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MyPillow founder and chief executive Mike Lindell said that his company is now facing multiple audits from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), namely targeting earnings relating to his call center.
During an appearance on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Mr. Lindell that IRS auditors are looking into earnings for call center contract workers. Mr. Lindell said that the agency has carried out five audits targeting his company, and he sought to cast them as politically motivated.
He continued: “We do not have a call center overseas where you can’t understand the language—these are hardworking moms and who these audits are targeting.”
Elaborating, he said that he believes the audits are being carried out due to his vocal support for President Donald Trump and his claims about the 2020 election, although the IRS has not publicly commented on the matter. “This is something that hasn’t happened in 15 years, and all of a sudden there’s IRS audits against MyPillow in three different years,” Mr. Lindell told Mr. Bannon.
The Epoch Times has contacted the IRS for comment on Thursday. Mr. Lindell’s claims could not be independently verified by The Epoch Times.
Over the past several years, Mr. Lindell has said that there have been wide-ranging efforts to essentially cancel MyPillow due to his support for President Trump. In 2021, it started when Bed Bath & Beyond said that it would stop selling the company’s products, while other major U.S. retailers followed suit over the years.
Companies including Walmart, Target, Kohl’s, Costco, Dollar General, and others have opted not to sell MyPillow merchandise.
Several weeks ago, meanwhile, Mr. Lindell told Mr. Bannon that American Express “crippled” his company but cutting its credit line by about 90 percent.
About a year ago, the pillow company CEO said that agents with the FBI seized his cellphone at a fast-food restaurant, also posting a grand jury subpoena from a federal prosecutor in Colorado and what appeared to be a search warrant. The Denver FBI field office told news outlets at the time that “without commenting on this specific matter, I can confirm that the FBI was at that location executing a search warrant authorized by a federal judge.”
“The FBI came after me and took my phone,” Mr. Lindell wrote on social media at the time. “They surrounded me in a Hardee’s and took my phone that I run all my business, everything with. What they’ve done is weaponize—the FBI, it’s disgusting. I don’t have a computer. Everything I do [is] off that phone. Everything was on there. And they told me not to tell anybody. Here’s an order: ‘Don’t tell anybody!’ ‘OK, I won’t!’ Well, I am.”
“Mr. Lindell is hardly an outlier in this. He is just the most public victim of the unrelenting ‘wokeism’ now fragging patriots all over Mr. Trump’s America,” Mr. Navarro wrote Tuesday, adding that he believes he’s also been targeted in a similar manner.
“But when a taxpayer claims that an audit is tax-motivated, the IRS may well be able to show that this isn’t the case. There may be aspects of a taxpayer’s return that draw their attention. The IRS is very guarded about revealing what these ‘audit triggers’ are, if only so that taxpayers won’t take advantage of this knowledge,” Mr. Schizer said.
