Chris Hayes Interviews Trump Voter Who Debunked Mike Lindell’s Election Claims and Is Now Owed $5 Million

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes interviewed a Donald Trump supporter who took up Mike Lindell’s challenge in 2021 to disprove his claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election. The MyPillow CEO offered $5 million to anyone who succeeded in the “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge.

On Thursday, an arbitration panel ruled that Robert Zeidman, a 63-year-old computer forensics expert had done just that. Lindell said he will appeal the ruling in his effort not to pay up.

Later on All In, Hayes asked Zeidman how he came to accept Lindell’s challenge.

“I actually was getting a lot of pressure from friends because this is my field,” he replied. “I’m a forensic scientist and I testify in court. And they kept telling me, ‘You need to go.’ Some of them said, ‘You might win $5 million.’ And my response was, ‘If he’s offering $5 million, he’s got the the proof, so I’m not gonna win it.’ Anyway, three days of a conference is not enough time to examine all the data that he was allegedly showing.”

Zeidman, who noted he will not vote for Trump again, said he ultimately changed his mind.

“What actually was the evidence here?” Hayes asked.

Zeidman responded:

Well, what was presented was a number of files… Everyone looked at this and said, ‘This isn’t what we expected. It’s nothing about the election.” Most of us didn’t know what it was. But I started doing some simple transformations, and every time I did a transformation, I got something that I recognized. And eventually I found that most of the files were Word documents. One was a table of numbers that were basically meaningless. Another one was hundreds or thousands of pages where it looked like somebody had been randomly typing letters into a document.

[HAYES LAUGHS]

But then there was a transformation, several transformations done. So, when it was handed to us it looked like, “Oh, some kind of sophisticated computer data.” And so, within a few hours, I slipped out of the room where everybody was looking over the data, I went back to the hotel write up a report. And I called my wife and I talked to her quietly. And I said, “Start thinking about you wanna do with $5 million.”

Zeidman added that the data he looked at had nothing to do with the election.

When he tried to collect the $5 million prize from Lindell, he was told he failed the challenge. Zeidman called the response “pretty ludicrous.”

“It didn’t make any sense,” he said, before explaining the agreement he signed with the “Prove Mike Wrong” organizers included an arbitration clause.

“The arbitrators didn’t buy it,” he said, referring to Thursday’s ruling in his favor.

“I met the challenge,” Zeidman said. “Because that was easy.”

Hayes chuckled and thanked his guest.

Watch above via MSNBC.