MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a staunch President Donald Trump supporter currently running in the Minnesota Republican Party’s gubernatorial primary, claimed on Monday that the GOP has “shut [him] out” of the upcoming debate.
“They’re having a big GOP endorsement where they’re having a debate and I’m not allowed to come,” Lindell claimed to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on his podcast War Room. “They’ve shut me out.”
Lindell added, “The establishment doesn’t want me, Stephen. The Minnesota media—you wouldn’t even know I’m running.”
Lindell, who was officially endorsed by Trump in the primary, compared his campaign to his early days creating MyPillows for his customers, which he did by selling them door-to-door. In a similar way, Lindell argued, he has gone county-to-county to meet individual voters in his gubernatorial campaign.
“I believe I am the only one that can win, and I believe I’m the only one with the solutions to our problems,” Lindell told Bannon.
Despite Trump’s confidence, he is facing financial problems that may put strain on his campaign for governor. Lindell is currently trying to get out of paying $5 million he owes to an engineer who proved him wrong about his conspiracy theories on the 2020 presidential election.
Engineer Robert “Bob” Zeidman proved in a 2021 contest that Lindell relied on junk science when he falsely asserted that China had meddled in the 2020 election to steal it from Trump. Zeidman proved this after Lindell challenged people to prove him wrong in his election conspiracy theories for a contest.
Initially a panel of judges determined that Zeidman had proved Lindell wrong beyond a reasonable doubt and that Lindell owed him the $5 million promised, but three Republican-appointed judges from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later threw out the settlement. The Supreme Court, also controlled by Republicans, refused to intervene. Yet Zeidman is still trying to get the case reheard and the original settlement restored.
“In an April 30 filing, Lindell Management LLC attorney Barbara Podlucky Berens asked Senior U.S. District Judge John R. Tunheim, a Bill Clinton appointee, to agree that Zeidman should get no such rehearing because he would have ‘no viable theory’ to collect the $5 million upon a ‘second bite of the apple’ before the arbitration panel,” Law and Crime’s Matt Naham reported earlier this month.
The Lindell team’s filing argued that "Zeidman's alleged successful demonstration regarding the data at issue was based solely on the absence of capture packet data. Thus, in order to succeed, this claim, like the breach of contract claim, is contingent on the validity of the extracontractual data-format requirement imposed by the Pane. And like the breach of contract claim, the Eighth Circuit's express reversal of the Panel's capture packet data requirement defeats this claim as a matter of law."
They concluded, "Any rehearing would thus be futile.”
