(Bloomberg) — MyPillow Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mike Lindell should be sanctioned for using the courts to spread the “fiction” that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was rigged, Smartmatic Corp. told a judge in seeking dismissal of his $2 billion racketeering lawsuit against it.
Smartmatic said in a court filing Wednesday in Washington that it will seek sanctions and legal fees against the CEO over his Dec. 1 lawsuit, in which he claims it conspired with another election technology company, Dominion Voting Systems Inc., to flip votes away from former president Donald Trump.
“Smartmatic has refrained from scorching every facet of Mr. Lindell’s baseless claims” in order to keep the cost of the litigation down, the company said in its motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
Dominion earlier sued Lindell for defamation, seeking $1.3 billion in damages. Smartmatic hasn’t sued the CEO, though it told the court it plans to do so.
Read More: Newsmax, OAN Sued by Smartmatic Over Election-Fraud Claims
Lindell claims Dominion and Smartmatic have “weaponized” the courts in an act of “lawfare” to silence him. Smartmatic described the word as “a term of art he borrows from Wikipedia” and took aim at a variety of debunked claims in his suit, including the “tinfoil-hat conclusion” that Smartmatic and Dominion had been infiltrated by the Chinese government.
Reached by phone on Thursday, Lindell said “they’re just trying to deflect.”
“Right now, Smartmatic, Dominion, all of them — they’re all the same — they’re all just trying to push things off and stall until the 2022 election, and then we don’t have a country anymore,” he said.
Lindell said he has posted all the evidence of the conspiracy he alleges on his website and that the Supreme Court will eventually expose it and rule in his favor.
(Updates with comment from Lindell.)
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