Attorneys for Mike Lindell and MyPillow Ask to Withdraw from Dominion and Smartmatic Lawsuits Because They’re Owed Millions of Dollars
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File
The attorneys representing Mike Lindell and MyPillow in defense against the defamation lawsuits filed by Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems have filed a motion to withdraw, alleging that their pillow-purveying client hasn’t paid their legal bills in months and owes them “millions of dollars.”
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump and his allies promulgated a staggering quantity of misinformation, wild claims, conspiracy theories, and flat-out lies about the election being stolen by fraud to benefit Joe Biden — including making baseless accusations that the election machine technology from Smartmatic and Dominion were part of a wide-ranging effort to change Trump votes to Biden.
Smartmatic and Dominion filed defamation lawsuits against many of the parties who made or promoted these false claims — including Lindell, MyPillow, and Lindell’s media company, FrankSpeech LLC. Fox News settled with Dominion in April for a whopping $787.5 million, and still faces a lawsuit from Smartmatic.
In the aftermath of these lawsuits, Fox fired Lou Dobbs and even defenestrated Tucker Carlson, one of the top hosts who aired false election fraud claims, and has seemed to exercise a higher degree of caution regarding what gets aired on their networks about the 2020 election.
Lindell, on the other hand, has seemed undaunted by the looming litigation and repeated brutal confrontations with reality, and has continued to peddle his tin foil hattery in multiple podcasts, television appearances, “documentaries,” and “election crime bureau summit” events.
And now the pillow monger is going to have to find new attorneys to defend him against Smartmatic and Dominion.
A Motion to Withdraw as Counsel of Record for Defendants was filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by attorneys with the law firms of Parker Daniels Kibort LLC and Lewin & Lewin, LLP, which had been representing Lindell, My Pillow, and FrankSpeech LLC.
According to the memorandum of law supporting the motion, Lindell and his companies “regularly paid” the Parker firm “in a timely manner the amounts owed for representation in the above-captioned case, through April 2023,” but the May 2023 payments were late, and thereafter they made only partial payments. No payments were made for the July 2023 invoice or anything thereafter. The Lewin firm is similarly owed substantial legal fees.
“At this time, Defendants are in arrears by millions of dollars” to the firm, the memo adds, arguing that the firm “is a small litigation and trial firm in Minneapolis, MN and cannot afford to finance Defendants’ defense in the Litigations.” Forcing the firm to foot the bill to continue this case would “impose a serious financial burden” and put it “in serious financial risk and could threaten the very existence of the firm.”
No trial date has yet been set for any of these cases, and “fact discovery is not set to close until May 30, 2024,” the attorneys argue, so “granting the Motion to Withdraw would not result in any delay to the trial date” and “will not unfairly prejudice any party.”
In an appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast Thursday, Lindell announced that his lawyers had filed “to drop us as our attorneys.” The clip was flagged by progressive media watchdog group Media Matters.
Lindell bemoaned this setback as a result of what he called the “lawfare” committed against MyPillow and said “we can’t pay the lawyers…there’s no money left over to pay them.”
Still, he vowed, “I will never settle anything, ever…I will never ever be quiet. I will never stop fighting no matter what, and I will never settle with the evil that’s out there. The corruption. And these guys what they have done to our country with these hiding, hiding what’s inside these machines.”
“Hang on. Hang on. The Murdochs settled,” said Bannon, referring to Fox’s settlement with Dominion. “You don’t agree with Murdoch?”
Lindell demurred and suggested Fox was part of yet another conspiracy, the proof of which seems destined to be promised in a future Lindell-produced election crimes “documentary” but somehow never quite materialize.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Lindell. “Were they in on it? I say they were in on it. There, they can come after me too, I don’t care…We do know Fox does not talk — they don’t talk about our election platforms. They don’t talk about any election platforms. Machines or vaccines. Fox is silent. They’re like a weather channel, Steve, where you can’t report hurricanes or tornadoes.”
