Kari Ann Lake (born August 23, 1969) is an American politician and former television news anchor. After working at Phoenix television station KSAZ-TV for 22 years, she stepped down from her role as a program anchor in March 2021. She announced her campaign for governor of Arizona on June 1, 2021, and was the Republican nominee in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election. She was endorsed by Donald Trump and disputed the election of Democrat opponent Katie Hobbs.
I've read your work. That, is judgment, not journalism.
Brief interview with Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic (October 9, 2022), responding to Godfrey's past articles describing Lake as an "election denier" and "conspiracy theorist".
Our voters were showing up on election day. That was no secret and the minute the polls opened the wheels fell off. The ballot printers weren't working, there was not enough toner in the printers, the tabulators weren’t working. It became a debacle. And the lines started forming right away, some of the lines three hours, four hours, five hours. And the video of people walking out of line. People told us, and this is in our lawsuit, that they showed up and couldn’t find parking because the parking lots were full and the lines were long. And many people didn't even get to vote. And those who did vote when they went up to get the printer out, the printer didn't have toner in it, so the ballots weren't dark enough. And our voters were showing up and voting 3 to 1 for me on election day.
We vote for a full month in Arizona with early ballots. And on election day when the Republicans showed up the election day voting was sabotaged. It is shocking what they did. The man who runs Maricopa County elections ran a PAC, he actually started a PAC, raising thousands of dollars to defeat me. And he is running our elections. And then my opponent [Katie Hobbs] oversees all the elections in Arizona. It was a conflict of interests. And not only was Katie Hobbes working with big tech to censor people, the man who runs Maricopa County elections, they were also censoring people as well online.
We will be presenting a lot of evidence. We have four whistleblowers. One that works for a company called Runback who said there were 300,000 ballots inserted into the system that had no chain of custody. Others who were in the voter signature verification department said tens of thousands of ballots were rejected because there were no signatures or scribbles and they somehow got thrown in and counted anyway.
There are a plethora of problems that went down in Maricopa County and if somebody doesn’t stand up and say we cannot have our elections being run this way, then we will never have another fair election. I mean, sixty percent of the polling places on Election Day were inoperational and not functioning. When do we stop and say enough is enough? Do we have to get to 80 percent, 90 percent, 100 percent? When do we say we need to have our elections run fair?
Speaking to an audience of Georgia Republican activists, Lake issued a warning for anyone "coming after" Trump, saying, "I have a message tonight for Merrick Garland, and Jack Smith, and Joe Biden. And the guys back there in the fake news media, you should listen up as well, this one's for you. If you wanna get to President Trump, you're gonna have to go through me, and you're gonna have to go through 75 million Americans just like me..."And I'm gonna tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA. That's not a threat, that's a public service announcement."
Lawmakers from both parties and houses of Congress have agreed to provide about $653 million to fund Voice of America’s parent agency, rejecting President Donald Trump’s demand to defund the international broadcaster and shut it down. A bipartisan spending bill released Sunday would allocate $643 million for broadcasting from the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA, plus nearly $10 million for capital improvements. That figure is down from the $867 million appropriated for the agency each of the past two years, but it’s more than four times the $153 million Trump requested that Congress provide to “support the orderly shutdown of USAGM operations.” The outlay is included in a broader bipartisan spending deal negotiated by House and Senate appropriators. The package still requires House and Senate approval before heading to Trump’s desk. “We understand the realities of the appropriations process, but I am disappointed that Congress is proposing half a billion dollars more in funding than we requested,” Kari Lake, the deputy CEO installed by Trump to shut down the agency, wrote in a statement Monday. “While reductions from prior years are a step in the right direction, USAGM can still advance President Trump’s message and share America’s story globally without wasting so much taxpayer money.”
The bipartisan commitment to funding USAGM reflects continued congressional support for America’s role in promoting the free flow of news and information abroad, a long-standing foundation of its soft power around the world. Congress’s funding proposal comes after a dire year for USAGM. Trump signed an executive order in March calling for the dismantlement of the government agency, which oversees Voice of America and funds nonprofit groups including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. To carry out the order, Lake placed more than 1,300 Voice of America staffers on paid administrative leave — many of whom are still not working — and halted broadcasting operations the same month. It was the first time VOA went dark since it was first set up in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda. In response, VOA’s director, Michael Abramowitz, and a separate group of USAGM staffers sued the Trump administration, arguing that its actions were illegal. Lake, a former Arizona television anchor who lost high-profile races for governor and U.S. Senate in recent years, has defended the cuts and called for the agency’s eventual elimination. She told Congress in a June hearing that USAGM was “incompetent, corrupt, biased, and a threat to America’s national security and standing in the world.” She has also said USAGM is “not salvageable.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
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