MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell says his company is now facing multiple audits from the IRS, namely targeting earnings relating to his call center.
During an appearance on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Mr. Lindell said IRS auditors are looking into earnings for call center contract workers. Mr. Lindell said the agency has carried out five audits targeting his company, which he said are politically motivated.
“It started in California. Now there’s three other states that are coming at MyPillow. And Steve, it’s disgusting,” Mr. Lindell said during the podcast with Mr. Bannon earlier this week. “They just keep attacking. Now they’re going after our employees. They made it very personal.
“We do not have a call center overseas where you can’t understand the language—these are hardworking moms … these audits are targeting.”
He said he believes that the audits are being carried out because of his vocal support for President Donald Trump and his claims about the 2020 election, although the IRS hasn’t publicly commented on the matter.
“This is something that hasn’t happened in 15 years, and all of a sudden there’s IRS audits against MyPillow in three different years,” Mr. Lindell told Mr. Bannon.
The Epoch Times contacted the IRS for comment on Oct. 5 but didn’t receive a reply by press time and couldn’t verify Mr. Lindell’s claims.
Over the past several years, Mr. Lindell has said that there have been wide-ranging efforts to essentially cancel MyPillow because of his support for President Trump. It started in 2021, when Bed Bath & Beyond stated that it would stop selling the company’s products, and other major U.S. retailers followed suit over the years, including Walmart, Target, Kohl’s, Costco, and Dollar General.
In 2022, the Minnesota Bank and Trust stated that it terminated its business relationship with Mr. Lindell and described him as a “reputation risk.” At the time, he told Business Insider that he was “disgusted” by the bank and said it was “de-banking” him.
“We really need everybody’s help right now. We have things going on I’m going to let you all know this week,” he said in September. “American Express, I wasn’t going to say this, we’ve been with them 15 years and we do all of our online marketing, all our shipping with them, out of the blue they took our credit line from a million dollars down to $100,000—just cripples MyPillow.”
About a year ago, the pillow company CEO said agents with the FBI seized his cellphone at a fast food restaurant. He also posted a grand jury subpoena from a federal prosecutor in Colorado and what appeared to be a search warrant. At the time, a spokesman for the Denver FBI field office told media outlets that “without commenting on this specific matter, I can confirm that the FBI was at that location executing a search warrant authorized by a federal judge.”
“The FBI came after me and took my phone,” Mr. Lindell said on social media at the time. “They surrounded me in a Hardee’s and took my phone that I run all my business, everything with. What they’ve done is weaponize the FBI—it’s disgusting. I don’t have a computer. Everything I do off that phone. Everything was on there. And they told me not to tell anybody. Here’s an order: ‘Don’t tell anybody!’ ‘OK, I won’t!’ Well, I am.”
This week, former Trump aide Peter Navarro wrote that Mr. Lindell and MyPillow are being targeted by “woke” corporations in what he described as a “dangerous form of uncivil warfare that threatens to further divide our nation even as it desecrates the First Amendment,” according to an opinion article he published for the Washington Times.
“Mr. Lindell is hardly an outlier in this. He is just the most public victim of the unrelenting ‘wokeism’ now fragging patriots all over Mr. Trump’s America,” Mr. Navarro wrote on Oct. 3, noting that he believes that he’s been targeted in a similar manner.
But David Schizer, professor of law and economics at Columbia Law School in New York, told Newsweek that the IRS can’t perform an audit for political reasons. However, he noted that “the IRS was roundly criticized during the Obama Administration for the way it audited nonprofits, using filters that singled out conservative organizations.”
“But when a taxpayer claims that an audit is tax-motivated, the IRS may well be able to show that this isn’t the case. There may be aspects of a taxpayer’s return that draw their attention. The IRS is very guarded about revealing what these ‘audit triggers’ are, if only so that taxpayers won’t take advantage of this knowledge,” Mr. Schizer said.
From The Epoch Times
