The Daily Beast
MyPillow Guy presents Trump with ‘China’ electoral fraud theory, lawyers send suitcases to him
Drew Angerer / GettyIn the last week of his presidency, Donald Trump met in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon with Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a personal friend of the president, who presented Trump with six pages of documents loaded with conspiracy theories. proven, that he told him proved that China and other countries helped to steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden. Lindell says that after a “five to ten minute meeting” at the Oval, Trump asked someone to take inventor MyPillow to a different room to show his documents to “the lawyers” and then asked the team to bring Lindell back later. After waiting for about two hours, according to Lindell, he finally met with White House lawyers who rejected his claims, but said they would “investigate”. He was not allowed to see the president again on Friday. The Daily Beast was unable to confirm with other sources whether the people Lindell met were lawyers or other White House officials. [Trump] got busy, I don’t know, ”Lindell said in an interview on Friday night. During the meeting, Lindell says he informed President Trump – who after inspiring a deadly uproar on the U.S. Capitol last week has yet to accept that his Democratic opponent beat him in the 2020 presidential election – that the materials claiming China’s involvement and other nations in an alleged anti-Trump election hacking operation were “across the Internet”, but were being suppressed by Big Tech. At the brief meeting, Lindell, a staunch ally of Trump (who has also been a big supporter of several legal efforts and rallies to try to overturn the 2020 election result) told the president: President, this is real, you really won by at least 10 million votes. Lindell said that Trump responded by saying, “Well, yes, we all know there was fraud, Mike. “Then Lindell added,” He was upset to hear that this was happening to all the people who supported him for all four years. He said, ‘Do you believe how they are treating us there?’ “Asked about other things the president said to him during the meeting, Lindell simply described the rest of the conversation as mostly” generic “. The White House did not do so immediately. respond to a request for comment on this story. Lindell says he handed Trump a total of six pages, two of which were from a document he said was given to him by “a lawyer”, although he did not reveal who he was. Lindell is, however, close to and financed some of the operations of Trumpist lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell in 2020, both of whom have had direct contact with the president in recent weeks and the latter was so extreme that he was expelled from Trump’s legal team. last year. That first document was captured in a photo tweeted by Jabin Botsford, a photographer for the Washington Post who was at the White House on Friday, and quickly circulated on political social media. Those notes that Lindell delivered to Trump on Friday seemed to include a suggestion about invoking the Insurrection Act and “martial law, if necessary.” The President, in Lindell’s account, did not even go through the first four pages before sending Lindell out of the room. These four pages detailed the theory that Lindell discussed with Trump for a few minutes on Friday afternoon: that China is possibly “Perpetrator number 1” in stealing a second term from the outgoing president. Maiden, of course, won decisively. Lindell said he showed Trump an article from The American Report, a conspiracy theory website that is marginal even by the standards of Trump’s last presidency, aims to show that China and a number of other entities have hacked the election through an IP address analysis. But the president seemed just as, if not more, interested in the article’s photos, rather than the text or the graphic. On the second page of the report, a copy Lindell sent to The Daily Beast , there are two pictures of a man and a woman. “The president asked who the pictures were and I said I don’t know,” Lindell said. The photos that intrigued Trump are side-by-side photos of Russian antivirus tycoon Eugene Kaspersky and his former mul her, Natalya Kaspersky. But while the accusations that Eugene Kaspersky is close to the Russian government led the Department of Homeland Security to discontinue federal use of its software in 2017, not even the article in The American Report makes it clear what Kaspersky has to do with an American election. supposedly stolen. It is not clear what point the article in The American Report, which is currently offline, but preserved in file form, wants to make. The banner image attached to the article alleges a broad electoral conspiracy that includes the Chinese government, telecommunications giant Huawei, the Czech Republic, Amazon and even the German University of Stuttgart. The article claims, for example, that a device with a Huawei IP address “hacked into IP addresses” in a battlefield state on Election Day, but fails to offer any evidence that any intrusion actually occurred. The American Report article appears to be linked to the conspiracy theory that the website repeatedly defended after the election: a truly bizarre scam that the CIA used a nefarious supercomputer called “Hammer” and a program called “Scorecard” to steal the election. That idea came from Dennis Montgomery, a software engineer and alleged master fraud who claims to have created Hammer. But Montgomery is far from reliable – he allegedly stole millions of dollars in post-9/11 America from federal agencies with software he claimed could falsely detect hidden Al Qaeda broadcasts. While it is unclear where The American Report got its “data proving the hack, there are suggestions that the claims came from Montgomery. At the end of the article Lindell showed Trump, The American Report links to a website called “Blxware”, the same name as a company that Montgomery founded. This page promotes Montgomery as a heroic electoral whistleblower and links to a fundraiser where he raised more than $ 60,000 from Trump supporters interested in his electoral fraud claims. January 3 The American Report article that mentioned the conspiracy theory. “This is what we need the president to disqualify!” Lindell tweeted on January 11th. That’s what we need the president to disqualify! Https: //t.co/zrXavHWWpX— Mike Lindell (@realMikeLindell) January 11, 2021 After their brief Oval meeting, Trump, according to Lindell, said to him: “I have to give it to them”, referring to to his White House lawyers, and then Lindell was escorted to a meeting with the lawyers. After what he described as an “hour and a half or two hours” wait, he says he was taken to a different area of the building for a conversation with two lawyers he said he could not identify. This led to an argument during which Lindell accused them of trying to “discredit” the allegations he made. “They tried to deny it, saying, ‘We don’t think it’s relevant,’ and I said, ‘Don’t try to discredit it.’ They said they would ‘investigate and contact you’. And I told them that I just wanted them to know the truth … How horrible are we about to have an illegitimate president? People on the left and right should want to know the truth. “After that exchange, Lindell says, White House officials did not allow him to see Trump again on Friday. Read more at The Daily Beast. Get our top news in your inbox every day. Subscribe now! Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper into the stories that matter to you. To know more.