‘I’m in ruins,’ teary Mike Lindell tells judge in Smartmatic sanctions hearing
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(WASHINGTON) — Election denier and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell continues to refuse to pay more than $50,000 in sanctions he has been ordered to pay to voting software company Smartmatic over “frivolous” election claims — alleging he’s left with no money after numerous legal battles.
“I’m in ruins,” a teary Lindell said through a Zoom screen during a motion hearing in the U.S. District Court in Washington on Wednesday, pleading to Judge Carl Nichols to allow him to wait until after the final judgement comes out to make any payment in the case, which he has already lost.
Last month, Smartmatic filed a motion to hold Lindell in contempt, alleging the MyPillow CEO has been dodging his court-ordered payment of $56,369 to Smartmatic for months.
Lindell, however, insisted that he does not have the means to pay the amount due to various financial difficulties he has suffered over the last few years due to what he again claimed was “lawfare” waged against him for trying to “secure the election.”
“I borrowed everything I can. Nobody will lend me any money anymore,” Lindell claimed. “I can’t turn back time … but I will tell you, I don’t have any money.”
Lindell claimed he was recently forced to lay off hundreds of MyPillow employees, lost multiple MyPillow warehouse units over the past two years and even owes millions of dollars to the IRS for what he described as a COVID-era employee retention credit.
He claimed he has “nothing” except for two houses, which he claimed are in the process of being liquidated, and a truck.
He even claimed he can no longer adhere to a previously proposed plan of making monthly installments of $5,000.
After listening through Lindell’s plight, Nichols acknowledged that these claims are “non-verifiable representation” at the moment and gave Lindell until Friday to file under seal financial statements and other documents to prove his claims.
“I have nothing to hide,” Lindell said as he agreed to do so and added he wants Smartmatic to see the financial situation he’s in as well.
Smartmatic’s attorney said his client would prefer to see the payment made in a lump sum as soon as possible but acknowledged he would respect the judge’s ruling.
(NEW YORK) — Alphabet’s Google illegally dominated two markets for online advertising technology, according to a federal judge.
Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a ruling Thursday that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the web.
“Plaintiffs have proven that Google has willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising,” the judge wrote in his ruling. “For over a decade, Google has tied its publisher ad server and ad exchange together through contractual policies and technological integration, which enabled the company to establish and protect its monopoly power in these two markets.”
The Department of Justice had sued Alphabet claiming Google had a monopoly in ad technology that allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale. The Justice Department has said Google should have to sell off at least its Google Ad Manager, which includes the company’s publisher ad server and its ad exchange.
“We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president for regulatory affairs, said in a statement. “The Court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don’t harm competition. We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.”
ABC News has reached out to Alphabet for comment.
Google is now facing the possibility of two different U.S. courts ordering it to sell assets or change its business practices. A trial will be held this April in Washington on the DOJ’s request to make Google sell its Chrome browser and take other measures to end its dominance in online search.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) –U.S. stocks were mixed at the open of trading on Wednesday, extending days-long turmoil in markets as tit-for-tat tariffs between the U.S. and China heightened the risk of a global trade war and worsened fears of a recession.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened down 315 points, or 0.8%, while the S&P 500 fell 0.4%.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq ticked up 0.03%.
Meanwhile, a selloff hit U.S. Treasury markets on Wednesday, sending bond yields higher and raising concern about a typical safe-haven asset during moments of instability for stocks.
President Donald Trump’s latest batch of levies on China increased the cumulative rate of tariffs on Chinese goods to 104% — a move met with retaliatory tariffs in Beijing that raised tariffs on U.S. goods to 84%.
The latest U.S. tariffs came into force with key Asian markets already open. In Japan, the Nikkei index dropped more than 5% in response, while the broader TOPIX index slipped 4.6%. The Nikkei closed down 3.93% and the TOPIX down 3.4%.
Stocks in Taiwan fell more than 5.7%, Singapore’s STI index slipped 2.4%, South Korea’s KOSPI index lost 1.8%, Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 lost 1.8% and India’s NIFTY 50 dropped 0.4%.
In China, Hong Kong’s Hang Sen index slipped 0.4%. Shanghai’s SSE Shanghai Composite Index — which has fewer international investors and is buoyed by the state-owned investors known as the “National Team” — posted gains of 1.1% despite the new tariffs. Shenzhen’s SE Composite rose 2.2%.
In Europe, key indices dropped on opening.
The British FTSE 100 dropped by 2.2%, Germany’s Dax index dropped 2.3%, France’s CAC 40 fell by 2.4% and Spain’s Ibex index was down 2%. The pan-European STOXX index was down 2.6%.
United States stocks closed lower on Tuesday, marking a major reversal from a rally that sent the S&P 500 and Nasdaq up more than 4% earlier in the day.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 320 points, or 0.8%, while the Nasdaq dropped 2.1%.
The S&P 500 fell 1.5%, putting the index on the brink of a bear market, a term that indicates a 20% drop from a previous peak.
The move lower on Tuesday resumed a selloff that stretches back to Trump’s tariff announcement last week. Since then, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq have each fallen more than 12%.
(NEW YORK) — An Elon Musk ally hired to overhaul the U.S. Department of Treasury has a lengthy record of undertaking hardline reforms in the private sector that demoralized staff and made them fear for their jobs, according to interviews with several former employees at his tech firm.
Tom Krause, the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Cloud Software Group, oversaw layoffs at his company in each of the last three years while instituting a return-to-office mandate, rigid performance ratings, and a request that weekly updates be sent from workers directly to Krause, the former employees told ABC News — echoing the sort of reforms that Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency has begun undertaking within government agencies.
