In the last week of his presidency, Donald Trump on Friday afternoon in the Oval Office met Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a personal friend of the president, who handed Trump six pages of documents full of unproven conspiracy theories, which he told him that China and helped other countries steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden.
Lindell says that after a “ five to 10 minute meeting ” in the Oval, Trump asked someone to take the MyPillow inventor to another room to show his documents to “ the lawyers, ” then asked for staff to help Lindell afterward. to return. . After about two hours of waiting, according to Lindell, he finally met White House lawyers who dismissed his claims but said they would “look into it.” He was not allowed to see the president again on Friday.
The Daily Beast was unable to confirm with other sources whether the people Lindell met were lawyers or other White House personnel.
“Could be [Trump] was busy, I don’t know, ”Lindell said in an interview Friday night.
At the rally, Lindell said he informed President Trump – who, after inspiring a deadly riot in the Capitol last week, still has not accepted his Democratic opponent’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election – that material alleging that China and other countries were involved. in an alleged anti-Trump election hacking operation were “all over the internet” but were suppressed by Big Tech.
During the brief meeting, Lindell, a staunch ally of Trump (who has also been a key funder of several legal efforts and rallies to overturn the 2020 election results) told the president, “Mr. President, this is real, you really have won by at least 10 million votes. “
Lindell said Trump responded by saying, “Well, we all know there was fraud, Mike.”
Then Lindell added, “He was upset to learn that this was happening to all the people who had supported him all those four years. He said, “Can you believe how they treat us out there?” ”
When asked about other things the president told him during the meeting, Lindell simply described the rest of the conversation as mostly “general.”
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 says was given to him by “ a lawyer, ” although he didn’t want to name who it was. Lindell, however, is close to and has funded some of the 2020 operations of Trumpist attorneys Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, both of whom have been in direct contact with the president in recent weeks and the latter was so extreme that she was ejected from The Legal Team from Trump late last year. That first document was captured in a photo tweeted by Jabin Botsford, a Washington Post photographer who was at the White House on Friday and quickly made the rounds on political social media. Those notes Lindell handed over to Trump on Friday appeared to contain a suggestion about invoking the Insurrection Act and “ martial law if necessary. ”
The MyPillow honcho told The Daily Beast he didn’t think Trump even read those two pages. According to Lindell, the president hadn’t even gone through the first four pages before sending Lindell out of the room.
Those four pages set out the theory Lindell discussed with Trump for a few minutes on Friday afternoon: that China may be the “number 1 culprit” by robbing the outgoing president of a second term.
Biden won decisively, of course.
Lindell said he showed Trump an article from The American Report, a conspiracy theory website that is in the grind even by the standards of Trump’s recent presidency, which claims to show that China and a host of other entities are running the election. hacked through an analysis of IP addresses.
But the president seemed just as, if not more, interested in the images on the article than in the text or map. The second page of the report, a copy of which Lindell sent to The Daily Beast, contains two photos of a man and a woman. “The president asked who the images were and I said I don’t know,” Lindell said.
The photos that confused Trump are side-by-side images of Russian anti-virus magnate Eugene Kaspersky and his ex-wife, Natalya Kaspersky. But while allegations that Eugene Kaspersky is close to the Russian government prompted the Department of Homeland Security to phase out federal use of his software in 2017, even the article in The American Report fails to make clear what Kaspersky has to do with a supposedly stolen American election.
It is not clear what point The American Report article, which is currently offline but preserved in archival form, wants to make. The banner image attached to the article claims a wide-ranging election conspiracy that includes the Chinese government, telecom giant Huawei, the Czech Republic, Amazon and even the German University of Stuttgart. For example, the article claims that a device with a Huawei IP address “hacked IP addresses” in a battlefield state on election day, but does not provide any evidence that hacking actually took place.
The American Report article appears to be linked to the conspiracy theory the site has repeatedly defended after the election: a truly bizarre hoax that the CIA used a nefarious supercomputer called “Hammer” and a program called “Scorecard” to steal the election. .
That idea came from Dennis Montgomery, a software engineer and alleged master hoax star who claims to have created Hammer. But Montgomery is far from credible – he allegedly defrauded federal agencies for millions of dollars in post-9/11 America with software he claimed could falsely detect hidden al-Qaeda broadcasts.
While it’s unclear where The American Report got its “data” proving the hacking, there are suggestions that the claims came 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 that Montgomery founded. On that page, Montgomery is promoted as a heroic election whistleblower, and is linked to a fundraiser where he raised more than $ 60,000 from Trump supporters interested in his allegations of electoral fraud.
Lindell more explicitly promoted the Hammer and Scorecard hoax earlier this week by tweeting a link to a Jan. 3 article in The American Report that mentioned the conspiracy theory.
“This is what we need to declassify the president!” Lindell tweeted on Jan. 11.
Following their brief Oval meeting, Trump said to him, Lindell said, “I have to give it to them,” referring to his White House attorneys, and then Lindell was brought out to meet with the lawyers. After what he described as “waiting an hour and a half or two,” he says he was taken to another part of the building for an interview with two lawyers he said he could not identify.
This led to an argument in which Lindell accused them of discrediting 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 it.’ They said they would “look into it and get in touch with you.” And I told them I just want them to know the truth … How terrible is it that we are about to have an illegitimate president? People on the left and right should want to know the truth. “
Following this exchange, Lindell says, White House officials did not allow him to see Trump again on Friday.