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Mike Lindell has been ordered to pay up for his challenge to disprove some election interference evidence.
It’s a remarkable situation. Evidence of election interference should be investigated by law enforcement agencies, with no need for a bounty to disprove the validity.
The great thing is that the man who met the challenge voted for Trump twice. (I wonder if he will a third time.)
If Lindell didn’t trust government authorities to properly investigate election interference claims, he should have also known not to trust the courts to fairly (from his perspective) enforce an arbitration issue about it.
Had Lindell set the bounty to prove the veracity of the evidence (beyond a reasonable doubt), he’d still have his money.
This is like the inverse of the Balaji Srinivasan bet on inflation and Bitcoin. I think it’s great when the wealthy put their money where their mouth is. We need more bets taxing bullshit.
As I understand AAA rules, both parties picked arbiters and those two arbiters picked a third.
And then they voted unanimously against Lindell.
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I don't understand how this is possibly the court's fault. I haven't heard of this challenge before, so maybe the article you linked about it is misleading somehow, but it sounds like the sequence of events was:
The court very explicitly did not look at the election claims; they only said "this was the terms of the bet; they were fulfilled, so you have to pay out".
I'm really not sure why you think evidence of election interference isn't investigated by government authorities (reworded because I'm not sure if law enforcement or the secretary of state's office / election board is the appropriate authority, probably depends on the exact case). It sounds like Lindell didn't have any evidence and just threw together some unrelated obfuscated numbers and didn't expect anyone to call him out on it.
Assuming you didn’t accidentally respond to me vs. another commenter, I’ll take this as a compliment that I presented the facts in a way that someone could think I actually think Lindell has been wronged.
On a technical point, the court had to agree that the terms of the challenge were fulfilled, which means they believe the evidence provided by Lindell was in fact demonstrably false. So fans of Deep State theory can stay believers if they want to. “The rot runs even deeper than we thought.” (No one ever seems to explain how the Deep State tried so hard to defeat Trump in 2016 but failed so narrowly.)
If you look at my comment history, you’ll find we violently agree about Lindell and general claims of election fraud.
The most charitable I can be about someone like Lindell or Sidney Powell (or Trump) is that they are mentally ill, and not just straight out con(wo)men. I can’t use that for say a Giuliani or a Michael Flynn, given their past careers, and Dinesh D'Souza is a longstanding grifter.
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Before that Mike Lindell has been deplatformed and one of the target of the ire of the left wing establishment which includes plenty more rich people collectively working together than what Mike Lindel represents. Where their behavior is not held accountable.
There is no reason to consider this as an example of a bet taxing bullshit. That perspective would only merit entertaining if we see courts forcing liberal establishment figures, including in powerful corporations and NGOs having to pay large fines, or getting them to pay relating to technicality, including prove me wrong bets, to the extend there is some parity there.
Even this hitpiece article against him shows how Lindell has been targeted for his political opinions although they have a celebration paralalax line. https://www.newsweek.com/rise-fall-mike-lindell-1830372 and he has been banned from social media platforms and had other interference with his affairs https://www.axios.com/2023/09/22/mike-lindell-cellphone-seizure-court-constitutional
The message being given is that if you oppose us or support Trump, we are going to get you. And then throw a line of weak deniability. But it would be about your political opinions.
Moreover, the collective media hitpieces on this guy is just utterly horrible behavior. It seems that a culture of liberal voyeristic sadistic glee has developed where certain figures especially, and their general opponents become the afixed target. But especially there is a focus on particular individuals as a tactic to isolate the opposition. This culture definitely leads to increasing injustice and indifference to injustice, because the priority is "getting them" whether Trump, Lindell becomes a value that replaces actual moral principles.
This culture of feeling pleasure over the misfortune of the hated Lindell promoted by such media and such echochambers might be influencing your happiness at his misfortune.
Another issue to ponder, is what would happen if everyone who made claims about russiagate, election interference, supported riots, made destructive false partisan claims, not just politically incorect but including all political correct false narratives, etc, were targeted. Not to mention controversial issues that aren't cared about like supporting warcrimes, aggressive wars, and more. Who would be left of the political establishment?
