Kari Lake Invents BS ‘Gay Lover’ Story About Dem Rep to Defend Gutting VOA

Kari Lake, the Trump-appointed special adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, responded to a Democratic congressman calling out her election lies by mentioning a false rumor about him having “a gay lover.”

Lake, a two-time loser in Arizona—first in the 2022 gubernatorial election, and again in last year’s State Senate contest—has still refused to admit defeat in the former election. Which is the point Arizona Rep. Greg Stanton was attempting to make when he called her untrustworthy.

After Stanton concluded his remarks by jokingly asking her to run for governor again, Lake argued that Voice of America “can put out absolute, abject lies and we can’t control” because “we have no say about what the editorial content is.”

“They could literally put out a lie about anybody here,” she claimed of the editorially independent, state-run broadcaster that Trump has gutted. “And I know you have been the victim of that. I remember the stories about you where they said you had a gay lover, and those were going around—”

Rep. Bill Keating interjected, asking the committee chairman to have Lake’s words be stricken from the record.

It wasn’t immediately clear what “stories” Lake was referencing. According to Phoenix New Times, “Lake appears to have made those ‘stories’ up. There seems to be no evidence of any old ‘stories’ about Stanton’s sexuality, nor did Lake specify who ‘they’ were.”

Brahm Resnik and Garrett Archer, two longtime Arizona journalists, confirmed to the New Times that they had never heard any sort of rumors about Stanton.

Lake continued: Those kind of lies “could be broadcast today on [Voice of America] and you couldn’t pick up the phone, Rep. Stanton, and say, ‘Hey, you’re putting out lies about me.’ You would not be able to do that because they would sue you for breaking the firewall.”

“So, lies are being told on Voice of America,” Lake insisted.

“It’s inappropriate,” Lake continued. “You’ve been subjected to lies that you said were lies about you in the media before. And how would you like it if those lies were put on Voice of America right now? Because they could do it and you couldn’t do a thing about it. You couldn’t stop it.”

President Donald Trump has overseen mass staff reductions at VOA—perhaps too many, as the administration earlier this month had to rehire some Farsi-speaking employees it had put on administrative leave.

Meanwhile, Lake has said that VOA’s news coverage will instead come from far-right network One America News, whose promotion of Trump’s false 2020 election claims led to the network having to settle multiple lawsuits from voting software companies.

The post Kari Lake Invents BS ‘Gay Lover’ Story About Dem Rep to Defend Gutting VOA appeared first on The Daily Beast.