By Leo Hohmann, 9/14/22
MyPillow CEO and election integrity activist Mike Lindell found himself pinned into a corner at a fast-food restaurant while returning to Minnesota Tuesday from a duck-hunting trip in Iowa.
He immediately said to his hunting partner, “these are either bad guys or they’re FBI.”
It was the FBI.
They had apparently tracked him all the way to Iowa and back through his cellphone.
Lindell said he cooperated fully with the agents.
“I said, ‘I’ve been wondering why you haven’t come to bash down my door because I have all the evidence [of machine voting fraud],” Lindell said he told the agents, as he recounted the experience to broadcaster Brannon Howse Tuesday night at Frankspeech.com.
On the return trip, when they reached Mankato, Minnesota, Lindell and his hunting buddy pulled through a Hardee’s drive-through to make an order. He pulled ahead after giving his order and a car zoomed in front of him to block his exit.
Another car pulled up and pinned him to the right, the wall of the restaurant was to the left.
They were trapped.
The cars were all different models, driven by undercover agents.
Lindell opened his door and said, “who are you?”
He demanded to see their badges.
“I said ‘what do you want? They said ‘we need to talk to you.’”
They showed more badges.
“We start talking and they’re asking questions about Colorado. I said ‘are you going to arrest me, because this will make international news.’”
He asked, “could you please arrest me? If you’ve been watching my show, I’ve been wanting you to arrest me so I can show you all the evidence I have (about election fraud).”
They said “no, we just want your phone.”
His lawyer, whom he called on the spot, advised him to hand over the phone.
Lindell said the FBI agents started asking him questions about former Mesa County, Colorado, elections supervisor Tina Peters and Dr. Douglas Frank, a statistician and inventor featured in one of Lindell’s films, Absolute Interference.
Peters is the subject of a federal investigation after she started looking into evidence of alleged election fraud in Colorado.
Lindell said the agents acted friendly and said they were “just doing our job.”
“I said, ‘oh yea, why don’t you come and bash my door down like you did Sheronna Bishop’s in Colorado.’”
He said the agents told him Bishop, who was raided by the FBI while homeschooling her children one morning in November 2021, didn’t answer her door fast enough. They reportedly waited less than a minute after knocking before they broke down Bishop’s door, scared her children half to death, and seized computer communications related also to the Tina Peters investigation.
“I was hoping they would arrest me. But they said, ‘we’re taking your cellphone. We have a warrant for your phone,’” Lindell said.
“I said ‘are you kidding me? I’m not giving you my phone.’
At that point Lindell called his attorney, who told him “give them your phone.”
“I’m thinking, maybe they’ll arrest me if I don’t give them my phone. But they would have done everything they could, with physical force, to get the phone, so I had to give up the phone.”
Lindell said he doesn’t even own a computer. He does all his business on his phone.
“I said, this is my life, businesses run off of this phone. I can’t believe you can just take someone’s phone because they want me to be a witness in the Tina Peters case.”
The whole event lasted maybe 15 minutes, Lindell said.
So now the FBI is scouring a famous businessman’s cellphone.
But the judges won’t let us see inside public voting machines.
The subpoena letter given to Lindell from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Colorado said Lindell was “not under obligation of secrecy.” However, it recommended he not disclose the subpoena publicly, which he did on Lindell-TV at 7 p.m. Eastern Time Tuesday, September 13, on the air with Howse.
Lindell said he asked if he could back up his phone before turning it over and was denied.
“We believe the impact of any disclosure could be detrimental to this investigation,” the letter said, further warning that if Lindell did disclose the subpoena publicly he must inform the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Colorado.
The letter was signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Teitelbaum.
“I hope you’re listening Mr. Teitelbaum because this is your notification. I’m going to tell the world what you guys have been doing. This is disgusting.”
“They wanted to intimidate,” Lindell added.
Lindell said evidence has been deleted in the civil lawsuits between himself and Dominion Voting Systems, which he believes is a violation of laws requiring election data to be stored in federal elections for 22 months.
Lindell said Colorado Secretary of State Janet Griswold “has done nothing but collude with Dominion … “to hurt the people of Colorado, now they’re hurting the employees of MyPillow. The FBI is getting weaponized by Griswold against our own people. It’s disgusting. We can’t have these evil voting machines.”
Lindell said the agent in charge told him they were “just doing their jobs.”
The warrant and subpoena are out of federal court in Colorado and concerns the Tina Peters investigation.
“So what they’re saying is, they’re trying to take my phone as part of this investigation,” Lindell said.
Lindell said he asked the agents, “what have we become as a country when our own government, this is what they did in Nazi Germany everybody. They’re attacking citizens, Gold Star moms like Tina Peters, companies like MyPillow, which is employee owned, they go home, they have families to feed. They’re Hispanic, Asian, white, we’re all like one big family. And we’re trying to survive the cancel culture, losing hundreds of millions of dollars. And judges kick the can for standing but other cases they’re pushing through like that against Tina Peters, a Gold Star mom who never even had a jay-walking ticket in her life.”
But Lindell wasn’t done with the agents.
“I said ‘don’t you care about our country? You know these voting machines need to go.’ This is the tip of the spear. Does Dominion and Janet Griswold think they’re going to intimidate me? They’re not.”
Lindell is one of dozens of supporters of former President Donald Trump, at least 35 of them, to have been raided by the FBI just the last couple of weeks. The most notable besides Lindell to face an FBI raid and/or arrest this month was former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who said this was an attempt by the Biden administration to use the federal agency to intimidate its opponents.
“This has to stop or we’re going to lose our country,” Lindell said.
“It’s hard to believe we are living in the United States of America,” said Mat Staver, chairman and founder of Liberty Counsel, an Orlando, Florida-based public interest law firm. “All going after Republicans, supporters of Donald Trump? This is a purge… and it has to come to an end before it rips this country apart.”