“A bet is a tax on bullshit” is not meant to say “government fines are a good thing.” The guy who wrote that article is not really a fan of government power being used to decide such things.
Lindell choosing to place a bet is a good thing. He just made a bad one for himself. His “misfortune” on this particular issue is all self-imposed by him, it just took a judge to force him to comply with his own promise.
Lindell is not being punished such as he is for supporting Trump. One can, theoretically at least, support Trump and not engage in blatant lies and other violations that will attract the ire of social media platforms.
The super ironic thing is that Lindell lost his phone due to an FBI investigation over election tampering at the county level. Contrary to what a lot of posters here believe, the US government takes election issues quite seriously and Lindell trying to doing vigilante election security backfired on him a bit. Somehow I doubt if that Mesa County official ends up convicted it will change anyone’s mind, because the case hasn’t made enough of a dent in people thinking it’s not too hard to screw with county election results.
Not that it proves you wrong, but it’s hard to take your complaints seriously based on how say Hillary got treated. Both sides of the aisle do a lot of shit that is indecent.
How was Hillary treated? There is an extremely high likelihood that she directly ordered her staff to break serious laws in serious ways, with serious consequences, then ordered them to cover it up, and both she and her staff were given a pass.
By “break serious laws” do you mean the email server? Or are we talking the theories out there about darker stuff?
If we’re talking about the email server, then I’d say the level of drama was way overblown relative to the actual significance. And, well, Trump has her beat with his personal presidential library he had going.
If you mean something more serious than the email server, then we are going to be in a disagreement about the evidence for those claims.
(If you bring up claims of general corruption related to the Clinton Foundation then I’m going to laugh at you, for reasons that should be obvious.)
Given the complete lack of security on Clinton's email server (during her first two months as Secretary of State she connected to it over an unencrypted connection) Trump's "presidential library" would have to be of the lending variety to be anywhere near as egregious.
You’re wrong for at least four reasons.
First, Hillary as SecState was found to have some emails that should have been classified. State Dept lives in between classified and unclassified worlds and so these things are going to happen. So clearly dumb and bad, but not to the level meriting prosecution.
Second, Trump is known to have shared the classified information for his personal interest.
Third, Trump took some really classified stuff.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-are-the-classified-documents-in-the-trump-indictment
Fourth, he refused to comply, necessitating a formal effort to seize the documents.
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I think like the documents case affecting Trump, the situation depends quite a lot on two questions: what did the person actually have, and how much security did they have in place to protect it.
If the emails contained nothing of consequence, then it’s a crime certainly, but the damage done to the country by them being hacked is pretty minimal. If all Trump took from the WH were secret recipes for really good steaks, it really isn’t going to hurt anyone. Within any office environment are papers with varying degrees of security and even within that there are things that are controlled that really aren’t that important or useful to other companies. New products in development are important to guard. Proprietary processes and technologies are important to guard. There might be other things like marketing plans that are less important. Not that they can be leaked with impunity, but there wouldn’t be nearly as much harm actually done by them getting out. In the realm of statecraft, things like the names and locations of spies, military intelligence, military technology, strategic planning, etc. are extremely important to keep secret. Dirt on heads of state, including our own might be embarrassing, but unlikely to be fatal.
The other question would be the security of those offsite storage facilities. How hard is it to crack Hillary’s server? How hard is it to get into the closet Trump had documents in? If the security was lax, it seems like such a thing should be treated like a leak. Not because we can prove it actually happened, but because the security was so light that anyone with the slightest understanding of security would know that the server or closet was almost certain to be breeched at some point. My understanding of the server was that it was basically an off the shelf Outlook server protected with a password. Trump had the documents in closets and empty rooms a Mar-a-Lago which is a facility with lots of staff and probably multiple keys to every room in the place and few other security features to keep people out of those rooms. In either case, I think it fair to treat that type of security as no security at all.
You should also consider that Hillary was doing what she did in the course of her duties as SecState and was permitted (stupidly) to have the server. She complied with the investigation.
