Supreme Court declines to hear Mike Lindell’s phone seizure case

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has suffered another legal setback — this time from the Supreme Court, which rejected his request to hear an appeal over the FBI’s seizure of his cellphone.

In September 2022, FBI agents approached Lindell at a Hardee’s drive-thru in Minnesota and confiscated his phone as part of an investigation into possible voting machine tampering in Colorado in 2020. (Lindell was not charged in the case.)

At the time, Lindell accused the FBI of being “weaponized” against him and said that he was running five companies using his phone and did not have a computer.

He has been trying to get that phone back ever since.

In late 2022, a U.S. District Court judge rejected Lindell’s attempt to have the phone returned. A federal appeals court upheld that ruling last year, writing that the seizure of the phone — which Lindell acknowledged had been backed up five days before it was confiscated — “does not give rise to a constitutional claim, let alone a showing of a callous disregard for his constitutional rights.”

Lindell then petitioned the Supreme Court, which on Monday denied the request.

The refusal is the latest in a string of court losses for Lindell. Last month, MyPillow was evicted from its warehouse in Minnesota after falling behind on rent, and a federal judge recently ordered Lindell to pay $5 million to someone who took him up on his challenge and debunked his election interference claim. He is also facing separate defamation lawsuits from voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems.

In October, Lindell told NBC News that he was broke and could no longer afford to pay the attorneys defending him in those lawsuits, along with a defamation lawsuit brought by a former Dominion employee.

“We’ve lost everything, every dime,” he said.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com