Mike Lindell lashes out at CNN reporter as expert calls election fraud ‘cyber symposium’ a ‘pile of nothing’

MyPillow CEO has become increasingly erratic as he trumpets false claims Donald Trump will be ‘reinstated’

At his three-day “cyber symposium” ostensibly meant to reveal incontrovertible proof that the 2020 election was stolen, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell gave a particularly bizarre performance in a CNN interview in which he seemed to fly off the handle.

Speaking to reporter Donie O’Sullivan, well-known for his interviews with fringe figures on the pro-Trump right as well as militant supporters at Trump events, a noticeably hoarse Mr Lindell repeated his unsubstantiated election fraud claims in his trademark free-associative, high-energy style, a performance exacerbated by the length of time he had stayed awake in a hyper-energetic state as the symposium proceeded.

“Just forget about the evidence!” he told Mr O’Sullivan during a break in an event he had pitched for weeks as an exposition of said evidence. “If I’m right that China took our country, right now, do you care? Would that bother you?”

Pushed several times, Mr O’Sullivan conceded that “of course it would”.

“Then why do you think I keep going?” Mr Lindell asked. “Do you think I like getting attacked?”

Mr Lindell began the third day of the symposium by claiming to have been attacked at his hotel the previous night, though he didn’t go into details as to what the supposed attack entailed. “I just want everyone to know all the evil that’s out there,” he said. As of Thursday afternoon a police report had not been filed.

Asked by Mr O’Sullivan whether it wouldn’t be better just to hand his data over to cybersecurity experts if it was indeed legitimate, Mr Lindell again pushed back.

“I’ve been told that they can go out there and corrupt it and make fake stuff and put fake news out … So I don’t need your people to go out and doctor the evidence and put out a, ‘Mike Lindell’s a conspiracy theorist!’ We’re showing it right on the screen right now, so you can’t sit here and do a hit piece when it’s on the screen right now.”

Mr O’Sullivan brought to the conference with him a cybersecurity expert, Harri Hursti, who said the data made available did not come close to proving the election was stolen – and that in fact, what little Mr Lindell provided in the way of “evidence” bore no relation to electoral machinery, the supposed medium of electoral interference.

“We expected a huge file of data which we wouldn’t be able to understand how it could be evidence,” he said. “We didn’t expect there’s no pile of evidence. There’s only a pile of nothing.”

But as one of the speakers on the stage made clear, the media’s efforts to understand what Mr Lindell was putting forward were apparently misguided. “The CNNs of the world: you guys need to start reporting this stuff and stop fact-checking it!”

While the three-day symposium yielded a complete dearth of meaningful data, it also saw Mr Lindell and various other speakers putting in bizarre and sometimes sinister performances. Among those appearing virtually was Ron Watkins, a major player in the QAnon conspiracy theory who is considered a prime suspect for posting as Q himself.

Mr Watkins earlier this summer told followers on Telegram that he was about to share election fraud evidence of his own, but ultimately disappointed them with a strangely edited video of the CEO of Dominion Voting Systems as well as a link that installed a virus on users’ smartphones.

Alongside his other exploits this summer, Mr Lindell has been a proponent of the theory that Mr Trump is somehow going to be “reinstated” as president. In a July interview, he was pushed to provide a specific date and offered up 13 August, saying that by then, “the talk of the world” will be “Hurry up! Let’s get this election pulled down, let’s right the right. Let’s get these communists out.”

As of that morning East Coast time, there was no sign of any reinstatement in the offing.