Kari Lake chats with Glenn Beck about bombshell alleged bribe offer, calls out corruption in GOP: 'This is a bunch of BS'

On Friday morning's episode of "The Glenn Beck Program," host Glenn Beck chatted with Kari Lake about the bombshell audio clip that appears to show former chairman of the Arizona Republican Party Jeff DeWit attempting to bribe her to keep her from running for the U.S. Senate seat in Arizona currently occupied by Democrat-leaning Independent Kyrsten Sinema.

"Is there a number at which [you] take a pause for a couple years and then come right back to what you're doing?" DeWit asked Lake, according to the clip.

She vehemently refused. "$10 million? $20 million? ... No. A billion? No," she replied. "This is not about money. This is about our country."

DeWit resigned from his position after the audio clip, which Lake secretly recorded at her home about 11 months ago, was released earlier this week. In his resignation letter, DeWit claimed that the clip was "selectively edited" and that he had merely offered Lake a friendly, "helpful perspective" about the viability of her candidacy, not a bribe.

Beck has his doubts. The only way Lake could have taken the conversation "out of context," Beck said, would be if she had omitted DeWit saying something along the lines of, "Everything I'm about to say, I'm totally making up, Kari," or if he had simply been describing a movie, rather than giving her a legitimate offer on behalf of some unnamed GOP bigwig "back east."

"This is not taken out of context," Lake insisted to Beck. "This is not creative editing. Creative editing would be a 30-second clip. This is a conversation about him bribing me. There's no ifs, ands, or buts."

Still, Beck pressed Lake about several important issues related to the audio clip. First, he wondered why she had secretly recorded it in the first place. Lake claimed that she got "a bad feeling" in her stomach when DeWit called her that afternoon last year and asked if he could stop by since what he had to say, he had to say "in person," not "over the phone."

"I thought, is there going to be a threat? Why does he have to come to my door and talk to me?" Lake recalled to Beck.

"That's why I recorded it. I just thought, if he's going to threaten me, I need to have this on recording."

Under those circumstances, "I know I would record that conversation as well," Beck admitted, but he still wanted to know why she waited nearly a year to release the tape.

"I taped it because I was afraid there was going to be a physical threat," Lake responded. "And when there wasn't, I just kind of put that file away."

Lake then noted that she did make reference to the alleged bribe in a speech at CPAC a few days after it occurred. "Somebody showed up at my door this week," she said at the popular annual conservative convention. "... They came to my door, and they tried to bribe me out of getting out of politics. ... This is how disgusting politics is."

Despite the alarming allegation, no one ever asked her follow-up questions, Lake said, and she forgot about the tape until recently. Then she, her husband, and her daughter sat down and listened to it once again and were "shocked" by what they heard.

"Our jaws dropped to the floor. We were shocked," she told Beck. "I went, 'Oh my gosh. This is so much worse than I even remembered it being.'"

At that point, she said she resolved to expose the bribe and the dirty politics that it represents. "Right now, Glenn, it seems we have a lot of corruption on the Republican Party," Lake said. "And I think a lot of it is resistance to Trump. They don't want Trump running ... because he will reveal a lot of the corruption."

Beck couldn't agree more about exposing corruption, no matter which party engages in it. "That all has to be exposed," he said. "I can't call out corruption on the other side if I don't call it out on our side."

Finally, Beck asked Lake about some of the allegations DeWit made in his resignation letter. Not only did DeWit claim he had been "set up" in that conversation, but he claimed that Lake's team then threatened to release another, more damning tape if he didn't immediately resign as chair of the Arizona GOP. "I'm truly unsure of [the other recording's] contents, but considering our numerous past open conversations as friends, I have decided not to take the risk," DeWit wrote. "I am resigning as Lake requested in the hope that she will honor her commitment to cease her attacks, allowing me to return to the business sector — a field I find much more logical and prefer over politics."

Lake denied having "more tapes" or any recent contact with DeWit. "I haven't talked to him, returned any calls, even texted him in a long time," Lake told Beck. She then indicated that she couldn't have "blackmailed" DeWit since he never knew she'd recorded the conversation or that she planned to release it.

"Usually, if there's a blackmail situation, you say, 'This is going out if you do that.' He didn't even know until the media contacted him for comment. He didn't know it was going out," Lake explained.

"This is a bunch of BS."

Lake also hinted that DeWit was telling on himself by alluding to possibly more incriminating recordings. "I'm like, 'What could be more damaging than a bribery?'" Lake quipped. "I mean, what the heck is going on with this guy?"

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!