Courts

Supreme Court Declines To Save Mike Lindell From 'And Find Out'

The rules of civil procedure applies to you, too, big fella.

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US-POLITICS-ELECTION

(Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Rough day in Pillow Town as the Supreme Court put the kibosh on Mike Lindell’s hopes of fending off a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit against him filed by Dominion Voting Systems.

After first professing to be “thrilled” to be sued by the voting machine manufacturer over his allegations that it rigged the 2020 election for President Biden, Lindell proceeded to engage in a bunch of batcrap shenanigans to avoid a day of reckoning. First he filed a counterclaim in Minnesota, asking a federal judge in his home state to declare Dominion’s suit in DC to be illegal and throwing in a RICO claim for good measure. Then, after being summarily booted back to DC, he filed another counterclaim, this time interpleading Dominion’s competitor Smartmatic, under the theory that the two companies were in cahoots against him.

Unsurprisingly, he got a chilly reception from US District Judge Carl J. Nichols, who dismissed the Smartmatic suit and refused to grant Lindell’s motion to dismiss the case based on a theory that Dominion failed to allege actual malice under the New York Times v. Sullivan standard for defamation against a public figure.

Lindell demanded the right to file an immediate interlocutory appeal, but was rebuffed by the DC Circuit because, under 28 U.S.C. § 1291, you can only appeal an adverse final judgment, and this ain’t it. But Lindell, who has frequently promised to enlist the Supreme Court in his schemes, seemed to think the Justices might be inclined to bail him out.

In a truly bizarre petition for cert, he argued that “The court of appeals’ rejection of petitioners’ appeal on jurisdictional grounds prevents an appellate court from meaningfully applying the ‘actual malice’ standard to protect from harassing litigation expression criticizing official conduct of public business.”

He and his lawyers, a dream team which includes Harvard Law School’s most famous emerita, Alan Dershowitz, seem to think they’re entitled to a pre-trial determination as to whether Dominion is a public figure.

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The petition also takes as its premise that Dominion, a private company, is really a government actor, and wonders “Whether a critic of official conduct may immediately appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 a district ii judge’s refusal to dismiss under New York Times Co. v. Sullivan a defamation complaint against him, if the critic’s motion to dismiss accepts the truth of all the allegations of the complaint, and its denial will result in his enduring long and expensive discovery and pretrial proceedings.”

And yet, much of the petition is occupied with selling the Court on a fantastic opportunity to clarify “[t]he proper understanding and application of Section 1291 to various collateral orders … an important question that has divided 14 the Circuits.”

The Court should grant certiorari on the jurisdictional issue presented by this petition so as to provide guidance to lower federal courts on where the line should be drawn between immediately appealable interlocutory orders and those that must await final judgment. This is an important question in which the Court has shown interest in recent Terms.

Call now, and he’ll even throw in a free MyPillow!

Or not, since the court declined to hear his case. Ah, well, you lose some, you lose some more. Isn’t that how that saying goes?

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MyPillow Inc v. US Dominion Inc. [SCOTUS Docket]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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