Called Out over Election Falsehoods, Kari Lake Serves Up a 'Gay Lover' Fabulation

Former TV news anchor and current political appointee Kari Lake – a "special advisor" to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, of which Voice of America is a part – offered a bizarre, and entirely untrue, rationale for axing the VOA: She suggested that the venerable international broadcaster had aired fake stories about Congressman Greg Stanton having "a gay lover," The Daily Beast reports.

The problem with Lake's insinuation, The DB said, was that Lake appeared to have "invented" the claim, since the VOA never aired any such story about Rep. Stanton.

Lake was appearing before the House Foreign Affairs committee when she "had a blistering exchange" with Rep. Stanton "over her history of spreading election falsehoods," the Arizona New Republic documented.

The newspaper detailed that Lake "was summoned before Congress June 25 for a hearing titled by GOP leaders as 'Spies, Lies, and Mismanagement: Examining the U.S. Agency for Global Media's Downfall.'

"Lake, a senior adviser to the agency, has overseen mass firings as part of Trump's overhaul of the country's foreign policy apparatus."

During the hearing, Lake argued that the agency she advises is "rotten to the core" and suggested that China is unduly influencing the agency, accused VOA of "liberal bias," and declared that "it's best to just scrap the whole thing and start over," the Associated Press reported.

It was during questioning by Rep. Stanton, an Arizona Democrat, that "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,'" The DB writeup detailed. The example she gave was "stories about you where they said you had a gay lover," the report added.

But the abject lie in this case was that such "stories" existed before Lake offered them as part of her attack on the broadcaster. VOA was created during World War II as a means to counter enemy propaganda and became a fixture of cold war "cultural diplomacy" in the decades after that conflict.

Stanton chided Lake, the ANR detailed, for her role in "eroding Americans' soft power around the globe" and added, "there is a more fundamental issue that I want to address today, and that is character."

Specifically, Stanton pointed to Lake's history of dubious claims, which includes assertions that two elections she lost – in 2022, when she ran for the office of governor in Arizona, and last year, when she lost a bid for a senate seat – were stolen from her.

Along those lines, Lake has also repeated lies told by Donald Trump about the 2020 election; moreover, Lake has said that officials who gave credence to the facts in that election and rejected Trump's claims that the election was rigged should be prosecuted.

"I can't imagine how people fighting for democracy today, and around the world, can trust someone who has so shamelessly lied about her own election," the ANR quoted Stanton as telling Lake, before Stanton called her an "an adjudicated liar and a two-time political loser in Arizona."

Lake turned to her fable about VOA's supposed broadcasting about Stanton's fictitious "gay lover" after that, declaring, "Those kind of lies could be broadcast today on VOA.

"How would you like it if those lies were put on Voice of America right now?" Lake continued. "'Cause they could do it, and you couldn't do a thing about it."

"A review by The Arizona Republic and two other local media outlets found no such news stories written about Stanton," the ANR reported. "A media contact for the U.S. Agency for Global Media didn't immediately return a request for comment to clarify what Lake was referring to."

Lake's contention that Voice of America could broadcast stories that officials could not censor or dictate is rooted in "a set of policies designed to protect the agency from political influence by government officials," ARN noted – in other words, a "firewall" designed to protect the broadcaster's integrity.

"Meanwhile," The DB noted, "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."