MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, one of Fox News' largest advertisers, announced on Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast on Friday that he has hired a team of "private investigators" to dig into Fox News over the burning issue of why the conservative channel won't let him appear on-air to tout groundless election conspiracy theories.
"I don't remember seeing you on Fox recently. Why are the Murdochs afraid of Dominion?" Bannon began, referring to Dominion Voting Systems, which has filed a massive defamation suit against Lindell, Fox News and various of the network's prominent hosts. "Why is Mike Lindell not on Fox, and why do they seem to say, 'Hey, when Dominion says something, we're just gonna shut up about it and talk about Biden's tax bill'?"
Lindell responded by telling Bannon he has hired private investigators to look into everything from Facebook to Fox News, although the scope of the supposed investigation seemed amorphous. "You know, I'm gonna have those answers soon cause I've hired private investigators, and I've spent a lot of money on them to investigate everything. Why are the bots and trolls, who's behind them? Why is Facebook involved, Wikipedia involved?" Lindell asked. "And then the big question: Why isn't Fox having people on? Why isn't Fox on there talking about Dominion and Smartmatic and the election fraud?"
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell asked why he hasn't appeared on Fox News, floats the idea he has hired "private investigators" to look into the cable news giant. pic.twitter.com/Cwl2qnohZz
— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) April 9, 2021
A Fox News spokesperson didn't return Salon's request for comment on whether the channel plans on cooperating with Lindell's team of private investigators, or has heard about them. Lindell didn't respond to Salon's request to comment on why he still advertises on the network, if he's at war with it.
Poking fun at Lindell hiring investigators to look into Fox News, The Daily Beast's Justin Baragona tweeted that this was: "The sequel to Trump sending 'private investigators' to Hawaii to look into Obama's birth certificate." Others on Twitter likewise mocked Lindell over his effort to investigate the cable giant.
This isn't the first time the pillow maven has railed against the conservative network he advertises on. In late March, Lindell wondered aloud whether Fox News was "in on" the $1.3 billion lawsuit Dominion filed against him. "Why can't people go on there [Fox News] and say their free speech, then?" Lindell asked on a right-wing YouTube channel at the end of March. "You're already sued, Fox. What do you have — are you going to get double sued? What's the matter with you? What, are they in on it? I don't get it. Is it a fake lawsuit?" Lindell stated.
The MyPillow CEO, when not blasting Fox News, has recently claimed that in the coming months Donald Trump will be reinstated as president, although the mechanism for such an extra-constitutional transfer of power is unclear. "What I'm talking about, Steve [Bannon], is what I've been doing since Jan. 9," the pillow maven said in late March. "All the evidence I have — everything is going to go before the Supreme Court, and the election of 2020 is going bye-bye. It was an attack by other countries, communism coming in. I don't know what they're going to do with that after they pull it down. ... Donald Trump will be back in office in August!"
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