Two years ago I wrote about Mike Lindell’s Prove Mike Wrong Challenge in “Mike Lindell proves himself a fool.” The MyPillow CEO held an August 2021 “cyber symposium” in Sioux Falls to provide a forum for his claims of fraud in the 2020 election. He convened the symposium under the auspices of Lindell Management LLC, which I will refer to in this post as Lindell.
The event took place over three days. Speakers included Ronald Watkins, Steve Bannon, and the son of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. The symposium featured a showing of the same conspiracy theory-filled documentary four times and Mike Lindell’s own rants against Fox News. He seems to have mellowed on that point.
Lindell promoted the Prove Mike Wrong Challenge contest as part of the event. Contestants had to attend the symposium to participate in the $5,000,000 challenge. Robert Zeidman attended the symposium to participate. The rules provided that, to win the challenge, a participant was required to prove “that the data Lindell provides, and represents reflects information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally does NOT reflect information related to the November 2020 election . . .” I found that difficult to decipher. Stated otherwise, the rules required that a participant provide a written submission that “proves to a 100% degree of certainty that the data shown at the Symposium is not reflective of November 2020 election data.”
Zeidman claimed to have proved Mike wrong. Challenge judges determined that Zeidman had not provided sufficient proof that the data unequivocally was not election data. Zeidman pursued his claim in arbitration under the Challenge rules. The three arbitrators who heard Zeidman’s case were designated in accordance with the arbitration clause in paragraph 9 of the parties’ August 10, 2021 Agreement and ruled in favor of Zeidman.
Arbitration decisions are given a wide berth under applicable law. I was not surprised when the arbitration decision against Lindell was affirmed here in federal district court by Judge John Tunheim. His decision confirming the arbitration award in favor of Zeidman is posted online here.
Lindell appealed Judge Tunheim’s decision to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. Last week a three-judge panel heard the case and ruled in favor of Lindell in an opinion written by our old law partner Judge James Loken. Judge Loken’s opinion is posted online here. The Eighth Circuit panel held that the arbitrators had exceeded their authority by effectively amending the unambiguous contest rules when they used extrinsic evidence to impose an unstated requirement (“that the data provided was packet capture data”).
My friend Andrew Parker represented Lindell throughout the case. I wrote yesterday to congratulate him on his MyPillow soft landing. Andy responded telegraphically: “The law demanded reversal. Apply law and not politics. Judge Loken spot on.”
