Arizona U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake revealed shocking new details about the bribery scandal that attempted to keep her from running.
This week, while speaking to conservative podcaster Glenn Beck, Lake disclosed why she decided to go public with the recording of conservation involving former Arizona GOP chair Jeff DeWit 11 months later.
"I didn't want to release anything, and I also didn't listen to it. I taped it because I was afraid there was going to be a physical threat, and when there wasn't, I just kind of put, you know, the file away and never even dealt with it," Lake said.
Lake said she was eating dinner one evening with her family when she came across the recording. She said that she and her husband's mouths dropped to the floor as they listened to the exchange in which she says she was bullied into dropping out of the Republican race to take on Sen. Kristen Sinema (I-AZ).
A recording of the call with DeWit revealed that he claimed "very powerful people" from the "east" were willing to pay large sums of money to push Lake out of the race. Lake admitted that she didn't think much of it until after she listened to the recording.
"I was eating dinner with my husband, and my daughter was with us, and I happened to track it down, found it, and hit play while we were eating dinner and literally, as vivid as I recalled it — and I think in my speech at CPAC I described it pretty well — our jaws dropped to the floor. We were shocked. I said oh my gosh, this is so much worse than I even remembered it," she continued.
.@KariLake tells me why it took her 11 months to release the Jeff DeWit tape: “I didn’t listen to it until this week…Our jaws dropped to the floor…This was so much worse than I even remembered it being.” pic.twitter.com/5MsS2addon
— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) January 26, 2024
On Thursday, DeWit resigned, claiming that the Lake campaign threatened to release damaging "selectively edited" recordings of him. He said that he resigned as a reason not to take the risk that his many conversations with Lake would be publicized. He also called on the Arizona Republican to cease her "attacks" and allow him to "return to the business sector — a field I find much more logical and prefer over politics."
In the recording, DeWit told Lake that there are "very powerful people who want to keep you out," admitting he was bribed to keep her out of politics.
Lake said DeWit's resignation letter came too late. "I didn't see an apology to the people of Arizona. He tried to act like the behavior that you heard on that audio is normal communication amongst friends. It's disgusting. I think he did a horrible job, and he should have just apologized, resigned, and said he's going to work to do better."