One former Cloud Software Group employee said she hid her pregnancy for fear it could make her a target of layoffs. An ex-manager said they dreaded filing performance reviews of subordinates, knowing some workers may fall victim to the next cycle of cuts. Another former employee said they avoided expressing unease in company emails or in the messaging app Slack out of concern that it could jeopardize their job.
“They’re taking business practices popular in boardrooms and on golf clubs, and they’re taking them into government,” Kathleen Roan, a former senior content designer at Cloud Software Group who retired in 2024, told ABC News.
Krause in recent days has vaulted into a key position at the Treasury Department, overseeing its $5 trillion payment system, which sends funds to tens of millions of Americans for programs like Medicare and Social Security, the agency’s website says.
In a press release, the agency said Krause brings decades of experience “managing balance sheets” to the agency’s effort to “maximize payment integrity.”
Neither Krause nor Cloud Software Group responded to a request for comment from ABC News.
A ‘hatchet man’
Several former employees ABC spoke with praised Krause as a savvy business leader, and one said they enjoyed their tenure at the company. But most of them requested that they not be identified due to concerns about reprisals.
“There was a whittling away of the things that made you feel like you were a valued employee and then finally ‘Oh, now we’re going to start eliminating jobs,'” Roan said of her time at the company under Krause. “They saw people as expendable.”
Cloud Software Group company was established in 2022 through the acquisition of enterprise software firm Citrix in a private equity-backed $16.5 billion deal, followed by a merger with TIBCO Software.
Krause, who had previously served as president of software at Palo Alto-based Broadcom, was named CEO of the new firm.
Within months, in January 2023, the company cut 15% of its workforce.
“The feeling was that he was there to cut expenses down and be a hatchet man, similar to what’s happening now in the government,” a former human resources employee said. “Everyone was on edge.”
Some of the cost-cutting measures at Cloud Software Group under Krause were first reported by The American Prospect.
Within months of Krause’s arrival, the company also requested that employees return to the office, multiple former employees said.
At the same time, the company closed some offices in an effort to reduce overhead costs, multiple former employees told ABC News. The closures left some workers without an office nearby, making them exempt from the return-to-office requirement, a former employee said.
On Inauguration Day, Trump signed an executive order calling on federal agency heads to mandate in-office work. Musk backed that policy in an op-ed he co-authored in the Wall Street Journal, predicting that mandatory return to work “would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”
‘A much higher level of business discipline’
Employees at Cloud Software Group lost some perks, too.
David Morgan, a former client support provider at Cloud Software Group, said the firm ended his quarterly bonuses, which amounted to $16,000 each year. Workers also stopped receiving “thank you” days, an extra allotment of paid time off, Morgan said.
“Everything we were told would be benefits at the time of hiring was slowly removed,” Morgan said. An Air Force veteran with a disability, Morgan said he received one day of notice before he lost his job as part of a round of layoffs in January 2024, after having been assured that his position had been safe over the months prior.
In a post on LinkedIn that month, Krause said the company had improved but still required personnel changes.
“Our focus on adding value for our long-standing customers while driving a much higher level of business discipline and accountability is bearing fruit — with customer retention and financial results for our first fiscal year as Cloud Software Group coming in ahead of plan,” Krause said.
“But change often means difficult decisions,” he wrote. “While we have a number of areas of the business where our plans involve additional hiring to support our goals, they also mean a pragmatic look at those places where we simply need fewer or different resources.”
In a direct message to Krause over LinkedIn days later, Morgan wrote, “It’s challenging to reconcile my dedication and commitment to the company with the feeling of being let go in a way that seemed to lack empathy.” It does not appear that Krause responded, according to a screenshot of the conversation reviewed by ABC News.
Another policy shift under Krause brought the implementation of employee-performance ratings on a scale of one to three, multiple former employees said.
The ratings took a toll on one former manager, who said the company required them to label at least one subordinate as a low performer. “I had to give one person a low score, even if I thought they didn’t really deserve a low score,” they said. “It was miserable.”
Rating systems have reportedly been deployed as part of the Trump administration’s recent push to cut staff. Senior staff across the Department of Health and Human Services were told to rank thousands of employees in probationary periods, with as much as 40% to be deemed non-mission critical, the Washington Post reported.
‘It’s very alarming’
Daniel Keum, a professor of management at Columbia University Business School, said the apparent overlap between cost-cutting initiatives at Cloud Software Group and some federal agencies exemplifies the Trump administration’s use of tactics borrowed from the private sector.
“In tech, there’s a mentality that you have to break things to make them a lot better,” Keum told ABC News. “When transposed into federal agencies, that mentality becomes very dicey.”
Nearly all former employees who spoke to ABC News expressed shock or concern about the role at the Treasury taken up by Krause, though one expressed indifference and another voiced support.
“It’s very alarming,” said Roan, the former Cloud Software Group design architect.
“He should absolutely not have anything to do with the U.S. Treasury Department,” said Morgan.
In contrast, a former account executive at the company applauded the choice of Krause for the Treasury role, citing his financial acumen.
“I don’t think you can find a better person to swim in the weeds [and] sit in the edifice of the Treasury Department,” the person said.
In January, Cloud Software Group conducted another round of layoffs. That same month, Krause sent an email to all employees asking them to voluntarily send him a message at the end of each week “telling me what you accomplished,” according to a copy of the email reviewed by ABC News.
The approach draws on best practices from “two great entrepreneurs and CEOs that lead the most valuable companies in the world,” Krause wrote, naming Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
In a separate email in recent days, Krause told employees that he plans to continue in his role at the company during his time at the Treasury, according to a copy of the email reviewed by ABC News that was first reported by CRN.
“I am honored to serve our country,” Krause wrote. “Let me be clear — as CEO of Cloud Software Group, I am committed to our company and to you, our employees.”
