WASHINGTON (AP) — MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell said Tuesday that federal agents seized his cellphone and questioned him about a Colorado clerk who has been charged in what prosecutors say was a “deceptive scheme” to breach voting system technology used across the country.
Lindell was approached in the drive-thru of a Hardee’s fast-food restaurant in Mankato, Minnesota, by several FBI agents, he said on his podcast, “The Lindell Report.” The agents questioned him about Dominion Voting Systems, Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and his connection to Doug Frank, an Ohio educator who claims voting machines have been manipulated, he said.
The agents then told Lindell they had a warrant to seize his cellphone and ordered him to turn it over, he said. On a video version of his podcast, Lindell displayed a letter signed by an assistant U.S. attorney in Colorado that said prosecutors were conducting an “official criminal investigation of a suspected felony” and noted the use of a federal grand jury.
Lindell began by explaining that he and his buddy had been out on a fishing trip, and decided to stop at a Hardee’s drive-thru on the way home in his hometown of Mankato, Minnesota.
“We pulled through the drive-thru, they take the order, we pull up, and she says pull ahead,” Lindell said, noting that when they did, another car came and parked perpendicular to them, essentially blocking them in the drive-thru.
“That’s either a bad guy, or it’s FBI.”
Lindell said he and a friend were on their way home from fishing in Iowa and stopped at the fast-food restaurant when three cars with four FBI agents surrounded his vehicle.
“The FBI corralled me in Mankato, Minnesota, and took my cellphone,” Lindell told the Reformer, in a rambling interview in which he repeatedly attacked the Reformer and other media outlets, fulminated about Dominion Voting Systems and said the company is trying to destroy his pillow company.
Lindell said he asked the FBI agents if they were going to “come bash my door in” like they have others, and they said they weren’t going to arrest him, but they had a warrant for his phone. (He told the Reformer he was talking on another phone.)
Lindell says he runs 5 companies off that cellphone and doesn’t own a computer. He runs his hearing aids off the phone too he said. He said that the FBI didn’t even let him back-up his files.
