MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has spent four years and tens of millions of dollars spreading claims the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Now, he’s spending two weeks in a Denver courtroom, fending off defamation charges in a case he calls the “trial of the century.”
In 2021, Lindell claimed an executive named Eric Coomer rigged voting machines to switch the 2020 election from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Lindell called Coomer “treasonous” and a “traitor,” claiming he had evidence to prove the charges. Lindell never produced evidence. In 2022 Coomer sued him for defamation.
In this Aug. 30, 2018, photo, Eric Coomer from Dominion Voting demonstrates his company’s touch screen tablet that includes a paper audit trail at the second meeting of Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s Secure, Accessible & Fair Elections Commission in Grovetown, Ga. (Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)
Coomer testified last week that false claims about him led to credible death threats that forced him to hide out and temporarily relocate to Europe. He says he still fears for his life and hasn’t opened his window blinds in years.
“I didn’t do anything to Mr. Coomer,” Lindell claimed during nearly eight hours of testimony on Monday.
Coomer’s attorney, Charles Cain, asked Lindell if he had any evidence for the claims he made against Coomer.
“The evidence was he attacked me and sued me,” answered Lindell, who grew emotional while explaining that his crusade had cost him $40 million.
“I personally have nothing left in the world,” Lindell said, later adding that he had no choice but to persevere.
“I couldn’t walk away from revealing the truth and saving the country.”
“I couldn’t walk away from revealing the truth and saving the country,” said Lindell, who hopes his trial will provide a “gateway” to moving the U.S. to do away with voting machines and rely on paper ballots. His testimony continues Tuesday.
Lindell’s lack of evidence for his claims has been part of the case from the start. In an unusual opening statement, Lindell’s new legal team said they wouldn’t provide any evidence either. Instead, they argued the case is really about what Lindell believed about Coomer, not the facts.
“This trial is about whether Mike Lindell believed his statements were true at the time he made them,” said an attorney.
It wasn’t a great beginning for a trial that springs from just one of the three big defamation lawsuits Lindell faces. He also has been sued by Dominion, which employed Coomer, and the other major U.S. voting technology company, Smartmatic.
Mike Lindell advertising his product, MyPillow.
Lindell is convinced he can win over the eight-person jury, but others have chosen to settle defamation cases rather than take them to trial. Fox News paid Dominion an unprecedented $787.5 million to settle one case in 2023. Newsmax paid $40 million to settle with Smartmatic in 2024.
The claims that Coomer rigged the 2020 election didn’t start with Lindell. They started with a previously little-known far-right Colorado podcaster and conspiracy theorist named Joe Oltmann. On Nov. 9, 2020, just a few days after the election, Oltmann made an amazing claim.
He said he had listened in on a conference call with members of antifa, a radical group often cited by the far-right. During the call, a man he concluded was Eric Coomer said he had “made fucking sure” Trump would not be elected. Oltmann said people who rig elections should be killed.
Quickly, Trump-supporting election-deniers — some of them popular Christian influencers — promoted Oltmann’s claims about Coomer:
- Lindell gave Oltmann a speaking slot at his 2021 “Cyber Symposium” on election fraud
- Salem Broadcasting radio host Eric Metaxas called Coomer “evil” and “Satanic” and compared him to the Unabomber
- Colorado conservative radio host Randy Corporon, who is broadcast by Salem Media of Colorado, joined the campaign
- The Trump campaign even recycled the claims
Coomer sued them all. The case he filed against Lindell, MyPillow and Frank Speech, Lindell’s streaming video platform, is the first of these cases to make it to trial.
Oltmann testified that four years after he first made his claims against Coomer, he still lacks any evidence to back them up. He can’t find any of the 18 other people who were on that alleged antifa conference call. He claimed evidence he once relied on had been “wiped” from the internet by “some sort of government agency.”
Oltmann’s inability to support his claims about Coomer may spell trouble for Lindell and serve as a warning sign to Metaxas and others who relied on Oltmann’s claims and face lawsuits of their own.
In his testimony, Oltmann also:
- Acknowledged he skipped out of a 2021 deposition in the Lindell case not because he was sick with COVID, as he claimed, but so he could present his claims about Coomer at Lindell’s Cyber Symposium
- Revealed he and Lindell had done business with each other and claimed the relationship ended this year, in part because Lindell and his companies owe Oltmann nearly $4 million.
Lindell didn’t help himself in the first week of the trial with his behavior. He repeatedly violated a judge’s orders by posting on social media from the courtroom and giving interviews outside the courthouse to Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast and to his own outlet, Lindell TV. The judge in the case admonished Lindell but did not sanction him.
Lindell’s new legal team’s strategy of not providing evidence for the claims against Coomer could prove risky. His new lawyers also were chastised for using AI to create legal documents containing erroneous citations.
The trial is expected to wrap up this week. Lindell faces many other financial and legal challenges, as BNG reported in April.
Lindell has launched a GiveSendGo.com campaign to raise $1.5 million and so far has received more than $360,000. The appeal says: “Mike Lindell is in the middle of critical legal battles with the Voting Machine Companies and those who support them — the same people trying to silence him for speaking the truth about our elections. They want to shut him down, bankrupt him, and make an example out of him because he dares to question the machines. But Mike has not been intimidated. He will never stop fighting for election integrity, free speech, and the American Dream. This trial is not just about Mike Lindell, this is about all of us and the future of our country.”
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