MyPillow chief spends tens of millions in fresh
crusade to push Trump’s big lie
Mike Lindell says he has poured up to $40m into wave
of lawsuits and a new movie as US experts warn of threat to democracy
Peter Stone
in Washington
Thu 4 Aug
2022 08.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/04/mypillow-mike-lindell-trump-big-lie-election-fraud
MyPillow
chief executive Mike Lindell, a fervent Donald Trump ally, says he has poured
$35-40m into a wide crusade – a wave of lawsuits to get rid of voting machines
that he faults for Trump’s defeat, a new movie about voting fraud, and a hefty
legal stable – to promote charges that the 2020 election was riddled with
fraud, despite a flood of contrary evidence.
In his
frenetic quest to dispense with electronic voting equipment that he has often
charged are defective, Lindell is hosting a two-day “Moment of Truth” summit on
20 and 21 August in Missouri, that he expects will draw 200 federal and state
officials and staff, as well as hundreds of representatives from groups
nationwide who have investigated election fraud this year and in 2020.
House
January 6th Select Committee Holds Its Third Hearing<br>WASHINGTON, DC -
JUNE 16: An image of John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani is displayed on a screen
during the third hearing held by the Select Committee to Investigate the
January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol on June 16, 2022 in the Cannon House
Office Building in Washington, DC. The bipartisan committee, which has been
gathering evidence related to the January 6, 2021 attack at the U.S. Capitol
for almost a year, is presenting its findings in a series of televised
hearings. On January 6, 2021, supporters of President Donald Trump attacked the
U.S. Capitol Building in an attempt to disrupt a congressional vote to confirm
the electoral college win for Joe Biden. (Photo by Tom Brenner-Pool/Getty Images)
On a
related front to boost his cause, a small segment of the summit will feature 10
conservative sheriffs who have become increasingly active in fighting purported
election fraud, who Lindell told the Guardian he invited so they would have “a
platform to get their voices heard”.
One leading
voice is slated to be former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, who runs the
rightwing Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). The
organization hosted a July meeting in Las Vegas that Lindell attended and
publicized via a TV operation he owns, and has taken the unorthodox step of
making monitoring election fraud its top priority, which Mack has dubbed a
“holy cause”.
The
upcoming Lindell summit underscores the growing roles of him and his allies in
a sprawling network waging a multi-front war to push Trump’s “big lie” about
the 2020 elections, and mobilize activists to ramp up their scrutiny of the
fall elections as poll workers and poll watchers. These moves could curb voting
rights and intimidate voters, say election watchdogs.
The “big
lie” network has been bolstered by other multimillionaires including Patrick
Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock, and at least $1m from a Donald
Trump political action committee.
Byrne
co-founded the America Project with retired army Lt Gen Michael Flynn just a
few months after they attended a meeting with Trump in December 2020, where
wild schemes to overturn Joe Biden’s win were discussed. He has boasted of
pouring $3m into a self -styled “election integrity” drive to hunt for
potential fraud by training activists in poll watching and canvassing.
Non-partisan
election spending analysts warn of threats to democracy in the new voting
blitzes that mega-donors who promote Trump’s “big lie” are underwriting.
“Mega-donor
spending, long associated with Super Pacs and non-profits, is now also aimed at
shaping even how our elections are administered,” said Sheila Krumholz, who
leads OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign money. “Election administration is
critical infrastructure in a democracy and should not be determined by partisan
power-brokers.”
However,
the burgeoning “big lie” ecosystem seems to have other priorities: it includes
nonprofits such as the Texas-based True the Vote, which co-sponsored the CSPOA
Las Vegas summit in July, and has teamed up with another sheriffs’ group,
Protect America Now, run by Arizona sheriff Mark Lamb, to form an alliance to
police this year’s voting for fraud.
Another
influential activist with strong fundraising ties on the right is Cleta
Mitchell, a former Trump campaign lawyer who has spearheaded numerous “election
integrity” summits in key swing states and is a leading figure at the
Conservative Partnership Institute, to which Trump’s leadership Pac last year gave
$1m.
Mitchell
participated in Trump’s infamous call on 2 January 2021 with the Georgia
secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, where Trump urged him to “find” 11,870
votes to block Biden’s win there. Mitchell was subpoenaed last month by a
special grand jury in Georgia investigating whether Trump’s call and other
related efforts broke state laws.
The “big
lie” advocates have spent tens of millions of dollars pushing baseless claims
of widespread election fraud in 2020 as they have built an infrastructure of
loyalists in swing states to be poll watchers and poll workers, and helped
enact new laws in 18 states since 2021 that include new limits on absentee
voting and other measures to make voting more difficult.
Despite
powerful evidence presented to the House panel investigating the January 6
Capitol attack, including former attorney general Bill Barr’s comments that he
told Trump there was no evidence of significant fraud in 2020, and numerous
studies showing that voting fraud is historically small, the pro-Trump network
seems to be growing.
“It is
troubling to see conspiracy theorists investing money in a network designed to
spread their lies about the 2020 election,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting
director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for
Justice. “They are using those conspiracies in an attempt to cause real harm to
voters, and to our democracy. In the search for non-existent fraud, they are
turning American citizens against their neighbors, who seek only to exercise
their fundamental right to vote.”
