Kari Lake, the defeated Republican candidate in Arizona’s latest gubernatorial election, faced a confrontational interviewer in Piers Morgan on Thursday, with the British host challenging her on her unfounded election claims.
During an interview on the host’s signature show Piers Morgan Uncensored on September 7 to discuss the 22-year jail sentence against Enrique Tarrio—the leader of the neo-fascist group Proud Boys who took part in the Jan. 6 insurrection—Morgan bashed Lake about her continued support for Donald Trump’s false claim that he actually won the 2020 election.
Defending Tarrio and the others who were prosecuted for their roles in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Lake claimed that the insurrection was actually a staged riot “to cover up the fact that they were going to certify a fraudulent election” and that “Americans are coming around” to this alleged truth.
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Morgan jumped in to interrupt her. “People were killed that day and they broke into the U.S. Capitol, the absolute epicenter of American democracy, and they did it to thwart democracy,” he told her.
“You might believe the election was stolen, Donald Trump might believe the election was stolen, but actually most senior Republicans don’t think it was stolen, most Americans who go to the polls don’t think the election was stolen,” he continued.
“And actually the enemy of democracy is not, as you’re trying to paint it, the FBI […] the enemy are people who genuinely propagate the myth of the stolen election—like you.”
Lake rebutted him by saying people were protesting peacefully “because that election was not fair, was not on the up and up.” She added that the doors were opened by Capitol police and said “there’s a lot of questions that remain.”
Morgan slammed her again, saying that “Trump produced no actual evidence” that the election was stolen.
“If it had been the other way around—if Donald Trump won that election, beaten Joe Biden and these were Democrats, hundreds of thousands of Democrats storming the U.S. Capitol to try and stop that election [from] being ratified with zero actual evidence of any election being stolen […] I can absolutely bet my house that you would have come on this show and argued the complete opposite,” Morgan told the Republican firebrand.
“If the November 3rd election would have been rigged and stolen the way it was against the Democrats, I would be appalled as an American,” Lake said, insisting that “evidence is coming out.”
“The evidence is coming out and I know it’s probably not being played in the U.K., but it is coming out every day. More and more evidence is coming out about how bad 2020 was. The polls are showing that the majority of Americans now believe that the 2020 election was wrought with fraud,” Lake claimed.
“No they don’t! That’s complete nonsense,” Morgan laughed. “Oh, Kari. As we would say across the pond, that is an absolute whopper.”
The British host added: “What you want to do, like Donald Trump, you want to fuel the sense that every time you guys lose a fair election is unfair, and rigged, and stolen, and every time you win it’s the purest example of efficient working democracy imaginable.”
Lake responded by denying this is what she and Trump are doing. Newsweek contacted Lake’s team for comment via the form on her website on Friday.
It’s not the first time Morgan has bashed Lake on air, which in fact happened about three months ago when the British host first urged her to stop talking about her challenge to the midterms’ results. “It’s a vote-losing premise to keep saying ‘I didn’t lose’ when you did. You’re better off saying ‘I lost that time, next time I’m going to win,'” he said.
Lake lost Arizona’s latest gubernatorial election to Democrat Katie Hobbs by a margin of 17,000 votes in November 2022.
She refused to concede, and instead legally challenged the results of the election, asking for the race to be re-run or for her to be declared winner. Lake claimed that irregularities in Maricopa County—home to 60 percent of voters—prevented Republican voters from casting their ballot in support of her. Her claims were eventually thrown out of court.