Seems Trump Judges Tired Of Being Seen As Ridiculous Hacks, Mike Lindell's Trump Judge Edition!

Should have filed in Florida, where Judge Aileen Cannon is, big guy. Tough break!

Last week, the FBI seized Pillow Fluffer Mike Lindell's cell phone in the drive through of a Hardee's in Mankato, Minnesota. Either that or all the wine we drank to get through the Trump administration is finally catching up with us.

Anyway, the Pillow Man is not taking this lying down! Although if he ever does come down, he'll at least have somewhere to rest his crazy head. After stopping by Steve Bannon's podcast to screech into the ether that the FBI is now the Gestapo, Lindell called up his crackerjack legal team to see what could be done about it.

The Lindell brain trust consists of: Minnesota attorney Andrew Parker , who represents Lindell in his pending case against the House January 6 Select Committee; Big Lie lawyer Kurt Olsen , who got un-personed from his New York firm for his role in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s effort to persuade the Supreme Court to toss out electoral votes from seven swing states, and spamming DOJ leadership in an effort to persuade them to sign on to a similar complaint; and Alan Dershowitz.

So you know this shit is gonna be AMAZING.

On Tuesday, the team sued Attorney General Merrick Garland in federal court in Minnesota demanding that the court find that the government violated Lindell's First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights. In his telling, the FBI was just trying to suppress his First Amendment right to spend all his time and money having a very public mental breakdown centered around the delusion that the 2020 election was stolen by Chinese operatives via Bluetooth thermostats and "packet captures." He also believes that the agents must have put a tracking device on his car, because how else could they have tracked him down at the Hardee's, HMMM?

Yesterday the dream team docketed an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order that was every bit as compelling as the original complaint.

Mr. Lindell’s efforts to expose and raise public awareness of election fraud, and the inherent dangers posed to our elections, and our Republic, by the use of black box computerized voting machines is well-known to the Government. The object of the search and seizure warrant for Mr. Lindell’s cell phone was not only to gain access to an immense amount of data collected on that cell phone, including attorney-client communications and communications with other individuals which are protected by the First Amendment, but also to send a message to others not to speak out on these issues.

They also allege that prosecutors must have violated the law by failing to inform the magistrate judge who issued the warrant about all Lindell's holy work seeking to "uphold" the integrity of American elections. There's no citation for either of these, so we'll just assume they came from the receptors in Lindell's fillings.

His lawyers also docketed a copy of the warrant, which we will not be linking to, since it failed to redact his cellphone number or the last four digits of his social security number. Fuckin' galaxy brains!

Lindell complained to Bannon that the agents questioned him about Tina Peters , the Colorado election clerk currently under indictment after generating a government ID for a contract hire and then using it to sneak a pro surfer turned election truther in to copy her county's Dominion voting machines and observe a restricted update by the company's staff. Lindell was reported to have stashed Peters in a safe house before her arrest and has at times claimed to have contributed $800,000 to Peters's legal defense, but this week told the New York Times that he'd misspoken. “I was financing everything back then,” he said. “I thought I’d financed hers, too."

In his complaint, he howled that the agents didn't Mirandize him during this discussion, but, as the warrant makes clear, they were seeking any paperwork or electronic documents relating to Peters and her shenanigans. This probably means that the supposed questioning was less a custodial interrogation than a means to serve the warrant. In any event, Our Mike isn't going to make them look too hard, since he docketed a couple of documents purporting to be forensic analyses of Mesa County's election machines. Presumably this would be the very evidence of breach the agents were looking for so ... good job boys.

If the plan was to show US District Judge Eric Tostrud, a Trump appointee, that Lindell is on the side of the angels and is thus immune from the Federal Rules of Civil and Criminal Procedure, then it appears to have missed the mark. Bigly.

"Plaintiffs’ request for an ex parte temporary restraining order directing Defendants to refrain from accessing or taking any action with respect to the seized cellphone until a hearing on that aspect of their Motion seeking a preliminary injunction will be denied for three reasons," Judge Tostrud wrote today . And those three reasons are that Lindell and his lawyers are bloody idiots and this ain't Fort Pierce, Florida, home of US District Judge Aileen Cannon.

Well, okay, he didn't put it exactly like that. But more or less.

Though Plaintiffs cite Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41(g) as the basis for their motion, Plaintiffs do not discuss the Rule or cite any authority that might explain why the cellphone’s return is appropriate under the Rule. To be clear, Plaintiffs cite Rule 41(g) in their Motion and in the caption and introductory paragraph of their Memorandum. But that’s it.

Rule 41(g) goes unmentioned in the remainder of Plaintiffs’ 18-page memorandum. See generally Pls.’ Mem. in Supp. [ECF No. 10]. Absent an obvious answer that Rule 41(g) requires the cellphone’s return, it would be a stretch to grant relief on the basis of this rule when the moving parties nowhere explain how the Rule’s procedural framework and substantive standards support the request.

(3) Whether Rule 41(g) requires the cellphone’s return is not obvious, and that’s understating things.

 Woof. 

In plain English, Judge Tostrud said that, while Judge Cannon might be willing to correct a facially deficient pleading and magical realism herself into jurisdiction over something she has no business hearing, he has no interest in being absolutely pantsed by the Eighth Circuit. So unless these dunderheads can come up with more than DEEP STATE MURDERS PILLOW FREAK WITH WARRANT, they are going to be shit out of luck.

Oh, 2022, you are so crazy!

OPEN THREAD!

[ Lindell v. USA ]

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