by Sharon Rondeau
(Oct. 25, 2022) — During an appearance at Clay Clark’s “Reawaken America Tour” in Manheim, PA on Friday, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell claimed he met with then-President Donald Trump at the White House on January 15, 2021, a contradiction to an interview he did one week earlier with an associate, Brannon Howse, at an “Ozarks Worldview Weekend” conference.
Lindell’s address to a reportedly “sold-out” audience last weekend begins at the 43:13 mark of the 8+-hour event video.
Concluding a short narrative about passengers wearing masks on airplanes, Clark introduced Lindell with, “Nobody is spreading the truth more than our next guest…” after which Lindell was escorted on stage by Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret), Trump’s first national-security adviser.
In a meandering fashion typical of his interviews and speeches, Lindell after several minutes recounted the runoff elections to the U.S. Senate in Georgia in January 5, 2021 wherein two Democrats reportedly defeated their Republican counterparts, changing the majority party of the upper congressional chamber. Although Lindell initially invoked the date of “February 4,” when he said he was present in Georgia, he later said the runoff took place “on January 4th,” then “January 5th,” for what he said was preparation for “January 6 and 7.”
“On January 6, when they planned that,” he said, “the manifestation of that was going to be January 7th and 8th, which is significant…and that was the day 1.2 million Americans lost their platforms; they lost their voices…their Vimeos, their YouTubes, Twitter…churches lost their platforms…if you said one thing about the election or Donald Trump, you lost your platform.”
Wikipedia contains a partial list of individual and company accounts Twitter suspended in 2021 which include Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA1) for allegedly “spreading misinformation about voter fraud in the 2020 US election[437], Lindell himself, and his account for MyPillow. According to the source, Lindell’s personal account was closed permanently for “Repeated violations of Twitter’s Civic Integrity policy. Lindell used his Twitter account to promote disinformation about the 2020 presidential election.[443]“
On January 7, 2021, The New American reported that Trump was suspended from both Twitter and Facebook in the wake of the January 6, 2021 incursion at the U.S. Capitol. Trump’s Twitter account was never restored, and he now issues comments, official statements and “Retruths” at his new platform, “Truth Social.”
Another source, citing Wikipedia, reported of Twitter that, “On January 11, 2021, over 70,000 accounts were permanently suspended which were ‘engaged in sharing harmful QAnon-associated content at scale and were primarily dedicated to the propagation of this conspiracy theory across the service’[9][10].”
In addition to complete purging of accounts, on January 26, 2022, Breitbart News reported that “Twitter required account holders to delete 4.7 million tweets that allegedly violated the platform’s rules in the first half of 2021, according to the far-left Silicon Valley platform’s latest transparency report.”
As he has previously, at 47:40, Lindell said he told FBI agents who confiscated his phone last month that he wishes to meet with the January 6 Committee to present “evidence” of alleged election fraud. He also claimed that the FBI issued a report dated June 26, 2021 claiming, “There was no collusion between Donald Trump and any of his supporters.”
On August 20, 2021, Reuters reported, citing “four current and former law enforcement officials”:
The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.
Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.
Just before the 49:00 mark, Lindell “dared” the mainstream media, several of whom he reported were in attendance, to report on the name, “Dennis Montgomery,” from whom he said he acquired evidence from the 2020 election on January 9, 2021, a narrative he related to Howse and to the audience at his “The Moment of Truth Summit” in August 2022.
“Dennis was a whistleblower, and he watched this election of 2020 and he has 32 terrabytes of data,” Lindell claimed, allegedly collected from “November third to November sixth.” “When I got this on January 9th, it explained everything to me…I needed to get this to the president because this data had a gag order on it, a government gag order…It goes all the way back to other stuff, too…”
Lindell was undoubtedly referencing a U.S. government protective order placed on litigation arising in 2006 on Montgomery’s part involving software inventions created while he co-owned eTreppid, a now-defunct technology company founded by Montgomery and Nevada businessman Warren Trepp.
At the time, then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Negroponte requested a protective order, citing the State Secrets Privilege, on information relating to eTreppid’s contractual work with the U.S. Defense Department in the early 2000s. On August 29, 2007, U.S. District Judge Philip Pro granted the request only as it related to “any intelligence agency.”
“When I walked into his office,…” Lindell said of his alleged meeting with Trump, “I get in to the president, and I said, ‘Here’s this data; they took the whole election’; I explained Dennis Montgomery — ‘You need to sign this to release it so we can show the whole world.’”
He claimed at Trump’s request, he was escorted “upstairs” and “downstairs” by “lawyers” before exiting the White House and becoming a focal point of the media, which he said were “running at the White House, like a herd of buffaloes, running down the hill…they were lined up like cordwood.”
Instead of answering their questions, Lindell said, he turned around and went back into the White House.
“I never got to see the president again, so I didn’t get that sheet signed,” Lindell told the audience.
If true, Lindell did not explain why he did not mention the meeting previously, why he built anticipation for the release of the election evidence at last year’s Cyber Symposium without restraint, nor why on August 20, 2022 his attorneys filed a Motion to Intervene in the long-settled 2006 litigation with a request to have the “gag order” lifted to provide Lindell an avenue to defend himself against pending litigation from Dominion Voting Systems, Inc.
Following the government’s October 6 reply stating Lindell is not restrained by the 15-year-old protective order, Lindell indicated his eagerness to make the evidence public but has not yet done so.
On Friday, Lindell’s legal team submitted its brief in response to the government’s October 6 reply asking the court to stipulate that Lindell “is not subject to the Protective Order entered in this case and it does not bind him in any way” and that “The Protective Order has nothing to do with the 2020 election or alleged fraud therein,” as the government’s brief claimed.
Another unanswered question is how, if the evidence and/or technology used to capture it were in fact governed by a protective order, it was legal for Montgomery to sell it to Lindell, as Lindell has claimed, or for Lindell to possess it.
On Friday Lindell alleged that on January 15, 2021, he spoke by phone with then-HUD Administrator Dr. Ben Carson, to whom he said he “couldn’t get this to the White House,” referencing the alleged paper he wanted Trump to sign to lift the protective order.