Minnesota law says you can't give people things of "monetary value" to get them to vote a particular way. It's a short rule with an obvious purpose: your vote isn't supposed to be something anyone can buy, not even for cheap.

On the Fourth of July, in Delano, Minnesota, Mike Lindell rode a parade float decorated with campaign signs and threw pillows to the crowd. The pillows were marked "Mike Lindell for Governor." Campaign literature was stuffed inside them.

A citizen who watched it happen filed a complaint. This week, an administrative law judge agreed it was serious enough to look at.

Judge Nicholas B. Lienesch ruled there is evidence of a "prima facie violation" of Minnesota campaign finance law and scheduled a probable cause hearing.

Lindell's defense is that the pillows were small

Asked about it, Lindell didn't dispute doing it. He explained the merchandise.

"This is our little 'go anywhere' MyPillow. It's like a mini-pillow. We've used it in promotions for a long, long time. I love doing parades."

And:

"These aren't full-size pillows. They're little pillows just like if you gave away a hat or a shirt or anything. Our literature is inside it. We followed all the guidelines to the 'T.'"

That's the whole argument: these were small pillows, so it's fine.

The law doesn't have a size exemption. It has a value test. And the complaint puts the value of each pillow at $34.95 — which is not a bumper sticker, a yard sign, or a button. It's a retail product.

The part that should bother Minnesotans more

Here's what makes this different from a candidate handing out koozies.

Lindell's campaign didn't buy those pillows from a novelty supplier. It bought them from MyPillow — the company Mike Lindell built and is famous for.

He sent KSTP an invoice himself: his campaign bought 2,500 pillows from MyPillow for $4.50 apiece, a little over $13,275.94 including tax.

And the pillows aren't the biggest line item. Campaign finance reports show Lindell has bought about $250,000 worth of his own autobiography to hand out, instead of using campaign brochures.

Read that again. A quarter of a million dollars in campaign money — money donors gave to elect him governor — spent buying a product whose author is the candidate.

David Schultz, a campaign finance expert at Hamline University, laid out the problems for KSTP:

"There's lots of red flags there. Lots of questions that we have, but certainly on the surface it raises all kinds of questions about the legality of what he did."

Schultz flagged three separate issues: whether the giveaways improperly induce voters, whether it's proper to spend campaign funds buying from the candidate's own company, and whether Lindell got pricing the general public couldn't get.

That last one is worth sitting with. The campaign paid $4.50 for pillows the complaint values at $34.95 retail. If a candidate can buy his own product at cost, hand it to voters at a claimed retail value, and count the whole thing as campaigning, he has invented a machine that converts donor money into promotion for his private business.

"We followed all the guidelines"

Lindell has said his lawyers confirmed all of this was legal, and that his campaign sought an opinion from the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board before the giveaways.

The board wouldn't confirm it. A spokesperson told KSTP the board does not publicly disclose whether complaints were filed or opinions were sought.

So the public has Lindell's word that the referee blessed it, and no way to check — which is exactly the position Minnesotans keep being put in with this candidate.

Why the small stuff matters here

You might think a pillow is a small thing to make a fuss about. That's fair. Nobody's vote flipped over a mini-pillow.

But campaign finance rules aren't really about any single pillow. They're about whether a person who wants power will follow the rules that constrain power when the rules are inconvenient and the stakes are low.

That's the test Lindell just failed enough to earn a probable cause hearing. Not a felony trial — a hearing about whether he broke an election law by throwing merchandise at voters from a float, using their own donations to buy it from himself.

A man asking to run the state's elections, its budget, and its agencies is currently arguing that a $34.95 product doesn't count as a thing of value because it's small.

We deserve better.

Source

Tom Hauser, Judge calls 'probable cause' hearing on campaign finance complaint against Lindell, KSTP 5 Eyewitness News. Related: Questions raised about Mike Lindell's pillow, book giveaways while campaigning.