, claiming that he doesn’t have a computer and does all his business on his phone.
Here’s the search warrant:
Correction: A previous version of this post misidentified the embedded filing. It is a search warrant.
