WASHINGTON — MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who is a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump and has promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, said Tuesday that the FBI had seized his cellphone and asked him about a county clerk in Colorado who has been charged with election tampering in a security breach of her county’s voting system last year.
Lindell said on his podcast, The Lindell Report, that he was stopped by FBI agents while going through a Hardee’s drive-thru in Mankato, Minnesota.
“He goes, ‘Well, I got some bad news.’ I’m like, OK, here it comes, right? He goes, ‘We’re taking your cellphone. We have a warrant for your cellphone,'” Lindell said. “I said, ‘My whole company, I run five companies off that. I don’t have a computer, my hearing aids run off this, everything runs off my phone.'”
Lindell said the FBI agents asked him about Dominion voting machines used in Colorado’s elections, as well as Tina Peters, the clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, and Doug Frank, an Ohio math teacher, who have also espoused 2020 election conspiracy theories.
Peters pleaded not guilty last week to charges of election tampering and official misconduct in connection with the security breach last year of Mesa County’s voting system. She is accused of allowing unauthorized people to break into the county’s election system in search of evidence supporting baseless election fraud theories espoused by Trump.
The reasons for the apparent seizure of Lindell’s phone are unclear. In a statement, FBI spokeswoman Vikki Migoya said that while the agency wouldn’t comment on the specific matter of the seizure, the FBI was “at that location executing a search warrant authorized by a federal judge.”
Reached for comment by NBC News, Peters said that she has not received a subpoena from the Department of Justice, but that she did get one as part of a defamation lawsuit filed against Lindell by Eric Coomer, a former Dominion Voting Systems employee targeted by Lindell.
Trump, for his part, reacted to the situation on his Truth Social site Tuesday night, saying that Lindell had been “raided by the FBI.”
“We are now officially living in a Weaponized Police State, Rigged Elections, and all,” he wrote.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
