Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and an ally of former President Donald Trump, has filed a lawsuit against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and members of the Jan. 6 committee to stop them from acquiring his phone records.
Politico reported Wednesday that the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 had issued a subpoena for the records.
In response, Lindell filed suit against the committee, Pelosi and Verizon to stop the carrier from turning over the information.
“I wasn’t there on January 6th and yes they did subpoena my phone records but we filed a complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief against the January 6th committee and Verizon to completely invalidate this corrupt subpoena,” the entrepreneur said in a text message to CNBC.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Minnesota, said Lindell’s actions challenging the results of the November 2020 election were “motivated, in part, by his strongly held religious beliefs.”
It said enforcing the subpoena would violate his rights to “freedom of religion, speech, press, political expression, and to associate with others to advance their shared beliefs.”
The lawsuit also said members of the committee “acted without authority because they were not validly organized as a House committee” according to the rules of the House, The Hill reported.
In addition, it argued that the subpoena “exceeds the authority of the Select Committee” because it requests “records that are far beyond the scope of the Select Committee’s investigation.”
Lindell’s lawsuit is only the most recent legal action taken by Trump allies. Others have brought similar lawsuits against the committee and Pelosi.
At the end of December, Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser to Trump, sued the committee to block its subpoena for his phone records, CNN reported.
Others who have done so include former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, radio host and commentator Alex Jones and attorney John Eastman.
The committee’s actions have deteriorated the public’s confidence in the investigation.
According to Pew Research polling in September, a majority of Americans were not confident in the panel.
“[A] narrow majority of Americans (54 percent) said they were either not too or not at all confident that the House committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 riot would be fair and reasonable,” the organization reported.
Pew’s survey was conducted Sept. 13-19 among 10,371 adults on its nationally representative American Trends Panel and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 1.6 percentage points.
Despite a significant portion of the population doubting the committee’s fairness, its members have made bold claims about how they are seeking the truth about Jan. 6.
“In this great country of ours, I’m convinced that sunlight and truth [are] the best disinfectant when you’re dealing with a lie,” committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, told CNN last week. “Hopefully we will provide the proper disinfectant for what’s happened on January 6, so that people will understand it.”
But as Lindell, Flynn and others continue to battle the Jan. 6 committee’s partisan overreach, it may have a hard time convincing the American public of the validity of its work and its campaign for so-called truth.