Morales-Doyle
added: “Now, it seems that election deniers have begun recruiting law
enforcement to their cause. At a time when both voters and election workers
have cause to fear intimidation and harassment, it is shameful that law
enforcement officers would compound that fear rather than offering them
protection.”
Some police
chiefs too are very troubled by law enforcement officials getting involved in
elections.
“There’s no
place for politics in policing,” Paul Penzone, the police chief of Arizona’s
Maricopa county, told the Guardian. “We are seeing a radical movement,
including some local law enforcement, of people who are committed to destroying
trust in our system for their own selfish gain.
“We must
fight against it, or our nation will no longer be the democratic standard.”
Critics
notwithstanding, “big lie” advocacy looks to be broadening.
For
instance, Lindell’s efforts to wage war on alleged voting fraud have expanded
in recent months as he has financed lawsuits to ditch voting machines in
numerous states including Arizona, which Biden won. He also plowed about $1m
into a new film on voting fraud by former Fox News reporter Lara Logan, which
is slated to debut at his summit.
Lindell
predicts the film will have a “huge” impact. Logan, who was ousted from Fox
after making an incendiary comparison between Anthony Fauci, chief medical
adviser to the president, and the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, told
Lindell she could “[not] find any place where there wasn’t fraud.”
The summit,
which will be broadcast on Lindell TV and streamed on Lindell’s
FrankSpeech.com, is also scheduled to include several of the lawyers Lindell
has tapped for his litigation, plus a team of cyber specialists who have done
research on election fraud, Lindell said.
The
upcoming summit seems to underscore other ties that Lindell has been forging
with Mack, the former sheriff, and his association. Mack’s Las Vegas meeting
was live-streamed on Lindell’s eponymous Lindell TV, and Lindell interviewed
Mack, a former board member of the far-right Oath Keepers, on his own show, The
Lindell Report, on 13 July. Lindell and Mack also held a joint press event in
Las Vegas where they touted how sheriffs could play key roles in fighting
alleged voting fraud.
Mack’s Las
Vegas event also garnered more exposure due to True the Vote’s co-sponsoring, a
move that reflects the Texas group’s aggressive drive to mobilize sheriffs to
monitor elections.
True the
Vote’s recent launch of ProtectAmerica.Vote, in tandem with Arizona sheriff
Mark Lamb, highlights a burgeoning alliance between the group and some
sheriffs.
The website
for ProtectAmerica.Vote offers a sweeping mission statement that includes efforts
to “empower sheriffs” and “connect citizens and sheriffs” as part of a
wide-ranging drive to ferret out potential voting fraud.
Other
drives to promote Trump’s big lie have witnessed more fundraising and alliances
to help beef up voting scrutiny for the fall elections.
Mitchell’s
summits, for instance, have benefited from strong links to well-heeled
conservative groups who have been co-sponsors, including Tea Party Patriots
Action and FreedomWorks. As senior legal fellow at CPI, Mitchell has led the summits
in swing states such as Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and
boasted of creating a “movement” to fight alleged voting fraud by recruiting
poll watchers and poll workers.
To that
end, Mitchell and CPI have helped set up local and state taskforces, and
supplied a 19-page “Citizens’ Guide to Building an Election Integrity
Infrastructure”. The CPI manual suggests traditional poll monitoring methods,
plus, ominously, urging its activists to be “ever-present” inside election
offices and to follow “every step” of vote-by-mail operations.
Further,
CPI has witnessed a big jump in its overall revenues, which benefit a variety
of the group’s conservative programs, including its election integrity
initiative, since last year, when it recruited Mitchell and Trump’s former
chief of staff Mark Meadows as senior partner. Founded by former South Carolina
senator Jim DeMint in 2017, CPI raked in $19.7m in 2021, up from $7.3m in 2020,
according to its latest annual report.
Besides
hauling in $1m from Trump’s leadership Pac, the group seems to have gotten a
boost from a letter Trump wrote, praising its role “helping to build out the
vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new
heights”.
Meanwhile,
when Byrne unveiled the America Project’s “election integrity” drive, dubbed
Operation Eagles Wings, that he ponied up $3m to launch this year, he named
Flynn and longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone as special advisers. The move
set off alarm bells with voting watchdogs such as Morales-Doyle, who deemed it
a “sham”, in part because of the duo’s ties to several Oath Keepers and Proud
Boys charged in the Capitol attack.
Byrne, like
Stone and Flynn, is known for conspiratorial and debunked efforts to prove the
2020 election was rigged. With Operation Eagles Wings he has boasted of plans
to educate “election reform activists” to handle election canvassing,
grassroots work and fundraising “to expose shenanigans at the ballot box.”
Byrne has
described the operation’s mission as ensuring “there are no repeats of the
errors that happened in the 2020 election”, and stressed the “need to protect
the voting process from election meddlers who care only about serving crooked
special-interest groups that neither respect nor value the rule of law”.
Looking
ahead, Morales -Doyle stressed that the Trump-allied election denialist
movement poses multiple threats to democracy.
“The
ramifications of the lie that the 2020 election was rigged reach far beyond the
events of January 6. This lie has fueled a variety of new threats to our
democracy, including changes to state law, harassment of election workers, and
the recruitment of poll watchers, poll workers, and vigilante canvassers.”
Still, he
added: “We must keep in mind that our democracy is resilient, and that there
are federal and state laws in place to protect voters and others from those
that seek to undermine it.”
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