Mike Lindell Loses Some Of His Stuffing In Dominion Sanctions Order

Mike Lindell ain’t what he used to be.

Oh, sure, the pillow pumper’s hair is still the color of a burnt sienna Crayola, and his mustache would make a pornstar tumescent with rage. But a lot of the stuffing has come out of that cushion.

Yesterday, Judge Carl Nichols ordered Lindell to pay $56,369 in sanctions to the voting machine company Smartmatic… in a lawsuit filed against Lindell by the rival company Dominion Voting Systems.

It’s a bit of a bet-you’re-wondering-how-I-got-here-record-scratch moment. Here’s how we described it in 2022:

After Dominion Voting Systems sued him for defamation in DC federal court, Lindell and his company filed a counterclaim against Dominion and its direct competitor, Smartmatic, alleging civil RICO and defamation. And he filed it in the District of Minnesota, obviously.

US District Judge Patrick Schlitz declined Lindell’s invitation to punish Dominion Voting Systems for the tort of suing Mike Lindell, and transferred the case to DC, at which point Smartmatic warned that it was going to request Rule 11 sanctions against Lindell and his lawyers. But these brain geniuses ignored the threat, and instead dismissed their claims against Smartmatic, then added the company back as third party defendant in the pending Dominion case. Only this time on top of the RICO libelslander allegations, Lindell accused Smartmatic of witness tampering via cease and desist letters sent to people making false claims about the company.

Judge Nichols, a Trump appointee, has been presiding over Dominion’s defamation suits against Sidney Powell, Lindell, Rudy Giuliani, the parent company of One America News, and the election-denying Overstock weirdo Patrick Byrne. Unsurprisingly, it’s been a shitshow, despite the court consolidating discovery for the sake of efficiency and assigning Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya so oversee it. This is the same set of cases where Byrne fired his competent counsel and hired election denying nutbag Stefanie Lambert, a Michigan lawyer under indictment for tampering with election machines. Lambert immediately handed protected discovery over to her election denying buddies, refused to stop when ordered, got herself disqualified from the case, and yet continues to file motions.

But the second biggest turd in the bowl has been Lindell, who not only tried to drag Smartmatic into this nonsense, but also howled that he was entitled to stay discovery by filing an interlocutory appeal to the DC Circuit. (He was not.)

Lindell’s antics with regard to Smartmatic got him sanctioned back in May of 2022, with Judge Nichols noting that “at the very least Lindell’s claim against Smartmatic under the Support or Advocacy Clause falls on the frivolous side of the line (other claims do too).” Specifically, the court dinged Lindell for accusing Smartmatic of conspiring with its own lawyers and PR firm to suppress political speech by filing lawsuits and sending out cease and desist letters. You can’t conspire with your own agents — that is not a thing. And, as the court notes, the Support or Advocacy Clause (42 U.S. Code § 1985(3)) was a Reconstruction Era statute meant to protect Black voters. He did not add that it’s utterly filthy to use it as a means to defend an effort to disenfranchise 20 million American voters.

Smartmatic invited the court to award them almost $600,000, most of their legal fees themselves, after being pointlessly dragged into this stupid business. But in the end, Judge Nichols elected only to award them costs for the Support or Advocacy Clause litigation, roughly ten percent of their original ask.

This case is set to go to trial in late 2025 (unless he gets beamed up to the mothership first). At which point, Lindell is probably going to be on the hook for a lot more than $56,000.

US Dominion Inc. v. MyPillow Inc. [Docket via Court Listener]

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