Trump took very sensitive documents because he wanted to own them. He did not comply with the investigation.
Trump is being prosecuted because there was no way to let this level of violation slide.
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It’s mostly about two things:
The Hillary server was known to the State Department and others in government because she used it for her job. It was a bad idea and poorly executed, but clearly de facto permitted. The emails were not classified, but upon investigation some of them had content should have been.
This last bit is not a result of the server; it’s a result of the State Department constantly straddling classified and unclassified worlds. I have no idea if Hillary and her close associates were more or less irresponsible than average people in her position because we don’t have investigation results to compare. I do know that the classification business is a pain in the ass and can involve judgement calls that are easier in hindsight.
Trump, on the other hand, absconded with dozens of boxes of highly classified documents, as if he wanted a personal collection. We know he talked about them and shared them, and not for official US government business. And when the US government asked for them back, he put up a fight. If he had just given them back the chance it would have gone any further was very low.
The remarkable bit is that the president is the absolute classification authority and Trump (falsely) claims he had declassified them. Now, if he had gone the formal declassification route then that would have been a scandal (declassifying sensitive things because you want them in your collection is not a good luck), but he wouldn’t have broken the law. (At least, I’m pretty sure there is no legal restraint on a president declassifying things because it’s an executive branch program; the reason congress is so cavalier with classified data is because they can’t be prosecuted for breaking those rules.)
Hillary made mistakes. Trump (almost certainly) committed a crime.
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Ok pretend I'm an idiot, it shouldn't be hard, what reasons that should be obvious are there for laughing at the Clinton Foundation? Because the insane amount of corporatist and nepotistic graft and influence peddling that flows through that place seems obvious. As does the fact that Clinton Foundation affiliates recycled Build Back Better from Haiti to the USA.
It's because the sclerotic voting system has ceded significant power to the establishment of each party through the presence of safe seats and the internal selection process. Influence is worth serious bucks, and special interests and lobbyists have significant influence within the local body politic. Nancy Pelosi for instance, is an institution herself within the Democrat party. The same goes for Joe Biden, but Bushes are no better either, nor Kennedys. The business of politics is the biggest business around, with the government wielding a massive budget. At a time when voters themselves have less impact than ever, they are presented with hand-picked options that will change fundamentally nothing about how politics itself will be run.
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I’d laugh in this context because the Clintons at least waited until leaving office to start their grifting, whereas Trump was still actively involved in running his company, despite the million different opportunities for conflicts of interest and other obvious ethical issues that should have been unthinkable to permit.
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She destroyed the evidence with BleachBit. To then claim there is no evidence of "darker stuff", is to abandon adverse inference.
Well the FBI disagrees with your sentiments and you do not seem to be accurately representing how events transpired.
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/hillary-clinton-deleted-33000-emails-secretary-state/story?id=42389308
Furthermore, using a tool to mass delete data, particularly that contains PII, is a standard practice.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/11/trump-fbi-search-hillary-clinton/
She was an idiot for mixing personal and business emails, but she would have been an even bigger idiot to have used it for whatever it is you mean by “darker stuff”.
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As I understand it, the significance of the email server was that it was carefully set up to allow Clinton to evade scrutiny of her communications, whilst also exposing very sensitive information to any halfway-competent hacker. It's bad on security grounds and its existence suggests further wrongdoing. A little like Nicola Sturgeon deleting all of her WhatsApp message rather than allow them to be examined by an enquiry.
Meanwhile, Trump and Biden both seem to be guilty of nothing more than having taken paperwork home and not giving it back. Trump is Trump, and also tried to deny wrongdoing in an obviously false manner, so he got dinged while Biden didn't, but there's not really any suggestion of anything untoward and the risk is much more limited.
Your theory is self-contradicting.
If you’re going to set up your own server to evade scrutiny, then you should probably also invest in making it highly secure.
Government IT tends to suck, which Clinton knew, and so she stupidly tried to avoid that by just using what she already had. It should not been allowed and certainly won’t be ever again.
