Government

FBI Seizes Mike Lindell's Cell Phone At Minnesota Hardee's. Or Maybe We're All Just Tripping On Acid.

We were told that shit would go back to normal once Trump was out of office.

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(Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Yesterday, the FBI executed a warrant at the Hardee’s in Mankato, Minnesota, and seized the cell phone of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Because we are trapped in the dumbest damn timeline for all eternity.

Here’s the man to tell you about it himself.

“The FBI came after me and took my phone. They surrounded me at a Hardee’s and took my phone that I run all my business, everything with. The could have just …” he said, trailing off. “What they’ve done is weaponize the FBI, it’s disgusting. I don’t have a computer. Everything I do off that phone, everything was on there.”

Leave aside for the moment the irony that a man who claims to have found evidence of election hacking by tracing digital data traffic doesn’t even own a computer.

Lindell spent the past two years using fortune and his platform made of pillows to spread bogus theories of election fraud and fund round after round of pointless litigation seeking to overturn President Biden’s victory. Initially, he told the Daily Beast that the government was seeking data compiled by election fraud conspiracist Dennis Montgomery.

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“They are looking for the terabytes from Dennis Montgomery,” Lindell told Beast reporters. “I hope they lift the gag order.”

In fact, there is no gag order, and Lindell is certainly not gagged. What Lindell got was the standard request not to talk about the subpoena, which calls for him to produce documents and/or testimony to a federal grand jury in Grand Junction, Colorado. But shutting up is very much not Mike Lindell’s thing, so here we are.

Lindell put a copy of the subpoena on screen during a broadcast last night on his Frank Speech social network, which is how we know that the FBI is seeking information on Lindell’s ties to former Mesa County, Colorado, election clerk Tina Peters, as well as several figures in the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement.

A year ago, Peters showed up at Lindell’s Cyberfraud-a-Pallooza in South Dakota with what appeared to be stolen data from a Dominion voting machine in her county. Peters made the bizarre claim that she had proof of election fraud to benefit Joe Biden, despite the fact that Donald Trump took 62 percent of the vote there. And then things got weirder!

Peters and two of her colleagues were indicted in March and charged with 13 counts, including criminal impersonation, attempt to influence a public servant, official misconduct, and identity theft. The plot involved getting a government ID for a subcontractor named Gerry Woods, confiscating the ID, and then using it to sneak “Gerry Woods” into the office so that he could image the county’s Dominion voting machines and participate in a restricted access update performed by the company’s staff. Toward that end, Peters and her confederates disabled security cameras and left doors unlocked to get “Gerry Woods” into the building, claiming he was a new employee just transferred from the DMV.

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In fact, the man who used the ID appears to be Conan Hayes, a pro-surfer turned election truther, who livestreamed some part of the event to former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, another funder of the vote fraud movement. Byrne famously accompanied Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Flynn for the December 18 showdown in the Oval Office with White House lawyers over the plot to get Sidney Powell appointed special counsel to investigate the election fraud which never existed.

Peters was subsequently removed from office and lost her run for Colorado Secretary of State. Naturally she is contesting the loss and alleging fraud. She also kicked a cop in a bagel shop after allegedly recording a judicial proceeding on her iPad and refusing to hand the device over when the police showed up with a warrant seize it.

Lindell has at various times claimed to have funded Peters’s activities, but told the New York Times that he was not responsible for Peters’s alleged breach of her county’s voting systems.

“I was financing everything back then,” he said, shrugging off a prior claim that he’d given Peters $200,000 from the Lindell Legal Offense Fund, “I thought I’d financed hers, too.”

But Lindell is sure that the government is seeking solely to shut him up, not to gather evidence of crimes.

“They think they’re going to intimidate me,” he told The Times. “That’s disgusting.”

And indeed, we are disgusted. But probably not for exactly the same reason as Mike Lindell.

Mike Lindell: Feds Seized My Cellphone at Hardee’s [Daily Beast]
MyPillow’s Mike Lindell Is Served Search Warrant [NYT]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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