Embattled ‘MyPillow’ executive and longtime MAGA fan Mike Lindell had a few minutes alone with President Trump during a closed-door meeting at the White House.
It was a moment out of a movie – a few fleeting moments with the most powerful man in the world.
Lindell used his highly-coveted one-on-one to bring up the enforcement of an obscure tax provision that touched small businesses, including his own, during the pandemic.
He told the Daily Mail he met with Trump to push for a change in the way the IRS calculates a COVID-era program that rewarded businesses that kept workers on the payroll.
Lindell, who used the program for his MyPillow, Inc. company, says he’s now working to erase the tax headache for small business owners.
And he started at the top with President Trump in an unannounced meeting after a National Day of Prayer event in the Rose Garden last week.
Although his own tax situation has been resolved, he claims, it’s a pain for small business owners who received government checks as recently as last year.
Many must now update their taxes to reflect the additional money they received through the program, he said.
‘It’s just a big mess. Why would you want to go back and redo all these returns for the whole country?’ he told Daily Mail exclusively.
‘The whole country would have to do the tax returns up to when you received that check,’ he said.
Lindell has already brought up the issue with the Treasury Department and the IRS.
Mike Lindell, chief executive officer of My Pillow Inc., told DailyMail.com he raised two issues with Trump during a meeting last week
‘I did bring it up with the president. He directed me to the [White House counsel] lawyers. He was aware of it. The lawyer said he was aware of it. He said yeah this is a big problem, but they’re working on it,’ he said.
The problem, as Lindell described it, is that the ‘IRS is saying: we want you to go put it in the year that it happened.’ That places the taxable event years in the past, and for some businesses could require them to file an amended return.
‘This is a big national problem and it’s an easy fix,’ said Lindell, whose TV network has a pair of correspondents at the White House.
His says he’s not advocating for a personal break. ‘I already got mine. We’re fine,’ he said of his refundable credit.
Last year, the IRS was urging businesses who got the credit improperly to resolve the situation, after the first voluntary disclosure program found $1.9 billion in credits that were given in error.
During his brief meeting with Trump, Lindell said he also raised the issue of Colorado clerk Tina Peters, who got sentenced to nine years in prison.
‘We’re trying to get her out,’ he said.
The Mesa County, Colorado clerk was found guilty of taking part in a breach of election data as part of a scheme to try to prove Trump and Lindell’s claims of a stolen election.
She was accused of using another person’s security badge to provide someone else with access to the election data.
‘She’s just a political prisoner,’ Lindell said, saying she’s ‘never had a jay-walking ticket’ before being charged. Trump’s Justice Department already carried out an unusual intervention by urging the court to release Peters pending her appeal.
Lindell wanted to keep the issue on the president’s radar.
It’s not clear what else Trump can do , since Peters is jailed in Colorado on state charges.
A president can only issue a pardon for federal offenses, as Trump did when he pardoned 1,500 January 6 defendants when he first took office.
Lindell brought up the case of Former Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters. She was sentenced to nine years in prison and is appealing her case
Lindell pitched two issues to Trump in a White House meeting
Judge Matthew Barrett of the 21st Judicial District admonished Peters at sentencing, calling her a ‘charlatan’ who would ‘do it all over again if you could.’
The Justice Department filed an unusual ‘statement of interest’ in the case calling out the ‘exceptionally lengthy sentence and said the court should give ‘prompt and careful consideration’ to Peters’ request to be released pending her appeal.
It noted pointedly that DOJ was reviewing the case to see whether it was ‘oriented more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice.’
The intrusion came at a time when Lindell and Trump allies were raising false claims of massive election fraud. Fox News in 2023 paid $787 million to settle a defamation suit with Dominion Voting Systems after airing claims about the firm’s electronic voting machine systems.
Lindell says his legal battles have wrecked his finances. ‘I’m in ruins,’ he told federal District Court Judge Carl Nichols in a hearing last month relating to the Smartmatic defamation suit against him.
And he continues to face his own situation with the IRS, although he says it is on a matter he brought to the agency’s attention.
At issue here is the $10 million Lindell invested in a substance he said was a ‘cure’ for the coronavirus that he purchased in the spring of 2020. It is now expired and sitting in a warehouse, and Lindell says he wants to take a write-off on the lost value.
‘It was Mike Lindell, it’s me. I bought the stuff out of my personal money. I put $10 million up to save the country and instead .. was attacked,’ he said. He says he tried to send it to Israel, the Philippines, and Brazil, and that the IRS came to view the stockpile. ‘So I’ve been dealing with the IRS on that deduction,’ he said, referring to the substance derived from Oleander as both a ‘cure’ and a ‘supplement,’ although the FDA rejected it.
The Washington Post reported in April that a political appointee at the the Treasury Department contacted the IRS on Lindell’s behalf after he got his second audit letter in two years, intervening on behalf of a ‘high profile friend of the president.’
Lindell denied being under a second audit, calling it a ‘big lie,’ and saying ‘I’m the one that reached out to them.’
‘They went there, took pictures of all of my warehouses that had all this stuff in there that never, never got used,’ he said of the IRS. ‘That became an audit and that’s still going on,’ he said. ‘It’s just arguing over that deduction.’
He got both issues in front of Trump by asking when he was at the White House for the National Day of Prayer.
‘So I said, can I get a few minutes with the president?’ he said of a meeting that wasn’t on Trump’s official schedule.
