Wednesday, July 16

Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and notorious election denier and conspiracy theorist, said some interesting things on a MAGA podcast this week about meeting regularly with President Donald Trump. Also in this week’s Eye On The Right: Marjorie Taylor Greene said she’s introducing her own anti-voting bill aimed at weakening non-white voting power, and we follow the money fueling Cleta Mitchell’s vast election integrity network.

As always, thanks for reading. 

— Matt Cohen, Senior Reporter

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Mike Lindell Said He Regularly Meets With Trump to Talk Election Conspiracy Theories

Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and notorious election denier who recently lost a massive defamation lawsuit brought by an executive from a voting machine company, said on a recent podcast appearance that he regularly meets with President Donald Trump to talk election conspiracy theories. 

“I did just meet with the President — this is the third time now — about two weeks ago, and I’ll hopefully see him again next week,” Lindell said on the Stern American podcast Monday. “One of our biggest focuses is — you’ve heard about the special prosecutor, we need a team that goes back in time — and then we also have a team going forward, everybody, to get rid of these machines before the primaries.” 

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Lindell’s meetings with Trump.

Late last month, Trump reignited false conspiracy theories about mass voter fraud when he called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the 2020 election. But Lindell’s mention of a “team going forward” may be even more troubling. 

He didn’t elaborate further on what that meant, or if Trump has any plans to put together some sort of election team focused on the 2026 midterm elections. Lindell did mention that he and Trump discussed Tina Peters — a former GOP local election clerk in Colorado who was sentenced to nine years in prison for her role in a voting system data breach. The president previously ordered the U.S. Department of Justice to “secure the release” of Peters and Lindell said Trump is “doing everything he can” to free her. But Peters was convicted on state charges, so it’s not clear what he can do to get her out.

Mostly, Lindell spent his short time on the podcast ranting — as he has for nearly five years — about the need to get rid of electronic voting machines.

“The president, one of the things he and I are aligned perfectly on is he wants to get back to paper ballots, hand-counted, same day voting, precinct level, voter ID,” he said. 

Despite Lindell’s recent legal woes — a federal jury found that Lindell defamed a former employee of the Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems, ordering Lindell to pay $2.3 million in damages — he doesn’t appear to be deterred from continuing to spread dangerous conspiracy theories about electronic voting machines and the 2020 election.

“This time around, with our voices getting so big, we will get the word out and say, ‘Open up those machines!’” Lindell said.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Introducing Her Own Election Bill Aimed at Weakening Non-White Voting Power

Between Trump’s sweeping anti-voting executive order and the SAVE Act, there’s no shortage of voter suppression efforts coming from the executive and legislative branches these days. But that isn’t stopping Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from introducing her own anti-voting bill in Congress. 

In an interview with Steve Bannon last week, Greene told the former Trump senior advisor that she recently introduced the “Making Elections Great Again Act” — a bill that would redraw district lines and reapportion House districts.

“The war that we have to fight is for our elections,” Greene said. “Because it’s through our elections that the American people actually control our government. And we don’t have control of our elections right now. And you can call me a conspiracy theorist, or whatever you want to call me, but I really think our elections are a major problem in this country.”

Greene said her bill is a two-parter. The first part immediately calls for a new census — the next census isn’t scheduled until 2030 — that only counts U.S. citizens, then calls for reapportionment, “so that house district lines are drawn to represent United States American citizens only,” she explained.

“You’re going to see changes,” Greene told Bannon. “California will lose seats. They will lose Electoral College numbers. So will New York and so will any other sanctuary state.”

Greene hasn’t introduced the bill yet, and she doesn’t exactly have a great record of introducing bills that make it very far in Congress. 

Still, the idea presented in the bill isn’t just something that exists in the fringe of the GOP. Trump was asked about Greene’s bill by a reporter earlier this month and he said that he’s aware of it and he’s for it, before launching into a predictably insane rant about the 2020 election being rigged. 

“I know all about it,” he said. “We want to bring our elections back. The election in 2020 was rigged. Millions and millions of votes. It had to do with Covid and a lot of things. But it really had to do with crooked people. The Democrats are good at cheating at elections.”

Following the Money of Cleta Mitchell’s Sprawling Anti-Voting Machine

It’s no secret that the prominent anti-voting lawyer Cleta Mitchell is tied to a deep network of election integrity groups working overtime to restrict the right to vote all over the country. Her most prominent and public-facing group, the Election Integrity Network (EIN), has chapters in most states and trains far-right activists to manufacture mass voter challenges and push anti-voting policies among state lawmakers and in state legislatures.

But an analysis of the most recent tax filings for one of Mitchell’s organizations, the Foundation for Accountability and Integrity in Elections Fund (FAIR Elections Fund), reveals the roots of Mitchell’s vast anti-voting machine run deeper than previously reported. And it sheds light on how Mitchell’s dark money network fed into the various legal attempts to purge voters and undermine state voting laws ahead of last year’s presidential election.

According to the filings, which were provided to Democracy Docket by the investigative watchdog Documented, much of FAIR Elections Fund’s spending in 2024 went to smaller, state-level right-wing organizations that were involved in anti-voting legislation. 

For example, FAIR gave $89,100 to the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona, who filed two high-profile lawsuits last year (which were represented by Stephen Miller’s America First Legal) challenging the state’s election administration procedures and voter roll maintenance procedures. FAIR also gave $75,000 to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which was involved in a contentious lawsuit challenging the use of mobile voting sites throughout the community.

And FAIR gave $89,100 to the Citizen Outreach Foundation, a Nevada-based group led by another anti-voting activist (and perennial EOTR favorite) Chuck Muth, who filed a number of lawsuits aiming to have voters purged from every county in Nevada ahead of the 2024 election. 

It’s far from the only notable nugget that Documented dug up in FAIR’s most recent tax filing. The Only Citizens Vote, another Mitchell-tied nonprofit, gave grants to a number of organizations that pushed noncitizen voting conspiracy theories — like The Federalist and the Immigration Accountability Project. 

Though these filings only reveal what these Mitchell-tied organizations were up to last year, Mitchell hasn’t slowed down in her efforts to rewrite voting laws across the country. Last month, Democracy Docket exclusively reported that a senior official in the Department of Homeland Security held a briefing with Mitchell’s EIN.