“MY PILLOW” CEO CONTINUES TO SPREAD TRUMP’S “BIG LIE”

 

                                            …The My Pillow CEO, Mike Lindell

 

Lindell’s own expert says that Lindell’s data is bogus

 

If you have been following the My Pillow, CEO, Mike Lindell, you know how much of a con man he really is.

Recently, the well-known reporter, Philip Bump, wrote about a three-day symposium being put on by this same stolen-election fanatic and Trump ally, Mike Lindell, with the apt headline, “The Con is winding down.”

It might now be more correct to say the con has “spectacularly imploded.”

Lindell has been pushing many false and baseless, crazy theories about voter fraud.  But the symposium was billed as focusing on one in particular, “irrefutable” proof that hackers backed by China stole the election for Joe Biden. Lindell had the data, and he was going to show it to you. What’s more, his website promised to give $5 million to anybody who could “prove that Mike’s cyber data … is not valid.”

Well, someone has stepped forward to debunk the data, or at least the claims Lindell is making about it. And it’s none other than the cyber expert that Lindell himself hired.

Josh Merritt, also known as the “Spider” or “Spyder” and who was hired by Lindell for his “red team.”  He told the Washington Times at the symposium that, effectively, Lindell has sold his adherents a bill of goods. Lindell claimed that intercepted network data obtained by other hackers, data also known as “packet captures,” could be unencrypted to reveal evidence of vote-switching by the Chinese-backed hackers.

But Merritt has now said that’s just bogus info.

“So our team said we’re not going to say that this is legitimate if we don’t have confidence in the information,” Merritt said. And it apparently turns out it was not legitimate.

Dominion Voting Systems has since filed a defamation lawsuit against the MyPillow CEO for promoting baseless theories about its voting machines.

Merritt did still claim that the data did provide evidence of manipulated votes, but he also made clear it’s not really all it’s cracked up to be.

“We were handed a turd,” he said. “And I had to take that turd and turn it into a diamond. And that’s what I think we did.”  But it's still a turd.

Perhaps an equally damning revelation this week came in something else Merritt said. He confirmed the source of the cyber-data as of course being: Dennis L. Montgomery.

It has been suspected that Montgomery was the source, given graphics similar to the ones Lindell has used and have also appeared on Montgomery’s website, and Merritt did confirmed it.

Why is that important? Because Montgomery has a very spotty history with this kind of thing.

The New York Times reported in 2011 that the U.S. government was trying to keep secret the details of an arrangement in which Montgomery promised to provide technology to catch terrorists. Montgomery even claimed he could decode secret al-Qaeda messages embedded in Al Jazeera broadcasts. He falsely received more than $20 million in government contracts for his bogus efforts.

But his own former lawyer has indicated the government was clamming up because the technology was bogus and the US government wanted to avoid the embarrassment.  He also called Montgomery a “con man.” 

French officials have reviewed and rejected Montgomery’s work after they were being wrapped up in the negative consequences of it.  The Bush administration had actually grounded certain international flights because of Montgomery’s work in 2003, and they eventually came to a similar conclusion.

Current and former intelligence officials told PBS in 2014 that it was one of the most elaborate and dangerous hoaxes in U.S. history.

More recently, Montgomery got the then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to pay him $100,000 in money from the county's sheriff office to pursue a theory involving a federal government conspiracy against Arpaio.  Arpaio later acknowledged the theory was baseless.

Lindell’s presentation has also frustrated his fellow voter fraud true-believers.  This is according to the Washington Times and other reports in large part because he has failed to make good on his promise to share the data with them.

J. Kirk Wiebe, a former National Security Agency analyst who has pushed claims of voter fraud, became alienated by Lindell for not producing the goods.  It turned out, just because he didn’t actually have them, the Washington Times also reports that he said the scrolling text was likely meant to resemble what the packet captures would look like in the data set.  But they were not “actual packet captures”, which are vital to prove the claims.

Several cyber experts at the symposium became frustrated late into the first day with not being provided with packet captures.  Mr. Merritt and Mr. Wiebe said the missing packet captures could be a result of either the format the data was sent in or they were withheld by the source of the information, in other words, the same source of the cyber-data: Dennis L. Montgomery.

But the data Mr. Montgomery sent contains no packet captures and therefore, cannot be used to validate Mr. Lindell’s marquee theory, which he had planned to unveil at the symposium.  This information was offered up by the two experts: Wiebe and Merritt.

Adding insult to injury, those two experts would seem to be in line for the hefty payday of the $5 million that Lindell promised for revealing that Lindell’s data isn’t valid.  However, the expert Merritt has since said the offer from Lindell is no longer on the table.

But, Lindell’s lawyer continues to say that the $5 million offer, which still appears on Lindell’s website, is still available…?

It’s amazing how Trump’s supporters continue to promote his baseless lies…?

Copyright G. Ater 2021