My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell Was Stopped by the FBI and His Phone Was Seized. Here’s Why.

Image courtesy of ABC News

There are few characters who elicit as many guffaws and eyerolls from the left as My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, who pals around with the likes of Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn and Lin Wood while using his considerable wealth to fund conspiracy driven “investigations” into election fraud—which of course have never turned up any actual evidence. What he may have done instead, apparently, is aid and abet some serious crimes.

Tuesday evening, Mike Lindell was stopped while at a drive-in for a Hardee’s (you can’t make this up) by federal agents who served him with a warrant and, after some discussion and protestations from Lindell, seized his phone. Lindell says he was instructed not to discuss the search and seizure publicly without first contacting the Assistant U.S. Attorney on the matter, but he ignored this and went online immediately to announce that he had been targeted and that his phone, which he claims he uses to run five businesses, was taken from him without any explanation. (Lindell also claimed he only uses a phone, and not a computer, to conduct business. But earlier interviews reveal that he definitely also uses a computer and perhaps is now lamely attempting to throw authorities off the trail.)

Contrary to his claims, Lindell, like any subject of a search, was provided the basis of it. The warrant, which he also displayed online, made clear that a federal judge had agreed there was probable cause to believe that evidence of crimes would be found on Lindell’s phone. Those crimes include the following:

• 18 U.S.C. Section 1028(a)(7) (identity theft);

• 18 U.S.C. Section 1030(a)(5)(A) (intentional damage to a protected computer); and/or

• 18 U.S.C Section 371 (conspiracy to commit identity theft and/or to cause intentional damage to a protected computer)

The warrant also made clear that the violations involved the following persons: Tina Peters, Conan James Hayes, Belinda Kaisley, Sandra Brown, Sherronna Bishop, Michael Lindell, and/or Douglas Frank among other co-conspirators known and unknown. In his diatribe against the search and seizure, Lindell appeared wholly clueless as to his own legal jeopardy, even though he is listed among the alleged co-conspirators.

So, what’s this all about? It swirls around a scheme where the co-conspirators, including Mesa County, Colorado election official Tina Peters, broke into the county’s election machines to illegally obtain copies of the Dominion operating system code. They did so by misusing the official ID of an actual software programmer to access the system. Peters and a co-defendant are under state indictment, and the feds are investigating. 

A wonderful, colorful but lengthy New Yorker article laid the bizarre facts of this case out, and I’ll summarize them best I can here.

Alleged co-conspirator Douglas Frank, who was once a high school math and science teacher and is now listed among the alleged co-conspirators, had been going around the country giving lectures about a formula that allowed him to determine the “real” COVID-19 cases more accurately. From virus to election denialism wasn’t a big leap, and he started later to claim he also could recognize a “pattern” that allowed him to look at any county and predict all the other counties’ vote results accurately. (Politi-Fact has rated this claim a “pants of fire” lie.) Frank was hired by Lindell as a consultant on some of his Dominion lawsuits.

Frank often makes the wild and unsupported assertion that elections are stolen via Dominion voting machines that inflate voter rolls in the system and then cause these fake registrations to cast vote. To prove this, he needed a test county that was very conservative and willing to work with him.

That’s where Tina Peters comes in. Peters was the elected Clerk and Recorder of Mesa County, Colorado. The 2020 election had run smoothly and without incident, according even to Peters, but a non-partisan city council election in Grand Junction, Mesa County’s largest city in April of 2021 led her to embrace conspiracy theories after it resulted in none of the four conservative candidates winning. This was actually unsurprising, as the four winning candidates had all attended a forum hosted by 51 community organizations, and the four losers had not shown up for it. But Peters and her friend Bishop, who runs a conservative podcast called “America’s Mom” and is a darling of the far right, decided that the conservatives’ across the board loss was somehow clear evidence of fraud. 

Bishop invited Frank to speak at a packed forum in Mesa County, where Frank dazzled the crowd with talk of “six-order polynomials” and “coefficients that go in front of high-exponent terms.” A conspiracy was thus born in this very conservative corner of Colorado. Frank wound up convincing Peters that two thousand dead people voted in the last election, something for which there is no evidence whatsoever. Nonetheless persuaded by his arguments, Peters worked with Frank to hatch an illegal plan to prove there was fraud built into the voting machines.

A software update called a “trusted build” had been scheduled for the county’s voting machines in May of 2021. These builds are conducted in person to avoid connection to the internet, which could result in hacks. Frank told Peters she needed to make a “pre-build” copy of the existing software as “evidence” to support their case that the Dominion software was fraudulent. Frank claims he contacted Lindell about sending someone to do the backup. (Lindell disputes this claim.)

Here’s where it gets really crimey. Eight days before the scheduled build, around May 17, 2021, Peters’ deputy Belinda Knisley instructed the I.T. Department to turn off the cameras in the area where the trusted build would take place. At Bishop’s recommendation, Peters reached out to a local software engineer, Gerald Wood, to do some contract work in the county’s election office. According to testimony Wood later gave, Peters’ office sent him for a background check, and he received an ID badge, which Knisley took from him saying they’d be in touch if they needed him. The New York Times reported that on May 23, 2021, two days before the trusted build, the ID was likely used by Conan James Hayes, another close associate of Mike Lindell, to access the elections office and copy the hard drive. It was used again during the trusted build, then after the update another copy was made. The copy included proprietary Dominion software similar to code used around the whole country.

Lindell invited Peters and Bishop to a symposium in Sioux Falls in August of 2021 where files stolen from the Mesa County election system were projected on a big screen. By now, thanks to a grainy video of a conversation between an “unnamed election official” and an employee of Dominion Voting Systems (posted online by none other than Ron Watkins, who administers the QAnon online forum) authorities were on to Peters and had searched her office. Peters’ big talk in Sioux Falls was shut down mid-course, upon the advice of Watkins’ lawyer, just as Watkins and Frank were about to perform a live analysis of the data in real time.

In November of 2021, the FBI searched the homes of Peters and Bishop and seized their digital devices. A state grand jury was empaneled, and Peters and Knisley were indicted in March on a mix of felonies and misdemeanors. Peters actually ran for Colorado Secretary of State in the middle of all this but recently lost her primary, though of course she disputes the results.

Based on the search and seizure of his phone, the federal authorities are ramping up their interest in Lindell and the numerous ways he has funded and facilitated bad election actors, including Peters. Their interest in him likely extends beyond his direct activities around election denialism. Lindell, after all, was a close associate and confidant of Donald Trump. He reportedly had even urged the former president to declare martial law in the weeks following the attack at the Capitol. (Among the text visible in notes carried by Lindell as he entered the White House were the words “Insurrection Act now as a result of the assault,” “martial law if necessary,” and “Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting.”) If Lindell is charged with conspiracy in this wacky identity theft and computer election code scandal, this could give authorities some leverage in gaining his cooperation in the broader investigation.