Clinton turned over many thousands of emails to the State Department. The FBI managed to find even more. But at the end of the day there was no bombshell and it’s wishful thinking by her opponents to believe she successfully covered up all the really nefarious stuff. (Anyone with half a brain would do the nefarious stuff separately anyway.)
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/hillary-clinton-deleted-33000-emails-secretary-state/story?id=42389308
You’re just immensely wrong about how you characterize the Trump case. You have to significantly downplay the dozens of boxes of very sensitive documents he purposely took, and then the refusal to comply on top. It’s par for the course to have a situation like Biden’s and many other senior officials and presidents have. Trump is on his own golf course here with a totally unprecedented effort to keep classified material.
Some of the Trump documents were sufficiently sensitive that the classification itself is classified, due to belonging to special programs, and has to be partially redacted in court documents.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-are-the-classified-documents-in-the-trump-indictment
So all of the “but her emails” crowd who thought Clinton was terrible for exposing sensitive information that should have been classified in the course of her official duties as SecState, if their true concern is the responsible handling of classified information, ought to be utterly outraged at Trump for simply wishing to possess and share very classified documents for his own personal benefit.
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it is hard to frame him as a victim, imho. Mike profits from pillow sales by generating media attention. Likewise, the mainstream profits from ad revenue despite also being wrong a lot. The incentives encourage lies and sensationalism on both sides. There is no downside for the media being wrong. They book the ad revenue profit, issue retraction after the damage has been done and ad revenue realized, and move on and people forget.
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I realize that I’m skirting close to the ‘if pro-lifers really believed abortion was murder, surely they’d…’ argument, but there is a case to be made that this kind of applies to Trump himself. Like, if the deep state stole the election from him once, why would he have any faith they wouldn’t do it again, especially now “they” have the presidency and thus surely even more power and less oversight?
I don’t think Trump is the kind of guy who does something unless he believes he has at least a chance of winning, and I think he does believe he has a chance of winning this year.
That leaves two possibilities. Firstly, that the deep state is too weak or his margin of victory will be too great to cheat him of the presidency again or, secondly, that he never really believed he won the first (well, second) time, but was just using the claim of interference as a political tool (both to rally his supporters and maybe as some kind of gambit to stay in office).
On the third hand though what other choice is there? Make your own America? You fight until you are no longer physically capable of fighting, even if the odds are stacked against you. You will surely have a better chance of ousting the deep state as a president, even a hated one, than as a rich civilian.
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It's possible Trump believes it is rigged, but sitting it out is 100% chance of loss, vs a rigged election and some chance nonetheless.
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The argument is that in 2020 urban political machines used mail-in ballot rules to harvest ballots. This isn't an infinity-vote generator, it's a powerful-but-limited tool. So, the argument develops like this:
The pandemic is over and so the same playbook of last-minute changes to election rules will not be in effect.
Trump and his ilk now plan to build their own ballot harvesting machine instead of trying to deny the Democrats theirs.
Trump is performing better now than he did in 2020, so the amount of necessary fraud to steal the election goes up.
Biden is performing worse than he did in 2020, and key parts of the Democratic constituency may not be mobilized like they were before.
People like to say this, but nobody has ever produced any evidence that Trump doesn't believe what he's saying. Indeed, all the leaks from the Trump White House (infamously, they are legion) indicate that sometimes, Trump was the only one who believed in election interference.
No, that's not the argument Trump advanced. He claimed that the election was stolen via fraud, and asked Bill Barr to have the Justice Department investigate. Specific claims advanced at the time include over 3000 people in Nevada voting after moving to another state, or that Pennsylvania postal employees conspired to backdate late ballots.
These claims were all, of course, false.
Ballot harvesting in States where it is illegal to deliver someone else's ballot is fraud.
By "fraud" I mean something that causes invalid votes to be counted, or valid votes to not be counted, or coerces, bribes or disenfranchises voters. I'm not sure if any jurisdiction considers ballot harvesting in the absence of these other activities to be fraud. Texas, for example, explicitly defines "vote harvesting" as separate from "electoral fraud", although engaging in fraud as part of a vote harvesting organization can result in enhanced penalties.
