Smears over his effort to root out election fraud aren’t all Mike Lindell faces as the MyPillow CEO was made to answer questions about his campaign’s six-figure bulk buy of his own book.
(Video Credit: NewsNation)
Beyond his own struggles with drug addiction, Lindell has taken the brunt of literal cancel culture, seeing his products pulled from store shelves and suffering debanking in the wake of pursuing transparency on vulnerabilities in voting machines and the potential impact they might have had on the 2020 presidential election.
Now, as the entrepreneur aims to be the next governor of Minnesota, he appeared on “NewsNation Prime” with host Natasha Zouves, where he was questioned about his campaign spending $187,000 in contributions to buy copies of Lindell’s book, “What Are the Odds? From Crack Addict to CEO.”
The NewsNation host referred to reports that about the nearly $200,000 of $356,000 raised to purchase the books within the first two weeks of launching his gubernatorial bid, “Your campaign took in more than $350,000 contributions in just under a month, but filings show your campaign spent more than half of that money on your own self-published memoir. Explain to people why buy all those books. Is that a wise use of campaign spending?”
“Yeah, we got them for a very good price,” began Lindell, who argued the funds benefited the employee-owned company and not him directly. “What you can do, instead of paying for flyers and stuff, we have to go around and do debates for about a month-and-a-half, these debates, and we gave out the books — here’s instead of giving out a little flyer about me, this is my memoir, this is my autobiography and showing these people who I am.”
“I want people to know who I was before I went out and fought these voting machine companies and fought to secure our elections in our country, which by the way is all coming to fruition,” he went on.
Speaking with the Minnesota Star Tribune, the CEO had further pointed out,”I’m just one of the stockholders. The majority stockholder. It’s over 50 owners.”
What’s more, a 1998 review by Minnesota’s Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board had concluded that there was nothing illegal about a campaign spending money to purchase a book about its own candidate.
Before turning to the smears against him, including from incumbent Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) who referred to Lindell as a “snake oil salesman caught up in multiple legal fights who wants to bring Trump extremism to Minnesota,” Zouves asked the candidate, “Do you plan to spend any more campaign funds on your own book?”
“Absolutely … People that have read my books, it’s my memoir, then you know who I am,” responded Lindell.
As a reminder, Walz had suspended his own re-election campaign over the fraud investigations taking place in his state. Recent polling placed Lindell in third place for the Republican primary behind speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives Lisa Demuth and U.S. Army veteran Kendall Qualls.
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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