Election denier and MyPIllow CEO Mike Lindell is suing a New York City-based cash advance company, saying he was tricked into borrowing $1.6 million at a 409% annual interest rate. In the filing, Lindell claims he, and other business entities tied to him, borrowed more than $1.5 million "with daily payments of $45,225.82, which yields a total amount to be paid of $2,261,290.76," from Cobalt Funding Solutions.
The filing also alleges that Cobalt added an upfront cost of $124,760 (and 87 cents) “origination fee.” According to Law & Crime, the filing is "almost an exact replica" of the lawsuit Lindell filed in October against two other New York-based lenders, Lifetime Funding and CapSpot Financial.
In both lawsuits, Lindell describes the lending and borrowing system as “predatory,” arguing that the companies’ manipulated the contracts to bypass statutory maximum interest rate laws. “[D]espite the disclaimers in the Agreement and the incorporated guaranty, no actual sale of receipts ever took place, and the form Agreement is merely a sham intended to evade the applicable usury law.”
Coincidentally, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has spent a good deal of her career trying to gain support from the more conservative members of Congress to go after payday lenders, which generally offer short-term, high-cost loans to poor Americans. And from the Leopards Eat My Face files, it was Donald Trump’s pick as the interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney, who put a pause on a rule that would restrict payday lenders and the kinds of high-interest-rate loans Lindell is decrying now.
Lindell, a Trump-supporting election denier who once boasted of spending money to defend people like convicted former Colorado election clerk and recorder Tina Peters, has been reeling from financial issues since the 2020 election. Most of his issues, like fellow election-denier Rudy Giuliani, stem from mounting legal fees in connection to his election denialism.
Last year, Lindell said he borrowed $10 million to keep his businesses afloat. Lindell was then ordered to pay $5 million to computer forensics expert Robert Zeidman, who disproved Lindell’s claims that his election data showed interference by China in the 2020 election.
In October, Lindell said he was broke. His lawyers filed a motion saying that they were owed “millions of dollars” from Lindell, and could no longer work for free.
It would be great if Lindell got his buddy Trump to go after predatory loan practices, but he won’t. Instead, Trump will likely funnel taxpayer money to Lindell the way he did last time—giving him money for saying he would do a thing that he didn’t actually do.
