Mike Lindell, still in Trump's good graces, has new prediction: reinstatement by New Year's

Pillow magnate-turned-election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell has a new prediction: Donald Trump will be back in the Oval Office by New Year's Eve.

This article first appeared in Salon.

For months, Lindell floated August as the deadline for Trump's reinstatement, landing on Aug. 13 as the day Joe Biden's electoral victory would be thrown out. Though the 13th passed without any developments and his South Dakota "cyber symposium" fell flat, the infamous MyPillow CEO is still in Trump's good graces — earning a glowing endorsement from the previous commander-in-chief at a packed rally in Cullman, Alabama, Saturday night.

"[Mike Lindell is] a patriot, a wonderful man, a man who puts his guts into everything. A man that they don't treat properly. He's smart; he loves his country so much," Trump said, to cheers from the crowd. "He's willing to die for this country."

"I watched him over the last week at his symposium, which was really amazing, some of the people he had were incredible, incredible people. Mike Lindell!" Trump continued. "True! I'll tell you, true. It's true. He had some people up there, really - they were scientists, they were political scientists and beyond. They were incredible, what they said and what they understand."

Lindell was even given a prominent speaking slot at the event, using the time to rail against Fox News for ignoring him while continuing to promote a variety of debunked election-related conspiracies. In a side interview with the Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) before his speech, Lindell also claimed that Trump would be re-instated by the end of the calendar year.

"It has to happen now. It's Trump 2021. 100% Trump 2021! And it's — this election when it does get pulled down, there were so many down-tickets effected. Maybe the Supreme Court and that they just do a whole new election, which is fine," the pillow tycoon said. "But remember everybody, we have to melt down the machines to make prison bars out of them!"

Salon attended Lindell's "cyber symposium" and found no evidence he had ever posessed the long-promised "packet capture" (PCAPs) election data he attempted to present at the South Dakota gathering. Instead, Lindell baselessly accused "antifa" of infiltrating his event to sabotage him and divert attention from the disclosure of his "absolute proof."

While Trump praised Lindell's handpicked experts on Saturday night, the actual three-day event included dozens of third-party cybersecurity experts that said his data was essentially bunk. One career "packet capture" specialist even told Salon the data Lindell shared was in the wrong format — leading him to demand a cut of the $5 million reward promised to anyone who could prove the data was not legitimate.

The Dispatch's Khaya Himmelman, who was at the confab, reported:

Lindell had claimed multiple times that the PCAPs he had collected alone would demonstrate the widespread fraud he'd been claiming for months, and would be enough to convince the Supreme Court to overturn the election once and for all— unanimously. The basic idea of Lindell's PCAP claim is that he has a team of experts who gathered internet traffic from foreign computers to U.S. counties, where foreign computers came into contact with computers that are meant to provide election results. This all supposedly pointed to data that show a system intrusion that changed votes. And yet there were no PCAPs. In fact, all we got were a series of teasers of various pieces of "evidence" that never materialized. The whole event seemed like an effort to distract attendees with graphics, numbers, slideshows, and tangents, without ever sharing anything at all.

In fact, Lindell's handpicked cyber team — the same group Trump praised Saturday during his speech — spent the 3-day conference sharing bizarre conspiracy theories about election technology company Dominion Voting Systems, including that the company uses "Serbian technology with Chinese characteristics."

Lindell further failed to reveal the alleged Dominion machines that he claimed were in his possession.