It would be comical to follow the ongoing trials and tribulations of Mike Lindell and his quixotic quest to prove widespread election fraud, but unfortunately, it’s not a laughing matter. Too many people take this seriously. Rachel Maddow said just this evening that Donald Trump is going to travel to North Carolina on Saturday to give a speech to the state Republican party and he is “billing it as a presidential address, because he is pretending to still be president,” she said. He’s sending out fundraising emails as though he were still in office.
One thing I believe we can say with a fair amount of certainty, and that is that the founding fathers never foresaw a lunatic getting elected president. They certainly knew what a lunatic in power looked like, from living in the era of Mad King George, but they didn’t foresee one getting elected president of this republic.
At any rate, Trump’s got a grand week planned with the trip to North Carolina and then his MAGA Frank fest in Wisconsin on June 12, where he will appear “live via jumbotron.” Dumbo on the jumbo. Mike Lindell is furiously pitching not only that date, but he has come out with yet a fourth documentary, this one only 26 minutes in length, mercifully, wherein his digitally cloaked expert gives not only cyber security but legal advice as well, and assures Lindell of a 9-0 vote by the Supreme Court, once they see the evidence.
We are assuming that the “expert” means the evidence alluded to in this video, because if this is it, if this spreadsheet is what Lindell thinks is a legal mindbender, an argument compelling enough to “pull down the 2020 election” as he puts it, then he is further out there than we know. But one silver lining to this cloud, Mike Lindell is to election fraud movies what Ed Wood was to the sci fi genre.
And of course this appearance begs the question of why, if this man has information of such stunning import to our nation, didn’t this expert immediately run to the FBI? And also, why is he hiding his face? You can come up with your own answers to these queries. My theory all along is that somebody found an old Coke machine from the 50’s, wrote Dominion on it, and sold it to Lindell; and now they tell Lindell that the Coke machine displays code for them. I think he’s being taken to the cleaners by anybody who will reinforce this strange delusion of his. Right Wing Watch:
China did it,” Lindell said, calling it “a cyberattack of historic proportions” and “the biggest crime against our country and humanity I can think of ever.”
The unnamed “expert” Lindell hired to review the files, who appeared with his face digitally hidden from view, said the data had been recorded in real time during alleged hacks on election night, akin to capturing a bank robbery on video. They claimed that their analysis of just 20 of the “thousands” of attacks from China demonstrated enough flipped votes to reverse the election results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Lindell asked his expert to verify for viewers that Lindell had demanded that they carefully validate all their evidence, and the expert affirmed that “we validated the validation that was validated.”
“This isn’t subjective,” Lindell insisted. It is “irrefutable,” his supposed expert agreed.
They validated the validation that was validated. So now they know what condition their condition is in. That’s swell. And so apparently SCOTUS is going to rule on a spreadsheet? Oh, man. This isn’t the first time Lindell has tried to fly this and been told he was out in the weeds.
“Instantly,” said Steven Bellovin, a professor of computer science at Columbia University with almost 40 years of experience in computer networking and security.
That’s how long it took him to realize, he said in an interview, that a certain purported spreadsheet that I showed him was “not just fake, but a badly generated fake by someone who didn’t know what they were doing.”
The spreadsheet, together with an animated film that was said to illustrate its data, formed the crux of a nearly two-hour “docu-movie,” called “Absolute Proof,” which aired at least 13 times last February on the One America News Network. The movie, presented in a news magazine format, was hosted, co-produced, and relentlessly flacked by Mike Lindell, the irrepressible CEO of MyPillow, Inc. It purported to furnish absolute proof that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump in an international cyberattack exploiting vulnerabilities in voting-machine software that had been intentionally designed to rig elections.
So that’s where it’s left, apparently. Same lunacy, different spreadsheet, different “expert.” The tragedy, as Rachel Maddow pointed out, is that so many people believe this nonsense.
All this just to keep the grift going.
Meanwhile, while these seditious traitorous criminals continue to prance around freely, attempting to overthrow our democracy, a former treasury employee, Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards was today sentenced to six months in prison and three years of supervised release for leaking info from Suspicious Activity Reports regarding Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, the Russian Embassy and Confessed Russian spy Maria Butina among others to a Buzzfeed reporter.
Justice served??? I think not.
“A presidential address”????
Don John couldn’t even be presidential when he was president.
There were many indications during his presidential term that Trump was the victim of some kind of mental pathology, and now it’s obvious that his cognitive slide has continued since then. Perhaps his “public” appearance will convince at least some of his acolytes that he’s gone over the deep end — at least I hope it will. But I’ve always been a cockeyed optimist….
“But one silver lining to this cloud, Mike Lindell is to election fraud movies what Ed Wood was to the sci fi genre.”
Ursula, you owe Ed Wood an apology. Wood’s ONLY real fault was he didn’t have the necessary funds (or technology, for that matter) to make his visions appear on screen the way he saw them in his head. When you read the basic plots to Wood’s films, they are as interesting as pretty much anything that Asimov or Bradbury was writing. It’s true his talent didn’t really lie in the creative end of movie-making but if you judge Bradbury especially on his works that’ve been put on the big screen, you’d swear the man was nothing more than a hack (as a writer, Bradbury could spin a yarn that would keep you entranced but even the most gifted of directors and screen writers have failed to turn any of Bradbury’s works into films worthy of Bradbury’s original works).
And, let’s face it: Even the worst of Wood’s works can actually be fun to watch (provided you completely turn off your brain and just watch the movie, knowing that you’re NOT going to be getting anything more than a really good bad movie). Can you say that about anything Lindell’s done? The stupid stuff in any of Wood’s films is usually the most enjoyable part.
If the highest level government employees take a sacred oath to the constitution, or swear to tell the truth in a court of law, AND then provably violate these oaths many times over,(Trump, pence, barr, kavanaugh, mcconnell, the gop), how are there NO consequences???? None. Zippo. The law swoops in on everyday citizens for spitting on the sidewalk. Until the rich, powerful, & well connected are held accountable, the so called LAW is a phucking joke that deserves no goddamn respect. Period.