(NewsNation) — A federal judge affirmed a $5 million arbitration award against MyPillow founder Mike Lindell in favor of computer forensics expert Robert Zeidman, who showed Lindell’s data was unrelated to election fraud.
“I didn’t have any expectation, but when I got the data, I looked at it,” Zeidman said during an appearance on NewsNation’s “Dan Abrams Live.” “Partly because I’ve been doing this for such a long time, I recognize patterns.
“And I found that some of the data was just word processor documents, where it looked like somebody had typed random characters over thousands of pages. But then they did this conversion process to make it look like ones and zeros.”
Lindell said he plans to appeal. Asked if he can afford to pay, he pointed out that the breach-of-contract lawsuit was against one of his companies, Lindell Management LLC, and not against him personally.
Zeidman entered the challenge with a 15-page report that concluded the data from Lindell did not “contain packet data of any kind and do not contain any information related to the November 2020 election.” A panel of contest judges that included a Lindell attorney declined to declare Zeidman a winner, so Zeidman filed for arbitration under the contest rules.
Lindell is also the subject of a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems in the District of Columbia that says he falsely accused the company of rigging the 2020 presidential election. He’s also the target of a separate defamation lawsuit in Minnesota by a different voting machine company, Smartmatic.
Lindell has conceded that he and MyPillow are struggling financially. Fox News, which had been one of his biggest advertising platforms, stopped running MyPillow commercials in January in a payment dispute. Two law firms that had been defending him against lawsuits by Dominion and Smartmatic quit last fall. He acknowledged that he owed them millions of dollars.
Zeidman said his hopes are low because Lindell is “running out of money.”
“I think that the (other) lawsuits against him are probably going to succeed. It’s for over $2 billion. I’m just hoping if I get my money, I get in there before they do,” Zeidman said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
