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In the last week of his presidency, Donald Trump met on Friday afternoon in the Oval Office with Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a personal friend of the president, who presented Trump with six pages of documents, laden with theories of the unproven plot he told her proved China and other countries helped steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden.
Lindell says that after a “five to ten minute meeting” in the Oval, Trump asked someone to take the inventor of MyPillow to another room to show his documents to the “lawyers,” then asked. staff to bring Lindell back afterwards. . After about two hours of waiting, according to Lindell, he finally met White House attorneys who dismissed his claims but said they would “look into the matter.” He was then not allowed to see the president again on Friday.
The Daily Beast could not confirm with other sources whether the people Lindell met were lawyers or other White House staff.
“May be [Trump] got busy, I don’t know, ”Lindell said in an interview Friday night.
During the meeting, Lindell said he briefed President Trump – who after inspiring a deadly riot on the United States Capitol last week has still not come to terms with his Democratic opponent beating him in the presidential election of 2020 – that documents alleging the involvement of China and other nations in a supposed anti-Trump election hacking operation were “all over the Internet,” but being suppressed by Big Tech.
During the brief meeting, Lindell, a staunch Trump ally (who has also been a major backer of several legal efforts and rallies to try to overturn the 2020 election result) told the President: “ Mr. President, this is real, you really won by at least 10 million votes.
Lindell said Trump responded by saying, “Well, yeah, we all know there was fraud, Mike.”
Then Lindell added, “He was shocked to learn that this was happening to everyone who supported him during those four years. He said, ‘Can you believe how they treat us there?’ “
Asked about other things the president said to him during the meeting, Lindell simply described the rest of the conversation as being mostly “generic.”
The White House did not 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 does not name who it was . Lindell is, however, close to and funded some of the 2020 operations of Trumpist lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, who have both had direct contact with the president in recent weeks and whose latter was so extreme that he was kicked out. Trump’s legal team at the end of last year. This first document was captured in a photo tweeted by Jabin Botsford, a Washington post photographer who was at the White House on Friday, and who quickly made the rounds on political social networks. Those notes Lindell handed to Trump on Friday appeared to include a suggestion on invoking insurgency law and “martial law if necessary.”
MyPillow’s honcho told the Daily Beast he doesn’t think Trump even read those two pages. The President, according to Lindell’s account, didn’t even go through the first four pages before sending Lindell out of the room.
Those four pages detailed the theory Lindell discussed with Trump for a few minutes Friday afternoon: that China may be “the number one perpetrator” in depriving the outgoing president of a second term.
Biden, of course, won decisively.
Lindell said he showed Trump an article from The American Report, a conspiracy theory website that falls outside even the standards of Trump’s late presidency, which claims to show that China and a host of other entities have hacked the election through an analysis of IP addresses.
But the president seemed just as, if not more, interested in the pictures of the article, rather than the text or graphic. On the second page of the report, of which Lindell sent a copy to the Daily Beast, are two photos 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 images of Russian antivirus mogul Eugene Kaspersky and his ex-wife, Natalya Kaspersky. But while accusations that Eugene Kaspersky is close to the Russian government prompted the Department of Homeland Security to phase out federal use of its software in 2017, even The American Report article does not specify what Kaspersky has. to do with an allegedly stolen US election.
It is unclear how much The American Report article, which is currently offline but kept in archival form, wants to make. The banner image attached to the article alleges a massive 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 IP addresses” in a battlefield state on Election Day, but offers no evidence that any hacking actually happened .
The American Report article appears to be related to the conspiracy theory that the site has repeatedly championed after the election: a truly bizarre hoax that the CIA used an infamous supercomputer called “Hammer” and a program called “Scorecard” to steal the election.
This idea came from Dennis Montgomery, a software engineer and alleged hoax master who claims to have created Hammer. But Montgomery is far from believable – he allegedly scammed federal agencies for millions of dollars in America after 9/11 with software that he said could falsely detect hidden Al Qaeda transmissions.
While it is not known where The American Report got its “data” proving the hack, there are suggestions that the allegations originated 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 Montgomery once founded. This page promotes Montgomery as a heroic election whistleblower, and links to a fundraiser where he raised over $ 60,000 from Trump supporters interested in his allegations of election fraud.
Lindell promoted the Hammer and Scorecard hoax more explicitly earlier this week, tweeting a link to a January 3 article in The American Report that mentioned the conspiracy theory.
“This is what we need the president to downgrade!” Lindell tweeted on January 11.
After their brief oval meeting, Trump, according to Lindell, told him, “I have to give it to them,” referring 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” of waiting, he says he was taken to another area of the building for a conversation with two lawyers he said he could not identify.
This led to an argument in which Lindell accused them of trying to “discredit” the claims he made.
“They tried to deny it by saying, ‘We don’t think it’s relevant’, and I said, ‘Don’t try to discredit him’. They said they would “look into the matter and get back to you”. And I told them I just wanted them to know the truth … Is it horrible that we’re about to have an illegitimate president? People on the left and on the right should want to know the truth. “
As a result of that exchange, Lindell says, White House officials did not allow him to see Trump again on Friday.
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