In the final week of his presidency, Donald Trump met Friday afternoon in the Oval Office with Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow and a personal friend of the president, who presented Trump with six pages of documents, loaded of unproven conspiracy theories, which told him he proved that China and other countries helped steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden.
Lindell says that after a “five- to ten-minute meeting” at the Oval, Trump asked someone to take the inventor of MyPillow to a different room to show his documents to the “lawyers,” and then he asked the staff to bring Lindell afterwards. After an approximate two-hour wait, according to Lindell, he finally met with White House attorneys who dismissed his claims, but said they would “study them.” He was then not allowed to see the president again on Friday.
The Daily Beast could not confirm with other sources whether the people Lindell met were lawyers or other White House employees.
“May be [Trump] I was busy, I don’t know, ”Lindell said in an interview Friday night.
During the meeting, Lindell said he informed President Trump, who after inspiring a deadly revolt at the U.S. Capitol last week has still not accepted that his Democratic opponent would win him in the 2020 presidential election, that the materials alleging the involvement of China and other countries in an alleged election piracy operation against Trump, were “all over the Internet,” but Big Tech suppressed them.
At the brief meeting, Lindell, a staunch ally of Trump (who has also been a major financial sponsor of various legal efforts and rallies to try to overturn the 2020 election result), told the president, “Mr. President , this is real, you really won by at least 10 million votes “.
Lindell said Trump responded by saying, “Well, yeah, we all know there’s been fraud, Mike.”
Then Lindell added: “I was upset to hear that this was happening to all the people who supported him during all these four years. He said, ‘Can you believe how they treat us around here?’ “
Asked about other things the president told him during the meeting, Lindell simply described the rest of the conversation as mostly “generic.”
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 came from a document he said gave him “a lawyer,” though he would not mention who he was. Lindell, however, is close by and has funded some of the 2020 operations of trumpeter lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, both of whom have had direct contact with the president in recent weeks and the latter was so extreme that he was expelled from Trump’s legal team late last year. This 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 turned to political social media. Those notes Lindell handed out to Trump on Friday seemed to include a suggestion about invoking the Insurrection Act and “martial law if necessary.”
MyPillow’s honcho told The Daily Beast that he didn’t think Trump read either of those two pages. The president, on Lindell’s account, didn’t even go through the first four pages before sending Lindell out of the room.
These four pages detailed the theory Lindell discussed with Trump for a few minutes Friday afternoon: that China is possibly the “number 1 author” in stealing a second term from the outgoing president.
Biden, of course, won decisively.
Lindell said he showed Trump an article in The American Report, a conspiracy theory website that margins even for the standards of the late Trump presidency, which seeks to prove that China and a number of others entities hacked the election through IP address analysis.
But the president seemed, if not more, interested in the images in the article rather than the text or graphic. On the second page of the report, a copy of which Lindell sent to The Daily Beast, are two photos of a man and a woman. “The president asked who the pictures were and I said I don’t know,” Lindell said.
The photos that baffled Trump are side-by-side images of Russian antivirus mogul Eugene Kaspersky and his ex-wife, Natalya Kaspersky. But while allegations that Eugene Kaspersky was close to the Russian government caused the Department of Homeland Security to phase out federal use of its software in 2017, not even The American Report article makes it clear what it has. to do with Kaspersky with an election allegedly stolen in the United States.
It is unclear what point the American Report article wants to point to, which is currently offline but is preserved in archival form. The image on the banner attached to the article alleges a widespread electoral conspiracy that includes the Chinese government, telecommunications giant Huawei, the Czech Republic, Amazon and even the German University of Stuttgart. The article states, for example, that a device with a Huawei IP address “hacked IP addresses” in a battlefield state on election day, but does not offer any evidence that any piracy has occurred.
The American Report article seems to be tied to the conspiracy theory that the site has repeatedly defended after the election: a really strange hoax that the CIA used a nefarious supercomputer called “Hammer” and a program called Scorecard ”To steal the election.
This idea came from Dennis Montgomery, a software engineer and alleged master cheater who claims to have created Hammer. But Montgomery is far from credible: he allegedly ripped off federal agencies for millions of dollars in post-9/11 America with software claiming he 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 come from Montgomery. At the end of the article Lindell showed Trump, The American Report links to a website called “Blxware,” the same name Montgomery once founded. This page promotes Montgomery as an electoral whistleblower hero and links to a fundraiser where he has raised more than $ 60,000 from Trump supporters interested in his election fraud claims.
Lindell promoted the Hammer and Scorecard hoax more explicitly earlier this week, posting a link to a Jan. 3 article in The American Report that mentioned conspiracy theory.
“That’s what we need the president to declassify!” Lindell tweeted on January 11th.
After his brief Oval meeting, Trump, according to Lindell, told him, “I have to give them,” referring to his White House attorneys, and then Lindell was escorted to a meeting with attorneys. After what he described as waiting “an hour and a half or two hours,” he said he was taken to a different area of the building to chat with two lawyers he said he could not identify.
This led to an argument during which Lindell accused them of trying to “discredit” the claims he filed.
“They tried to deny it, saying,‘ We don’t think it’s relevant, ’and I said,‘ Don’t try to discredit it. ’They said,‘ They’d look at it and find you again. ’And I told them I just wanted to let them know the truth … How horrible is it that we are about to have an illegitimate president? People on the left and right should want to know the truth ”.
After that exchange, Lindell says, White House officials did not allow him to see Trump again on Friday.