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Trump was warning about mail-in ballots since before the votes were counted. ("Complaining about," if you prefer.)
Otherwise, I'm not sure what point you're making. Some fraud accusations are weaker than others, and we should only discuss the ones you find weakest? The version I have expounded is extremely reasonable, answering OP's idea that "the deep state stole the election," why-wouldn't-they-do-it-again.
Yes, he was complaining that they were more susceptible to fraudulent voting ("millions of counterfeit ballots").
This thread is about Trump's state of mind: why would he bother running again if his claims of election fraud were made in good faith? In that context, it's relevant that he did not invoke the reasonable scenario you presented, but rather a wide-ranging conspiracy where millions of votes can be fabricated.
I think this is a bad argument made in service of an ultimately correct position.
Even if Trump did believe the election was entirely stolen ... I mean, what would you do, if you imagine you're have the beliefs of a genuine conspiracy MAGAboomer? Just give in and say "yeah, the libs own the country now because they're more willing to commit crime with us"? No, it's a sufficiently important issue that you'd keep fighting.
I know right wingers who believe the election was stolen and as such are essentially checked out of electoral politics. It's an internally consistent position. There's no point fighting if you literally can't win.
I honestly don't know what Trump really thinks about 2020, but I do know he would be better off if he just admitted he lost because people were angry about COVID, but "we'll get them next time". He essentially blackpilled portions of his base by claiming Democrats are capable of large-scale election conspiracies.
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Here's my reference: in 1948, Lyndon Johnson created and harvested hundreds of thousands of ballots for his election to Senate. Robert Caro has documented this extensively in the second volume of his LBJ biography, "The Means of Ascent". It took decades for the people involved to come forward and talk to Caro, and only a few of them were really required. If you scale that up from one state to a dozen, millions of votes are not an implausible idea. And millions of votes were not even needed given the final tallies in a few swing states.
Now, there's a very obvious mechanism here: mail-in ballots can come from anywhere, and once they're mixed up with regular ballots it becomes impossible to prove which votes are "real". It's hard to prove what has happened. And everyone has motive. This does not need to be a "wide-ranging" conspiracy.
Trump has said many things about the election. I've never heard him say, as above, "the deep state stole the election". I've never heard him say, "there was a wide-ranging conspiracy". I have beard him say that mail-in ballots are not secure.
The idea here is really plain: the election wasn't stolen by some unalterable cabal that runs the world in secret. There is not a central committee that decided 2020 was not Trump, so that now we have to answer why bother with 2024 at all. Election fraud is boring and quotidian stuff. It can be greater or lesser depending on lots of contingent factors. And Trump can think he has a better show this time, while still also thinking 2020 was stolen.
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My personal but totally evidence free belief is that Trump, circa 2020, wanted to be bought out. It makes perfect sense from a real estate development perspective: if you have a claim, even a weak claim, you hold onto it until someone pays you. A weak claim might not be worth a ton, but it'll be worth something to get you to shut up.
It's extremely common in complex real estate transactions. "I have a letter of intent from two years ago, that pre empts your deal!" "Actually the estate was never closed and THIS brother claims a share in ownership!" "According to organization by laws we did not have a quorom at the meeting where I was removed so I'm still in charge and my successor had no power to sign those documents!"
Trump didn't think he won, and he didn't think he'd win. But he thought he had enough that the Democrats would buy him out, would offer him a deal to step down. It would have been the rational thing to do, give Trump something to make him go away. But the Dems were never going to do that, they're not equipped to do that.
Once you pay the Dane-geld, you'll never be rid of the Dane.
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I don’t think that tracks. To this day he’s acting as if he believes the election was stolen. He never gave any indication that he believed otherwise. He did back down from other beliefs. At first he took COVID seriously enough to send a hospital ship to New York, and to go along with the CDC on lockdowns. He changed his mind later, and his statements back that up. But he’s absolutely firm on the stolen election claim. He’s never changed his story, even when he should stand to benefit from at least backing down from the claim.
I don't see where he'd benefit from backing down, what would that look like?
I think the fact that 4 years later he’s still talking about the stolen election probably hurts him in the polls among mainstream voters who don’t think the election was stolen.
