Mike Lindell listens during an interview from the podium in the press briefing room of the White House, Friday, Feb. 21, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
A federal court in Minnesota on Thursday found pillow magnate Mike Lindell in contempt for shirking discovery obligations in a years-old defamation lawsuit filed by voting software company Smartmatic.
In a 16-page order, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan, a Joe Biden appointee, directed Lindell and MyPillow to provide the plaintiffs with an extensive set of requested discovery on various topics. Additionally, the defendants were ordered to pay Smartmatic’s attorneys’ fees — an amount that will be decided at a later date.
The ruling catalogs a series of missed deadlines, falsities, mischaracterizations, and outright rejection of prior court orders.
“Smartmatic asks the Court to find Defendants in contempt,” the order reads. “[T]he Court concludes that Defendants disobeyed [two court orders]. Therefore, the Court grants Smartmatic’s motion and finds Defendants in contempt.”
The underlying litigation dates back to January 2022 — and is merely one among many lawsuits Lindell and MyPillow are facing over 2020 election-related conspiracy theories in federal courts across the country. The long-and-winding lawsuit produced a sideline dispute over discovery that was itself years in the making.
In sum, Smartmatic specifically accused Lindell and MyPillow of failing to provide requested viewership data about an allegedly “defamatory” election fraud conspiracy theory video as well as other information the voting software company had requested for purposes of determining whether other “discovery disputes even exist.”
Motions on these ancillary issues began in October 2022, the court’s order explains. The defendants did, in fact, reply, but the plaintiffs said their responses were “deficient” and the back-and-forth ensued — occasionally supplemented by the court’s scheduling orders.
“Defendants missed the February 16 [2023] deadline to respond to Smartmatic’s motion to compel and filed a memorandum in opposition only after the Magistrate Judge issued an order to respond,” the district judge explains.
During a subsequent hearing several days later, a magistrate judge overseeing the case weighed in with a strong suggestion that the defendants comply with the discovery request. Lindell and MyPillow eventually said their compliance was forthcoming. By August 2023, the judge credited that promise but also ordered general compliance with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure relevant to discovery.
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Then progress more or less went sideways again; more motions were filed; another hearing was held to deal with the deficiencies.
Amid the video viewership dispute, the voting software company launched another series of requests for production — asking Lindell for detailed financial and tax-related data. Again, hearings and motions ended with the plaintiffs empty-handed, the judge observed.
In September 2024, Smartmatic filed a motion for contempt accusing Lindell and MyPillow of violating the court’s “prior discovery orders.”
In a memorandum of law accompanying the motion, the voting software company said Lindell himself “repeatedly indicated that he does not care about this litigation” and that it was no surprise he consequently “elected to ignore clear court orders” from the court “compelling him to turn over key evidence sought by Plaintiffs.”
Last December, a hearing before Judge Bryan ended with a defense attorney conceding that Lindell and MyPillow had not provided the requested information about the video. During that same hearing, Smartmatic said they had not received the financial data either.
Since then, the case has proceeded on several different tracks: several dozen additional documents and motions have been filed on the docket; the magistrate and district judges held additional hearings on other motions; and other orders were entered by the judges.
In the Thursday order on the motion for contempt, the court found the defendants had not complied in any meaningful sense with regard to the video viewership data and had not complied at all when it came to the information about Lindell’s financial condition.
“Defendants do not dispute the fact that the Magistrate Judge ordered them to disclose the requested viewership data or that they had knowledge of that order,” Bryan writes. “Defendants make no argument that they were unable to produce the requested viewership data. Rather, Defendants argue that they complied with the Magistrate Judge’s order. That is the only element in dispute. After review of the record, the Court concludes that Defendants mischaracterize the information that they disclosed.”
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In his analysis, the judge says an attorney for the defense ultimately produced a lone “screenshot of a Google Analytics webpage.”
“Defendants now characterize the single screenshot image in [the defense attorney’s] email as compliance with the August 1 Order,” the judge goes on. “This characterization is false. The screenshot image itself is not data. Moreover, [the plaintiff’s attorney] explained that she was unable to decipher what information was represented in the image. The Court is likewise unable to discern what is being represented in the image.”
The analysis of the financial information was even more to the point.
“This record establishes by clear and convincing evidence that Defendants have not produced documents as ordered by the Magistrate Judge concerning RFP No. 30,” the order continues. “Accordingly, the Court finds Defendants in contempt of that order for failing to produce documents sufficient to show Lindell’s financial condition for years 2022 and 2023.”
The court ordered: Lindell to produce certain financial statements by March 13; Lindell and MyPillow to produce the viewership data — in terms of six different data points — by March 27; Lindell to produce his 2022 and 2023 tax returns “upon completion” or by April 3, at the latest, or an affidavit explaining the delay and estimating when the tax returns for those years will be completed.
Smartmatic was ordered to produce an accounting “of the reasonable expenses it incurred in prosecuting” the motion for contempt. Based on that, the judge will issue an attorneys’ fees award down the line.
