The Newsmax host who went viral for storming off the set toward the end of an interview with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell said he could have handled the situation differently.
Newsmax TV host Bob Sellers acknowledged on Wednesday, a day after the heated interview with Lindell, that he was “frustrated that we couldn’t focus on the current, very pressing issue of free speech and cancel culture, and in hindsight, there is no question that I could’ve handled the end of the interview differently.”
Sellers, who in the original interview tried to prevent Lindell from repeating unsubstantiated claims about voting machine election fraud, also called the MyPillow CEO “a friend of this network,” explaining that “we were supposed to discuss Twitter’s decision to ban him and the impacts of cancel culture on his business, but there was some confusion, and Mike thought that we were to talk about voter fraud in the recent election.”
In the interview, Lindell alleged that his Twitter account was banned because “we have all the election fraud with these Dominion machines. We have 100% proof” before being cut off by Sellers. Lindell continued to talk about Dominion Voting Systems, a voting company that has been at the center of a handful of election-related conspiracy theories, despite the interruptions.
Dominion filed two defamation lawsuits against Trump-adjacent lawyers who promoted such theories, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, seeking $1.3 billion each, and the company has issued similar threats to both Lindell and Newsmax, among more than 150 others who the company said has promoted the unverified theory.
“Newsmax and its anchor only wanted to make clear that it has found no evidence of software manipulation involving the election. However, Mr. Lindell is entitled to his own opinion and has a different viewpoint than ours,” Newsmax told the Washington Examiner following Wednesday’s viral Lindell interview.
The network gave an on-air fact check in December 2020 following the threat of a lawsuit.
While Newsmax distanced itself from the conspiracy theories amid the threat of litigation, Lindell has done the opposite.
“I’m going to keep fighting, and I’m going to keep talking, and I’m going to keep going until the last little foot is trying to stomp me out,” he told the Washington Examiner previously. “People went through a lot of hard work to gather all this evidence. Doesn’t anybody in this country care?”
“I’m glad Dominion has put this letter out there. It was two weeks old. I wanted to get it out. I actually tried to get it out,” Lindell added at the time.
The MyPillow CEO recently suggested to the Washington Examiner that the Tuesday interview debacle was due to the “pressure” Dominion is applying to Newsmax.
“It goes to show how much pressure the companies are exerting,” Lindell said, referencing how Dominion has allegedly threatened him, Powell, Newsmax, and several other organizations and people on threats of defamation regarding election fraud claims.
He was on the network on Tuesday night after the viral interview with Sellers, where he and Newsmax host Rob Schmitt discussed cancel culture.