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What did the Dems have to offer him? Not prosecute him?
I don’t think that has any value to Trump. It’s why voters vote for him because he legitimately won’t back down. Now I think Trump mostly just cares about Trump and wants the crown for his own ego.
I think just agreeing to enhanced election security measures for future elections would have assuaged Trump's ego.
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Not prosecuting him is step one, but there's lots of other things to offer. Public Acknowledgement. An appointment to a powerful and important position. One or more Trumpian policies publicly enacted, with full credit given to Trump. One or more of his children, or Kushner, appointed to important positions.
Ok so you know there was zero chance the Dems are every giving him a high ranking position?
I mean yes, we know that. But why is it true? Why couldn't they do that? Trump, of course, would have to play along, which is the most major impossibility. But Kamala called Biden a racist just before campaigning on his ticket, Dems are perfectly capable of flipping the narrative when necessary.
Certainly Ivanka or Kushner could have been given a plum job, and if Trump in turn conceded and mildly endorsed Biden it would have been a win-win.
Trump was also friends with people like the Clintons before he ran against them. He created chants of "lock her up" and then did nothing to precipitate that. I just don't think Trump sees political acrimony as a permanent, fixed thing. He thinks they're just being theatrical and playing the game, as he is.
Exactly. Trump could accept it. But he'd need to behave and color inside the lines to be successfully co opted.
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You did say "evidence free" so I don't want to slam you in an unfriendly way or anything. But Trump absolutely believed he was going to win 2020, and nothing has ever come out to indicate he pushed election fraud claims for cynical reasons.
Sorry, that wasn't clear, I meant that I don't believe Trump ever actually thought (past maybe December 1 2020) he was going to succeed in retaining the presidency by procedural games. His actions throughout the process make far more sense if seen in the light of trying to solidify a weak claim, rather than in light of an attempted coup d'etat (justified or unjustified).
I appreciate the kid gloves for my shit post.
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What kind of deal are you proposing as hypothetically possible here?
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If he wins the popular vote there are basically two possibilities:
Either way he wins so long as he gets enough popular support, right? Not too different from a normal election.
Even if he wins he is surely unlikely to win the popular vote, given historically unpopular Hillary had 3 million votes on him in 2016.
If he does win the popular vote, I agree given Republican electoral dynamics that means he’s won comfortably and undeniably, but it’s unlikely.
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As I pointed out a few times earlier, if Trump honestly believed the 2016 election was rigged against him with millions of fraudulent votes (they just barely didn’t have enough to quite win the electoral college…), then his first order of business should have been a major investigation such that it couldn’t happen again.
Actually, even if he didn’t believe it and was merely saying it for propaganda purposes, it would have been a classic political maneuver to use a pretense for a major corruption investigation to defeat enemies and ensure ongoing political power.
Trump has the right instincts to be a strongman, just not the heart to follow though. Same thing goes for the meddling in the 2020 election outcome and that whole bit where Pence was supposed to play along, but instead there was a March on the Capitol to threaten his decapitation. It’s like a LARP of a would-be autocrat (along with threatening to imprison Hillary, bombing various countries, etc.). Trump has plausible deniability in the minds of many due to the half-hearted and bumbling attempts. I’ve had arguments with Trump supporters/defenders where one will say “of course he doesn’t mean it” and another will say “I’m excited for Trump to expose the corruption and jail the pedophiles.” A lot of MAGA takes him seriously and literally.
While I think plenty of Trump’s most vocal critics have cried wolf more than once (I define “TDS” as anyone who is more critical of Trump than I am), it does amaze me that people I formerly respected as “constitutional conservatives” don’t seem too concerned about Trump’s antics in terms of their present effect, or the potential effects down the road. I’d be a lot more concerned if Trump was 55, but his lasting effect on the GOP might still be pretty bad after he is out of the picture.
Hopefully we regress to a more sane political climate mean instead of pursuing a downward spiral.
Trump tried to do this but Barr basically refused to take it seriously.
(This user has me blocked, but this is worth pointing out anyways.)
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