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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.
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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