Klobuchar and Lindell: A “Family” Feud

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The front-runners of both parties in the Minnesota governor’s race have something in common.

Both Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell have had strong ties to a controversial, secretive, Christian organization, and no one’s talking about it.

The Fellowship Foundation — aka The Family — is famous for scandal and for running the National Prayer Breakfast. Increasingly, it’s become known among congressional Democrats for using prayer breakfasts to build right-wing networks opposed to organized labor and reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights.

That’s why so few Democrats participate now. But Klobuchar, virtually uncontested in next week’s primary, was for years one of The Fellowship’s few public faces among Democrats.

Lindell was transformed behind closed doors. He went from a casual, barely political Christian several years ago to a religious and political crusader for election denial over the course of about two years orbiting The Fellowship.

Lindell’s ties to The Fellowship remained largely secret until I fleshed out some hints he had dropped along the way. In his book, for instance, he talked about the profound impact of the 2016 and 2017 National Prayer Breakfasts.

The authoritative aura those events were given by the participation of high-profile government officials gave force to what Lindell heard there. That was especially true of the remarks of Senate Chaplain Barry Black, Lindell wrote.

Fellowship insiders took Lindell under their wing. They set up camp on the boards of his philanthropies, charities that soon shifted their focus from veterans and addicts to Christian evangelization. When Lindell did his surrender — on his knees, giving himself to Jesus — it was The Fellowship who got him there.

Most visibly, Lindell became enamored of Pres. Donald Trump, imbuing him and his presidency with religious meaning.

Klobuchar, by contrast, has had a much less exciting sojourn with The Fellowship. But she’s still preferred to keep some of it quiet.

I’ve reported before about Klobuchar’s work with The Fellowship, specifically the National Prayer Breakfast, an important tool for Fellowship networking.

Just this year, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, torturer of American deportees, joined in, speaking at the 2026 National Prayer Breakfast. Just a month earlier, Fellowship insiders including Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) flew to El Salvador to give him his own prayer network, praise him, and bestow God’s blessing on his work.

Democratic participation in the breakfasts has been a vital ingredient, legitimizing them, dangling the promise of unmediated and unreported access, and lending the events a false but cultivated veneer of official status.

Klobuchar was a speaker as early as 2008 and was there for some of the event’s big moments.

In 2017, when The Fellowship brought in guests who turned out to be Russian operatives, Klobuchar was one of the draws, delivering the closing prayer. Even The Fellowship’s dalliances with Russian spies didn’t dissuade Klobuchar from participating in 2019.

Over the years, she lent her name to the event as co-chair or as a member of the fictional congressional host “committees.” These were just names on the letterhead to impress powerful people in countries where Fellowship allies dangled invitations to leverage their own power there.

But 2019 was also the year of the Netflix documentary series based on Jeff Sharlet’s reporting about The Fellowship. Reporting by me and Ken Klippenstein when we were at The Young Turks (TYT) had showed how The Fellowship was sponsoring meetings between congressional Republicans and Fellowship allies — antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ+ — internationally.

Even Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), for years The Fellowship’s Democratic public face, told TYT in 2019 that he was “concerned about the perception that it [the prayer breakfast] is a partisan event.” That year, Coons, Klobuchar, and Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) were the only Senate Democrats to participate.

Klobuchar was on the 2019 invitation. But disappeared in 2020.

As I’ve previously reported, when Klobuchar and other Democrats let their names be used on Fellowship invitations, they facilitate The Fellowship’s right-wing political work.

The congressional names give the event an official imprimatur. That turns invitations into currency, which Fellowship associates then dole out to build their own networks in other countries. Like Uganda, where Fellowship associates pushed through an LGBTQ+ death penalty.

The official imprimatur also lets foreign politicians allied with The Fellowship justify using government funds to attend, again facilitating Fellowship network-building.

As my reporting, and the work of advocacy groups led by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, brought this dynamic to light, some congressional Democrats began bailing on The Fellowship’s breakfast. Seeking to preserve some measure of Democratic participation, The Fellowship split the event in two.

A new breakfast would take place on Capitol Hill, without all the lobbyists and Russian spies who helped make the main event so notorious. The smaller spinoff would be run by a separate nonprofit ostensibly independent of The Fellowship.

Klobuchar and Coons have shown up there, but don’t appear as active with The Fellowship these days.

Even congressional Democratic leaders have stopped going to either breakfast.

The Interfaith Alliance this year published a video in which four House members — secular and religious, including past breakfast participants — said they’re done.

One of those four, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA), had co-chaired the 2023 Capitol Hill breakfast with Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI). Walberg’s co-chair role was then cited in a Fellowship congressional filing to justify flying Walberg to Uganda to defend its LGBTQ+ death penalty.

McBath said in the Interfaith Alliance video that “our faith has been hijacked by political ideologies.”

