The Window Is Fast Closing For Mike Lindell and His PCAPS

A month ago the PCAPS were on everybody's mind. Now? Does anybody still care?

Mike Lindell is running out of time. 

Ever since he had filed a lawsuit in June against Dominion Voting Systems in Minnesota, Lindell had been incessantly bragging at every opportunity that he had “irrefutable evidence” that the Chinese government had “hacked into” the 2020 election and stolen it from Donald Trump.

He made a series of self-produced films built around this irrefutable evidence, with titles like “Absolute Proof” and “Absolutely 9-0”. He gave countless media interviews in which he talked enthusiastically about how the election machines in over 3,000 US counties were connected to the internet and were tampered with by foreign hackers.

The evidence Lindell says he has consists of network data packet captures [called ‘pcaps’] supposedly recorded by persons unknown between November 3 and November 5, 2020.  The mysterious recorders of the pcaps then decided to give them to Lindell back on January 9th, and the pillow magnate claims his own handpicked team of Cyber Security and IT experts have assured him this data is 100% real and proves beyond a doubt that there was foreign interference in the election. 

So confident was Lindell in the validity of these pcaps that he boasted he would let skeptical cyber and IT experts personally examine them at a “Cyber Symposium” he would host.  True to his word, and reportedly at great expense to himself, Lindell secured a venue, hired security, and sent out hundreds of invitations to lawmakers in all 50 states, as well as cyber experts and IT professionals across the country. Members of the media were also invited to cover the event, which is how I ended up attending all three days of the Symposium in Sioux Falls, South Dakota from Tuesday August 10 to Thursday August 12. 

People from all 50 states assembled themselves in the main room of the South Dakota Military Heritage Alliance and waited to see if more than two months of endless promises would be fulfilled.

Day One passed with the display of graphs detailing what Lindell and his team claimed where the ‘fake’ and then ‘real’ vote totals for all 50 US states.  Presumably, the pcaps were the source of the ‘real’ vote totals for each state, so this appeared to be setting the stage for the pcap’s appearance.

But Day Two of the Symposium also came and went without any pcaps in sight.  There were lots of good presentations about election fraud and the need for election reform that day, as there was for every day of the Symposium.  Just no pcaps, that’s all.

 And then early on Day Three, Lindell and Col. Phil Waldron, leader of the Symposium’s Cyber Team, confirmed in a statement to the audience what everybody already suspected: that the pcaps would not be coming forth after all.

The explanation given for not producing the much-heralded pcaps was that the Symposium’s Cyber Team had been infiltrated, and some kind of malware or ‘poison pill’ had been inserted into the pcaps, which meant they could not now be examined publicly. 

The fact there were big problems within the Symposium’s Cyber Team was evident even before the Symposium’s third day got underway, when a story appeared in the Washington Times.  Two members of that cyber team, Josh Merritt and J. Kirk Wiebe, told a reporter that Lindell was wrong about these pcaps; they didn’t prove anything, certainly not that China hacked the 2020 election. 

Josh Merritt

J. Kirk Wiebe

In the published article, the two men didn’t claim Lindell was lying, but rather only that the pcaps do not provide the ‘irrefutable proof’ that he’s claiming.  It seems Merritt and Wiebe are saying that Lindell’s own cyber people, who had spent more than six months telling him these pcaps were legitimate evidence, are misleading him. 

Whatever happened and whoever it was who misled Lindell, the event ended without any irrefutable evidence being supplied by the data packet captures.  No matter what other good things went on at the Symposium, the claimed evidence around which the entire event had been arranged never making an appearance did have a markedly negative impact. 

Lindell Still Believes

On Monday August 16, Lindell gave a lengthy interview on his own FrankSpeech.com website in which he discussed the sabotage of his Cyber Symposium by ‘infiltrators’.  He also repeatedly claimed that the pcaps in his possession are 100% valid because he fully believes what his own expert cyber team has been telling him about them for the past couple of months.

As I made clear in my Symposium recap video, I don’t blame Mike Lindell at all for what happened. It appears he was talked into trusting the wrong people.  And he may still be trusting the wrong people for all I know.

And I am impressed by his sense of loyalty to his own hand-picked cyber team, who is still insisting to him that what he has still does constitute ‘irrefutable proof’ of China stealing the election for Joe Biden.    

But in my opinion, it’s way past time to put all the cards on the table.  Either Mike has the Royal Flush he claims he does, or he doesn’t.

I understand that Lindell tried for a controlled rollout of the data packet evidence at the Symposium, and it blew up on him. It didn’t work out for reasons beyond his control. 

And now Lindell's still saying he has the pcaps and they're validated?  Well then, he had better act SOON. People are not going to hang around and wait much longer, not after over two months of relentless hype.

I can’t sugar-coat this. If another month goes by, and he’s still insisting he's got the validated pcaps locked away somewhere, and he'll be bringing them out some day...most people won't care. 

He's got a window. 

It's closing.

He needs to be smart.

Mike, if this stuff is real...GET IT OUT THERE.  And if you can’t do that, then just quit hyping this stuff like it’s some magic silver bullet that’s going to end all debate about the 2020 election. Wait until you can roll it out in the courtroom in Washington D.C.

And if that’s what ends up happening, let’s hope the presentation of this pcap evidence in the courtroom goes a lot more smoothly that it did in Sioux Falls.