Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed candidate for Arizona governor, was far from happy on Monday when Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked her about a report that linked her to drag queens.
The interview, which was fairly tame on Baier’s end, began with Lake falsely claiming that the 2020 election was “fraudulent” and that President Joe Biden is “illegitimate.” Baier responded by playing a tape of Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers testifying before the House Jan. 6 committee last week that the election was not “rigged,” as she believed.
“He is a Republican,” Baier said. “He is a Trump supporter. And that’s what he said.”
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“He is a RINO,” Lake replied. “And he hopefully will be defeated. He is an absolute RINO.”
“I understand what you are saying,” Baier said later. “But there have been, as you know, more than 70 court cases where there was not evidence and there was not any state legislature or governor that failed to certify an election, including your own Republican Doug Ducey.”
After Lake insisted that “we now have evidence” that the election was somehow fraudulent, Baier moved on to a story from last week in which Phoenix-based drag queen Rick Stevens claimed that Lake often went to a club where he performed. Lake, he also claimed, hired him to perform at her home for her birthday.
“She’s friends with drag queens,” wrote Stevens, who provided photographs to Arizona Central as evidence. “She’s had her kid in front of a drag queen. I’ve done drag in her home for her friends and family. She’s not threatened by them. She would come to shows constantly. To make me be the bogeyman for political gain, it was just too much.”
Baier asked if Lake would like to respond to the story.
“I actually do care to address that,” Lake said. “But I’m really shocked. I’m actually appalled that Fox News would take a defamatory story like that—and we are pursuing legal action against this drag queen—I’m appalled that you would bring that up when you have not talked about our stolen election.”
“We just spent three questions talking about this,” Baier shot back.
“I’m really disappointed in Fox,” Lake said later. “I thought you were a little better than CNN.”
Referring to Baier’s questions about the drag queen story, Lake added, “I think you do want to ask them, but you don’t want to ask about 2,000 Mules.” (2,000 Mules is the title of a movie by far-right conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza alleging the election was marred by widespread fraud.)
Before Baier concluded the interview, Lake had one more complaint: that when the Fox anchor spoke with her primary opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson, last week, he “didn’t ask her any tough questions.” (Baier denied this.) In that interview, Robson also falsely claimed that the 2020 election was “not fair at all.”
