Michael James Lindell, also referred to as the My Pillow Guy, speaks before a rally for former U.S. President Donald Trump at The Farm at 95 on April 9, 2022 in Selma, North Carolina.
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An arbitration panel ordered MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell to pay $5 million inside 30 days to a Nevada software developer for proving Lindell was incorrect in his claim that certain data was related to the 2020 presidential election and purported voting machine fraud.
The panel, in its 23-page ruling issued Wednesday, said that the Robert Zeidman “proved the information Lindell LLC provided, and represented reflected information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally didn’t reflect November 2020 election data.” Zeidman, a software developer, entered the “Prove Mike Incorrect Challenge” contest in during a cyber symposium in August 2021.
The American Arbitration Association panel, which held a three-day hearing in January within the case, also said that the Lindell LLC’s “failure to pay Mr. Zeidman the $5 million” offered because the stated prize of the competition “was a breach of the contract, entitling him to get well.”
Zeidman called the ruling “great” in an interview with CNBC.
“I knew from the start that I’d win,” Zeidman said, citing his review of the information, which Lindell believed showed that China had interfered within the 2020 election in several states and effectively swindled then-President Donald Trump out of reelection.
When Zeidman dug into the source of a few of the data “I got a [Microsoft] Word document which was principally a giant table of numbers.”
“This was obviously manufactured bogus data,” Zeidman said.
He said the information pushed by Lindell is a component of a “fraud amongst right-wing people” who argue that Trump is the true winner of the 2020 election.
“I’m a right-wing conservative,” Zeidman said, adding that he voted for Trump in each 2016 and 2020.
But Zeidman also said, “I do not expect to see the cash” that Lindell was ordered to pay him.
“I feel that Lindell’s got greater issues with the Dominion case,” he said, referring to a $1.3 billion lawsuit Lindell faces from Dominion Voting Systems for allegedly defaming that voting machine company together with his allegations.
Lindell faces a separate defamation lawsuit by one other voting machine company, Smartmatic.
“He’ll delay paying me and I do not know if he’ll have any money after Dominion.”
Lindell called the arbitration ruling “a horrrible decision.”
He also told CNBC that he’ll challenge the arbitration panel’s decision in court.
“The evidence was from 2020,” Lindell said of the information that was the topic of the competition. “That is the one guy who says it wasn’t.”
Lindell is one of the vital distinguished advocates of claims that Trump was swindled out of a victory within the 2020 election by voting machine results that were tampered with.
He told CNBC in December 2021 that he had spent $25 million of his own money to advertise claims that the election was stolen from Trump.
Bill Barr, who worked as attorney general under Trump, has said there was no widespread voting fraud within the election.
The U.S. intelligence community, in response to a declassified report in 2021, has said there are “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to change any technical aspect of the voting process within the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”
On Tuesday, Fox Corp. and its cable networks agreed to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems to settle a lawsuit over false claims about Dominion’s machines swaying the consequence of the 2020 election.
