The only legal representation available to MyPillow CEO and ardent election denier Mike Lindell is, apparently, completely fake.
Attorneys for the longtime Donald Trump ally are facing possible discipline for filing an AI-generated brief with fabricated legal citations in order to defend their client.
After facing accusations from a federal judge, Lindell and his legal team confessed to turning in a brief with “nearly 30 defective citations.” One of Lindell’s attorneys, Christopher Kachouroff, claimed that he had “personally outlined and wrote a draft of a brief before utilizing generative artificial intelligence,” according to a legal filing. That final draft, however, pointed to legal cases that never happened.
U.S. District Court Judge Nina Wang has given Kachouroff and Lindell’s other attorney, Jennifer DeMaster, until May 5 to prove why they should not face disciplinary proceedings and lose their legal licenses.
It is, shockingly, not the first time that Kachouroff has been caught with his pants down. Last year, the attorney was literally caught without any pants during a break in a Zoom court hearing in which he was representing another election denier.
Lindell is accused of undermining U.S. democracy and leveraging his connection to Trump to boost his poly-foam pillow sales. At one point, the MAGA businessman’s company was generating as much as $300 million in annual revenue, according to court filings. But by mid-April, Lindell claimed that he still owed $70 million in debt and that his income had plummeted to $1,000 a week.
Last week, Lindell told a federal judge that he couldn’t afford to pay $50,000 in sanctions in one of the longstanding election fraud cases against him, and that he was financially “in ruins” over the lawsuits as nobody will lend to him anymore.
“Not one dime,” Lindell said.
MyPillow has been struggling since Lindell aggressively saddled himself up to flip Trump’s 2020 election loss. According to Lindell, his infomercial-heavy product lost $100 million in revenue after it was dropped by shopping networks and retailers, had its credit limit downsized by American Express, and had to auction off thousands of pieces of equipment. Last February, the company also lost a place to lay its head, facing eviction from its warehouses after Lindell failed to pay rent at the company’s Minnesota facilities.
The former millionaire spent months using every platform at his disposal to seed conspiracy theories following the 2020 presidential election, including against Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, claiming the electronic voting companies were complicit in a scheme to keep Trump from retaking the White House. That, however, cost Lindell $5 million and made him a major target in a $1.3 billion defamation suit brought by Dominion, in which he’s being sued not just for spreading the lies but also for attempting to profit off them.
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