Exclusive — Kari Lake: Failed ‘Bribe’ for Me to Stay Out of Politics Exactly Why I Needed to Run

“It’s really a bad time. I happened to be really busy. I was getting ready to pack for CPAC; I was finishing up my book, and he just showed up at my door, and I thought that was really odd,” Lake recounted. “So I recorded it because I thought, ‘Well, maybe there’s going to be a threat here.’ He had said a couple things on the phone about – we talked a little bit about the Senate race – and I said, ‘Look, if you’re coming over to talk me out of it, I am not going to be talked out it, and I’m really leaning towards doing that.’ ‘No, what I have to tell you has to be said in person.’ So… my spidey senses went off, and I said, ‘I need to record this,’ and I did.”

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Lake, who emphatically rejected the “bribe” in the audio recording, would later emphasize to Boyle that she viewed the situation as a “sign” of why she should remain in politics.

“When… the ‘powerful people back East’ want you out of politics, I don’t know, that seems to be a sign to stay in politics, if you ask me,” she said. “So I sat on that, I never really did anything, I never listened to it until about a week and a half ago, and I was sitting in my dining room table eating dinner with my daughter and husband, and I hit play, and we listened to that, and our jaws dropped down to the floor. It was so much worse than I even remembered it being.”

She slammed DeWit, declaring that someone “who is compromised like that, who’s willing to make bribes like that, who has that type of ethics” cannot be the leader of the Arizona Republican Party.