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(Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
A year ago, Mike Lindell told Reuters’ Brad Heath that he was about to drop a lawsuit that would blow the lid off the 2020 election .
“There’s going to be stuff in this lawsuit that is going to … stuff that’s not been done before,” he promised.
And on the second part of that claim, he delivered bigly. Has anyone ever filed a countersuit in Minnesota after being sued for defamation in DC? And has anyone ever alleged that a private company committed RICO and defamation and violations of due process and the First Amendment by simply filing a lawsuit?
Seems pretty unlikely!
In the event, US District Judge Patrick Schlitz declined Lindell’s invitation to reach across the country and punish Dominion Voting Systems for the tort of suing Mike Lindell, and the case was transferred to DC, where it joined Dominion’s $1.3 billion suit against Lindell and his MyPillow company on Judge Carl Nichols’s docket.
Then Lindell added Smartmatic, a wholly separate voting machine company which directly competes with Dominion, as well as Dominion’s PR firm Hamilton Place as “Third-Party Complainants.” His theory seems to be that everyone who said his election theories were an unsavory mix of bat and bull shit was part of a conspiracy to ruin him.
Unsurprisingly, Dominion, Smartmatic, and Hamilton Place filed motions to dismiss Lindell’s RICO libelslander suit. Smartmatic also moved to sanction Lindell and his lawyers, requesting that the court “award Smartmatic the costs and reasonable attorney’s fees it has incurred defending itself and moving for sanctions [and to] disgorge the fees Mr. Lindell’s counsel has earned by prosecuting this bad faith, frivolous action and make them payable to the Court.” Which wasn’t exactly a shock either.
Yesterday, Judge Nichols, a Trump appointee, granted all those motions.
As for Lindell’s RICO and “normal” conspiracy allegations, the court found that there was no agreement between the parties to do anything, much less destroy Mike Lindell and his pillow company.
“[T]he corporate history between Dominion and Smartmatic in no way suggests that the two companies ‘joined together’ to achieve an alleged illegal purpose,” Judge Nichols wrote. “And Lindell’s Complaint contains no allegation that Dominion and Smartmatic did anything to coordinate their supposedly illegal ‘lawfare’ campaign.
“Lindell’s Complaint points to no event, no conversation, no document—really, nothing at all—to suggest that Dominion, Smartmatic, or Hamilton Place reached any sort of ‘agreement,” the court writes, adding that, “In short, Lindell has made no non-conclusory allegations of a meeting of the minds or any formation of an agreement among Dominion, Smartmatic, Hamilton Place, or others.”
Even if Dominion were in cahoots to ruin Mike Lindell with its law firm, Clare Locke, or its public-relations firm, Hamilton Place, it still wouldn’t be a “RICO enterprise” because a corporation can’t do a RICO with its own agents. Also the mere fact of filing a lawsuit and sending out nasty cease and desist letters isn’t a crime, much less a predicate act for a civil RICO claim. But other than that, hole in one, dude.
And even if Dominion and Clare Locke had “made [the allegedly defamatory] statements simply to ‘gratify private malice’ against Lindell” as the pillow maven attests, it wouldn’t matter because they did so in anticipation of litigation, and the judicial proceedings privilege attaches.
“[W]hat makes the judicial proceedings privilege an ‘absolute’ privilege is that it applies even if someone makes an allegedly defamatory statement with malice,” Judge Nichols notes.
As for the bizarroworld First Amendment, Due Process, and Equal Protection claims, the court basically agrees to play along with the conceit that Dominion became a state actor for all time when it contracted to sell its voting machines to state governments. And still, it doesn’t make this interpretive dance cum civil rights suit any less frivolous.
Lindell (and not MyPillow) asserts an Equal Protection Clause claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against Dominion and Smartmatic. See generally Lindell’s Counterclaims. In particular, Lindell claims that Dominion and Smartmatic violated his “rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution and under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.” Id. ¶ 170. Lindell bases his claim on the theory “that Dominion and Smartmatic disfavored the conservative political viewpoint of [] Lindell over those of left-leaning or Democrat-supporting individuals who also publicized the role of Dominion voting machines in election fraud and election tampering.” Id. ¶ 173. Without an express (or an implied cause) of action, a plaintiff cannot seek money damages to vindicate an alleged violation of a constitutional or a federal right.
Lindell alleges that his foes “acted under color of state law to engage in conduct that shocks the conscious because it was so disproportionate to the need presented, and so inspired by malice or sadism rather than a merely careless or unwise excess of zeal, that it amounted to brutal and inhumane abuse of official power literally shocking to the conscience.” But the sum total of what he’s alleged is that they said he was lying and sued him.
“Filing a lawsuit, sending cease-and-desist letters in anticipation of a lawsuit, and discussing a lawsuit with the media all fall well short of satisfying the shock-the-conscience test,” the court noted.
And so the court dismissed Lindell’s claims against Smartmatic, Dominion, and Hamilton Place, and partially granted Smartmatic’s motion for sanctions. The parties will have to submit briefs on how much Lindell and his lawyers owe for this ridiculous abuse of the federal docket and for forcing Smartmatic to participate in it.
So, congrats to Mike Lindell, who really did some “stuff that’s not been done before.” Although perhaps not exactly in the way he intended.
US Dominion Inc. v. MyPillow Inc. [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
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