Mike Lindell just can’t catch a break. Following reptilian raconteur Steve Bannon turning on him, the Daily Beast is reporting that the MyPillow CEO’s own “lead cyber expert” is admitting that the piles of evidence Lindell has spent months boasting about having that prove that the 2020 presidential election was hacked is all bullsh*t.
While Lindell made a big show out of offering a whopping $5 million to anyone who could show up to his “cyber symposium” and debunk his claims that China hacked our voting machines and swung the election Joe Biden’s way, that offer is apparently no longer valid. In an interview with the Washington Times, Josh Merritt—part of the team of cyber experts Lindell hired to legitimize his election-jacking theory—admitted that those pieces of “irrefutable” evidence the crucifix enthusiast has been throwing around, which look like screenshots from a bootlegged copy of The Matrix, are proof of absolutely nothing. As the Washington Times wrote:
Mr. Lindell said he had 37 terabytes of “irrefutable” evidence that hackers, who he said were backed by China, broke into election systems and switched votes in favor of President Biden. The proof, he said, is visible in intercepted network data or “packet captures” that were collected by hackers and could be unencrypted to reveal that a cyberattack occurred and that votes were switched.
But cyber expert Josh Merritt, who is on the team hired by Mr. Lindell to interrogate the data for the symposium, told The Washington Times that packet captures are unrecoverable in the data and that the data, as provided, cannot prove a cyber incursion by China.
While Lindell has spent weeks talking up his cyber symposium, and teasing his plan to unveil the mountains of data he—a former crack addict who hawks pillows in cheesy commercials that look like they were shot on an iPhone—had collected, it all turned out to be a bunch of hooey. Which any rational person already knew, but the idea of seeing Lindell unveil his trove of shite data would have at least been a conversation-starter.
On Wednesday, the same day Lindell was set to share his findings, Merritt said that he and his team were “not going to say that this [data] is legitimate if we don’t have confidence in the information.” The Daily Beast reports that several security experts who had traveled to Sioux Falls, South Dakota specifically to see Lindell’s “proof” were pissed off when Lindell offered them a boatload of nothing.
Rob Graham, a cybersecurity pro who is on the ground is Sioux Falls and live-tweeting his symposium exploits, offered a pointed take on what Lindell’s got: “random garbage.”
51/ To be clear: he gave us experts NOTHING today, except random garbage that wastes our time (e.g. a CSV needlessly encoded as RTF needlessly encoded as hex).https://t.co/BaPKrTZ3vV
— Robᵉʳᵗ Graham @ Sioux Falls cyber symposium (@ErrataRob) August 11, 2021
Funnily enough, that’s the same phrase many have used to describe Trump’s most devoted sidekicks.
(Via Daily Beast)