When I asked Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), co-founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, about Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) co-chairing this year’s Capitol Hill breakfast, he said, “I’m dismayed that some Democrats still choose to play footsie with this scandal-plagued prayer breakfast movement.”

Huffman’s view appears to be prevailing. The 2026 Capitol Hill prayer breakfast that Klobuchar attended seems to be losing traction. Video of the event showed sparse turnout.

And, ironically, the two breakfasts that both claim prayer is unifying are now at odds in a legal battle over the name “National Prayer Breakfast.”

Either way, it appears Klobuchar’s connections to The Fellowship are weaker than they have been, although we don’t know whether she still attends the weekly Senate prayer breakfasts facilitated by The Fellowship.

None of the political reporters covering her campaign appear to have asked Klobuchar about her Fellowship ties. She did not respond to my request for comment.

Neither did Lindell, who called me a “scumbag” the one time we spoke, which was also about his own Fellowship connections. Which are a lot wilder than Klobuchar’s.

Not that long ago, Lindell was just your average TV pillow pitchman and recovered crack addict. He was casually Christian, reflexively Republican.

The Fellowship radicalized him on both fronts.

It started in 2014 when Lindell met actor and right-wing Christian activist Stephen Baldwin, whose nonprofit was being run by Fellowship associates. Two years later, those associates got Lindell into the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast.

Dr. Ben Carson was there, and The Fellowship decided to put him and Lindell in a room together, one of the smaller, non-televised “breakout sessions” where the breakfast’s real work happens.

Lindell described it in his book:

“The dozen people in the room gathered in a circle and began talking about the critical importance of the 2016 election. We agreed it was going to be a real spiritual turning point for the country. One path could lead us toward national renewal. The other could lead us down a dark path from which there might be no return, a path that had begun with the removal of God from the public square.”

The conversation with Carson, Baldwin, and Fellowship insiders, he wrote, “opened my eyes to the impact of politics on ordinary people.”

The Fellowship’s spokesperson, A. Larry Ross, also a board member, took a particular interest in Lindell. And during the next year encouraged Lindell to attend a religious retreat run by someone known to The Fellowship.

A few weeks after the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast — where Lindell was awed and moved by the remarks of the Senate chaplain — Lindell agreed to go. The retreat worked.

“I went in there with hope,” Lindell told the Christian Broadcasting Network. “I said, ‘God please, show me you’re real, show me, you know? I want that personal relationship,’ And on the second day, on Feb. 18, 2017, I did a full surrender on my knees.”

There are more diplomatic ways to say that Lindell then went insane, but few more accurate.

With The Fellowship now involved, Lindell pivoted his nonprofits from helping veterans recover from addiction to funding evangelical causes.

He became an acolyte of Trump, who Lindell declared “chosen by God.” After Trump’s 2020 election loss, Lindell became an evangelist of election-denial and wildly unsupported conspiracy theories. Some highlights of his activism include:

• Helped raise bail for Kyle Rittenhouse.

• Said that was an accident and he really meant to fund election denial.

• Donated to the legal defense fund of election-denying county clerk Tina Peters.

• Pushed Trump on unfounded COVID claims about a drug he had a financial stake in.

• Banned from Twitter for election disinformation.

• Banned from Twitter for evading his ban for election disinformation.

• Called for Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to go to prison.

• Predicted I would go to jail.

• Got four votes in his race to chair the Republican National Committee.

Lindell’s bottomless faith in Trump led him to sponsor an election-denial bus tour, to attend the White House rally on Jan. 6, 2021, to blame Antifa for the attack on the Capitol, to take a file on the Insurrection Act into a Trump meeting a week later, to hold a cyber-symposium that failed to prove election theft, to hold a contest daring anyone to disprove election theft and then weasel out of paying the $5 million prize, to predict that Trump would somehow be instated as president on Aug. 13, 2021, and then later on to Sept. 30, 2021, and then to claim that “We have enough evidence to put everyone in prison for life, 300-and-some million people."

Even today, LindellTV continues to provide a platform for the wildest of election conspiracy theories.

That said, like Klobuchar, Lindell’s ties to The Fellowship appear to be more slender lately. The guy who runs the retreat where Lindell accepted Jesus was still on the board of the Lindell Legal Offense Fund as of 2024, but as I reported at the time, he wasn’t really a Fellowship insider.

Ross and other Fellowship insiders no longer occupy positions on his various boards, according to the latest tax filings. Some of Lindell’s nonprofits haven’t even filed returns in recent years, suggesting they became defunct after The Fellowship got involved.

Like Klobuchar, Lindell has not been asked about The Fellowship during this campaign. Neither has spoken publicly about where they stand with The Fellowship today. Neither commented for this article.

But if they do both still maintain Fellowship ties, it would mean no matter who wins, The Fellowship is about to have a friend in the Minnesota governor’s mansion.

I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.