Three Washington Republican lawmakers attend Mike Lindell ‘cyber symposium’ using public funds

Three Washington Republican lawmakers attended a 2020 election conspiracy conference put on by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell on the taxpayer dime, according to a recent report.

The Seattle Times reports that state Representatives Robert Sutherland, Vicki Kraft and Brad Klippert flew to South Dakota to attend Mr Lindell's "Cyber Symposium," a three-day conspiracy-laden event that made claims so legally questionable that Fox News refused to air ads for the event.

The three Republican lawmakers then requested and received reimbursements for their travel from the state legislature, totalling $4,361.

Mr Lindell promised that he would provide "irrefutable" evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump, but no evidence of anything ever materialised. By the end of the event, Mr Lindell's own invited cyber experts said the data he'd collected was nonsense and the pillow company CEO himself was waylaid by an "attacker" who reportedly hugged him too hard.

The three Washington lawmakers who attended on the public's dollar all have histories of promoting election fraud conspiracy theories. Mr Sutherland told his Facebook followers to "prepare for war" and called the election of Joe Biden a "coup" that could result in another civil war in December 2020.

Ms Kraft, who spoke at Mr Lindell's event, supported Mr Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally – which preceded the Capitol riot of 6 January – and said during the time that “as a lawmaker you would have to question and reject the results and the electoral votes being counted today.”

Mr Klippert sponsored several bills in 2020 to change the state's election system, which included scrapping mail-in voting, a system of voting the state has accepted as valid since 2005.

All three lawmakers have signed onto a letter by Arizona state Senator Wendy Rogers that calls for "forensic audits" in all 50 states. Ms Rogers was a major proponent of the infamous Maricopa County "forensic audit" that resulted in nothing aside from further confirmation that Joe Biden had won the election in that county.

Both Ms Kraft and Mr Sutherland defended their attendance to The Seattle Times, claiming they will use what they learned at the conference to develop new legislation related to elections. What exactly they learned from an event that produced no new information was not made clear.

“My constituents were demanding that I and others do something about it. Thus I set out on a journey to learn all I could about our election system(s), especially in WA state and in Snohomish County, in order to see if their concerns were legitimate,” Mr Sutherland said in an email to The Seattle Times.

Ms Kraft defended her attendance on taxpayer dollars by saying in an email to the publication that she went to "learn more about what a full forensic audit process looks like, how hackers could hack into an election system and to meet other legislators working on this issue. The conference helped me accomplish these objectives."

Mr Klippert has not yet responded to a request for comment.

When asked for a response to his party members attending the event at the public's expense, state House Republican Leader JT Wilcox said brushed off the idea that any taxpayer money had been wasted.

“I didn’t pay any attention to the conference and I’m sure that there are conferences attended by all sides that seem useless to many, but I’m not in favor of applying a political litmus test to them. Seems like that judgment is up to the voters,” he said.

Both Ms Kraft and Mr Klippert are running for Congress in 2022.