Judge Blocks Mike Lindell's Plan To Subpoena Government For Proof Of Magical Election-Stealing Super-Algorithm
The little man who lives in Mike Lindell's fillings would like a word with the court.
(Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
Mike “Lumpy Pillows” Lindell’s full-employment program for defamation lawyers remains undefeated.
Yesterday, Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya denied the pillow puffer’s bid to depose former Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and career Justice Department lawyer Carlotta Wells in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.3 billion defamation suit. Now we’ll never find out about the ONE WEIRD ALGORITHM the government used to steal the election for Joe Biden!
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This case has been Mad Libs on acid from the jump. After being sued in DC in February of 2021 for all the crazy lies he told about Dominion, Lindell filed a countersuit against the voting machine company in Minnesota, tacking on a RICO claim, ’cause YOLO. That case was dismissed, so Lindell turned around and interpleaded Dominion’s direct competitor, Smartmatic, on the theory that they’re all out to get me.
Judge Carl Nichols dismissed the Smartmatic complaint, then denied Lindell’s motion to dismiss the Dominion claim. At which point Lindell petitioned the DC Circuit and the Supreme Court for immediate interlocutory review WITH ALAN DERSHOWITZ IN TOW. (Don’t worry, he was just “of counsel,” so it doesn’t count. Unless it does.)
Forced to engage in discovery, Lindell promptly turned around and subpoenaed Wells, along with Negroponte, who left the government at the conclusion of the second Bush administration. He argued that the two potential witnesses could verify that Lindell reasonably relied on a man named Dennis Montgomery as a source for his false claims about Dominion.
As Judge Upadhyaya wrote:
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According to Lindell, Montgomery had provided computer programming services many years ago to the U.S. government through the contract Montgomery’s company, eTreppid, had with the federal government. Lindell claims he heard that “Montgomery had developed and used computer software that allowed the federal government to monitor internet communications and to manipulate computerized voting machines used in foreign countries.” Lindell further alleges that “he heard that Montgomery’s election-manipulating software was obtained by persons in China, and that Montgomery obtained copies of internet transmissions showing the software was used by persons in China to change votes in the 2020 presidential election.” According to Lindell, his knowledge about Montgomery’s “history of working for the United States government was one of the reasons [he] believed the information he learned about Montgomery.” Lindell asserts that he reasonably relied on this information in making the statements Dominion claims are defamatory.
Welp!
There are one or two teensy problems with this theory, however, starting with the fact that Montgomery has a long history of perpetrating hoaxes premised on suspicious datasets and algorithms cooked up in his own digital meth lab. In 2014, he got himself hired as a confidential informant after claiming to have evidence that the Justice Department and the federal judge presiding over a racial discrimination case against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio were conspiring against the sheriff. In 2017, he said he had proof that the government was tapping Donald Trump in the lead up to the election. And in 2003 he peddled software to the federal government that purported to be able to halt terrorist attacks.
The New York Times reports:
The software he patented which he claimed, among other things, could find terrorist plots hidden in broadcasts of the Arab network Al Jazeera; identify terrorists from Predator drone videos; and detect noise from hostile submarines prompted an international false alarm that led President George W. Bush to order airliners to turn around over the Atlantic Ocean in 2003.
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This was more than slightly embarrassing to Uncle Sam, and perhaps accounts for the energy the feds expended to block Montgomery from talking about the episode. In fact, Wells’s role in this debacle appears to have been mostly appearing at various points in Montgomery’s litigation against his former business partner and ordering him to STFU about “state secrets” connected to his magical terrorism detecting wand. As for Negroponte, he was DNI between 2005 and 2007, and hello, isn’t it just obvious?
According to Judge Upadhyaya’s order:
Lindell seeks testimony from Negroponte that:
(1) Mr. Montgomery participated in the development of software technology that can be used to penetrate electronic election equipment and manipulate vote totals; (2) this technology was tested and found to work; (3) the technology was developed and was operational prior to 2020; (4) the technology at some point passed into the possession of individuals outside the CIA; and (5) the technology was used to manipulate elections outside the United States prior to 2020.
Indeed, Lindell sought to intervene this year in the 2006 civil litigation between Montgomery and his former business partner, a decade after it was dismissed, on the theory that it might offer proof that there really was a secret algorithm developed two decades ago capable of warping election equipment — and perhaps the spacetime continuum! — to put Joe Biden in power.
Having waded through hundreds of pages of insane drivel, Judge Upadhyaya seems astonished that she’s actually having to spell out to a represented party why stringboard conjecture about the credibility of his own witness is a basis to compel discovery.
[T]estimony from Wells and Negroponte about why the United States sought and enforced a protective order in unrelated litigation almost 20 years ago is irrelevant to this case because it is not the actual basis for Lindell’s statements about Dominion vis-à-vis the 2020 election. That Lindell did not seek to verify the information he “received” and “heard” about Montgomery’s work with the U.S. Government when making his statements related to the 2020 U.S. election does not now make that information relevant … Nor does Lindell provide any authority for the proposition that he can rely on information discovered years after he made the statements to justify whether his conduct was “reasonable” under the circumstances as they existed at the time he made the statements.
Just wait ’til the Supreme Court hears about this one!
Oh, and PS, in addition to steering Lindell into this shitstorm, Montgomery already cost his pillow pal $5 million by supplying him with garbage “election” data for the “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge won by software developer Robert Zeidman.
Lindell v. US Dominion, Inc. [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
