Missouri’s top election official Ashcroft meets with conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell

Conspiracy theorist and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell Thursday was in Jefferson City with Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, the state’s top election official and a likely candidate for governor in 2024.

Lindell played a major role in promoting baseless election conspiracies in the wake of the 2020 election and met with former President Donald Trump days after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Lindell has continued to elevate debunked claims about the election in the years that have followed.

JoDonn Chaney, Ashcroft’s spokesperson, confirmed to The Star that Lindell and several other people met with Ashcroft Thursday inside the James C. Kirkpatrick Information Center, where Ashcroft’s office is located.

Lindell, reached by phone Thursday, said he was invited to the meeting by a group of people who wanted to talk with Ashcroft about election concerns. Lindell said he also met with “a couple of” state senators but refused to name them.

“Those guys, the grassroots or whatever, have election concerns — on being proactive in elections and reactive,” he told The Star. “I always like to be involved in them to find out what’s going on in all the states. What are the good practices and bad practices in elections?”

The meeting between Lindell, who has been widely denounced as a conspiracy theorist, and Ashcroft, who oversees Missouri’s elections, is noteworthy. After the 2020 election, Lindell backed efforts around the country to encourage people to go door-to-door in search of “phantom voters.”

Shortly after the riot at the Capitol in 2021, the MyPillow founder met with Trump in Washington with papers that suggested the then-president was considering invoking a law that would let Trump deploy military troops and use martial law, according to photographs captured by Washington Post photographer Jabin Botsford.

He also previously said he had spent $25 million of his own money to push the claim that the election was stolen from Trump, including a campaign for state attorneys general to join a lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election.

House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat, said the meeting hurts Ashcroft’s credibility as secretary of state and as a potential candidate for governor.

“It calls into question his competence as an elected official and the secretary of state,” she said. “He is our top elections person and for him to be taking meetings with somebody who is very outspoken against the elections and an election denier, I think is a really bold move, and just continues to show that he is running for governor and not doing his job as secretary of state.”

State Rep. Peter Merideth, a St. Louis Democrat, also criticized the meeting in an interview with The Star.

“This is somebody that has been thoroughly discredited as a conspiracy theorist attacking the integrity of elections with completely ridiculous facts that have been proven wrong over and over,” he said. “The fact that the guy that is responsible for our state’s elections and is running for governor is meeting with him is incredibly sad and problematic.”

Lindell said he had met with Ashcroft before and hadn’t seen him in awhile. He was in Missouri while campaigning to run for chair of the Republican National Committee, he said.

Ashcroft is one of three likely Republican candidates for governor. Another likely candidate, State Sen. Bill Eigel, a Weldon Spring Republican, did not respond to a call and text asking if he met with Lindell.

A spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, the third Republican candidate and the only one to officially enter the race, said Lindell did not meet with Kehoe.

Ashcroft, as secretary of state, has supported recent GOP-led changes to Missouri’s election laws, including requiring voters to show a government-issued photo ID at the ballot box.

The Republican secretary of state is also promoting a legislative agenda that prioritizes changes to election law. He did not offer specifics in an interview with The Star last month, but broadly said he wants to ensure that everyone who meets the minimum voting requirements can vote.

He also said he wants to make it “hard to cheat” and for people to trust election results. In the past, he has expressed opposition to expanded mail voting.