Mike Lindell Demands Recount Of Unanimous Arbitration Verdict In 'Prove Mike Wrong' Election Contest

Was it Chinese Bluetooth thermostats? Italian space lasers? Mules?

US-POLITICS-ELECTION

(Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Mike Lindell is giving Donald Trump a run for the money as the most vexatious litigant in God’s own America. Sure, Trump filed a RICO suit against Hillary Clinton and James Comey in Florida. But the Pillow Fluffer responded to a defamation suit in DC by voting machine company Dominion by filing a RICO counterclaim in Minnesota. So, the competition here is stiff!

There’s one contest where Lindell is unambiguously not the winner, though, and it’s one he set up himself in August of 2021 at a “cyber symposium” in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Part hootenanny, part telethon, the main attraction was a $5 million “Prove Mike Wrong Contest,” in which Lindell invited data scientists to examine the supposed packet capture data undergirding his claim that Chinese hackers stole the 2020 election for President Biden.

“The symposium was to get the big audience and have all the media there and then they – the cyber guys – saying yes this data is from the 2020 election and you better look at how they intruded into our machines, our computers, and that was the whole purpose,” Lindell testified in a deposition reported by CNN. “I thought, well what if I put up a $5 million challenge out there, then it would get news, which it did. So, then you got some attention.”

Software developer Robert Zeidman, duly examined the contest materials, determined that exactly none of it was packet capture data, and attempted to claim the prize. But he was rebuffed by the panel of judges, which included Lindell’s personal attorney Kurt Olsen, a MAGAworld regular who put his name on various post election challenges, tried to persuade the Justice Department to sign onto those doomed filings, and recently got sanctioned along with Alan Dershowitz for filing a frivolous election challenge on behalf of Kari Lake.

Olsen himself wrote the rules, including the one specifying that any disputes would be arbitrated in Minnesota. And so Zeidman, who lives in Nevada, and his DC-based counsel Brian Glasser and Cary Joshi of Bailey Glasser LLP, duly trooped to Minneapolis in January to present their case. In April, the arbitration panel unanimously agreed that Zeidman had won the contest and ordered Lindell to fork over the cash within 30 days.

“They made a terribly wrong decision!” Lindell vowed to the Washington Post at the time. “This will be going to court!”

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And indeed it is – multiple courts in fact, because on Friday Lindell filed a petition to vacate the arbitration order in Hennepin County, Minnesota citing state and federal laws allowing an arbitration order to be vacated in cases of corruption. He has not alleged any actual corruption in his filing, but promises to lay it out posthaste in a memorandum.

“This is a complete sham. A complete sham,” Lindell told CNN. “The bottom line is this thing is wrong, and I’m not stopping until we prove him wrong.”

Meanwhile in US District Court for Minnesota, Zeidman’s lawyers filed their own petition asking the court to order Lindell to pay up and noting that they’ll be requesting to consolidate the cases as soon as a number is assigned in Hennepin County. (Psssst, it’s 27-CV-23-7502.)

Lindell, or “Lindell Management LLC,” the putative entity which owes Zeidman the money, is represented by Minnesota attorney Andrew Parker. Parker represented Lindell in the arbitration, as well as the above-mentioned suit against Dominion, and one against the federal government for seizing his phone in a Hardees drive through. He was also sanctioned recently, along with Olsen, in the Kari Lake case.

And with a batting average like that … what’s one more round of humiliation, right?

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Zeidman v. Lindell Management LLC [Docket via Court Listener]


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