2022 Press Freedom Index
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MyPillow CEO and fierce Trump ally Mike Lindell says his phone was seized by the FBI this week and it appears to have interrupted his fast-food lunch.
Speaking on his online show, The Lindell Report, Lindell said he was in the drive-thru at a Hardee's in Mankato, Minnesota, on Tuesday afternoon when federal agents surrounded him.
"We go through a Hardee's drive-thru," Lindell said on the show. "We pull around ... we pull up and she says, 'Pull ahead,' you know, 'cause they had to make the order ... we pull ahead, and a car comes perpendicular. And I said to my buddy, That's either a bad guy, or the FBI.'"
According to Lindell, it was the latter, as one of the agents who approached told him they had come to collect his cellphone.
"I said, 'My whole company, I run five companies off that. I don't have a computer,'" Lindell recalled. "'My hearing aids run off this. Everything runs off my phone.'"
At that point, the pillow entrepreneur said he consulted his attorney before eventually handing over the phone.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Lindell doubled down on his claims, telling the outlet the FBI is "looking for the terabytes from Dennis Montgomery."
Dennis Montgomery whom Lindell referenced to The Daily Beast is, like the MyPillow CEO, a conspiracy theorist who has previously claimed that Trump only lost the 2020 election because, as he tells it, a deep-state supercomputer was used to change the ballot count. (Montgomery is also a former computer programmer who was previously mired in scandal for allegedly conning the FBI out of millions in government contracts following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.)
It's unclear if Montgomery is involved at all in the case, with The Daily Beast reporting that the investigation instead appears to stem "from a 2021 breach of voting machines in Mesa County, allegedly by the county's clerk Tina Peters and her associates."
On social media, Lindell posted what appears to be a federal grand jury subpoena and a search warrant related to voting machines in Mesa County, Colorado.
The Denver FBI field office told The Daily Beast that that it could not comment on Lindell's specific claims but confirmed "that the FBI was at that location executing a search warrant authorized by a federal judge."
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In an earlier interview with PEOPLE, Lindell said he first met Trump in 2016 after the then-Republican candidate invited him up to Trump Tower in New York City. Recounting how, after he got sober in 2009 following a well-documented crack addiction, he had "never voted," Lindell said he found a kindred spirit in the now former president.
"It was just surreal," Lindell says of the duo's first meetings. "Now, my friends all seen that on TV me sitting next to the president and they're going, 'Wow! This can only be God because there's no way this ex-crack head is sitting next to the president.'"
