Like many of his fellow conservative activists, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell headed to Maricopa County, Arizona, this week to participate in Turning Point Action’s America Fest. Unlike his fellow activists, however, he is there to make a play for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, with Arizona elections top of mind for him.
Lindell stopped by Steve Bannon’s “War Room” booth to talk about election shenanigans and the role the RNC plays — or doesn’t play — in addressing election integrity disputes. After revealing he had spent “almost $40 million” since 2016 to combat election fraud, with some of that money going into RNC coffers, Lindell said he had talked with other big donors in recent months and they all asked the same question, “Why are we giving any money anymore when there’s no return on investment?”
Lindell accused the RNC of raising money for election integrity, what he calls “election crime,” and doing nothing to combat it in November and December of 2020. In his opinion, the RNC “didn’t have the country’s” back after both the 2020 and 2022 elections, and he voiced concern that the party had backed out of Arizona prematurely this cycle and put their resources into the Georgia Senate runoff.
Standers-by broke into applause after this exchange:
Bannon: Are you putting up all the money here for Kari Lake?
Lindell: I am.
Efforts to support Kari Lake’s election lawsuit are being done through the Lindell Legal Offense Fund, according to Lindell, with no support from the RNC. He told Bannon and the assembled crowd: “This week is so historical. You know, we’re right there. The judge squished into ten days and they’ll be done by Friday. So we had to fly in extra lawyers, extra experts. We have to pray that a judge will finally look at it.”
In further explaining why he is so focused on Arizona, Lindell maintained that Kari Lake won by “a landslide.” Lake supporters had been encouraged to vote “day of” instead of through early voting or absentee ballot in order to ensure their votes were counted correctly. Lindell insisted that when voters showed up on election day, they discovered up to 59 percent of voting machines didn’t work. Voters who were unable to vote electronically were instructed to place their ballots in a box; those ballots were then considered absentee ballots. According to Lindell, “Over 300,000 votes lost chain of custody and never saw the light of day.”
Bannon and Lindell then set their sights on the Republican establishment, insisting that candidates labeled as “election deniers” — including Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano — had, in fact, won their elections. Lindell called out the mainstream media, including Fox News, for not being more curious about the contested election results and questioning the results that networks obtained through Edison Research: “This is something all of us could see if you track the Edison Research [results]. They have a monopoly, everything goes through them.” Asked Lindell, “Why doesn’t anyone want to see this?”
Bringing the conversation back around to Lindell’s candidacy for the RNC chairmanship, Bannon asked about “the people” saying electing Lindell would be a “step backward” and too much time would be spent looking back at 2020. To this, Lindell quipped, “I will never stop looking backward because that is looking forward. The 2020 election will go down as the most important election ever because of everything we’re learning from it. Everything we’re pulling out.”
Insisting a red wave in 2022 would have allowed people to gloss over questionable election results, Lindell says all future elections should have paper ballots and that all ballots must be counted by hand.
Of the Republican old guard, he concluded, “Evil is greedy and that’s going to be their downfall.”