Maria Bartiromo Invites Kari Lake to Spew Some Next-Level Election Denialism in Jawdropping Segment: ‘How Did They Sabotage You?’

Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo gave Arizona’s Kari Lake the green light to push her unsubstantiated claims that she is the rightful winner of the Arizona governor election.

Bartiromo allowed Lake to make her wholly unsupported claims despite being a named defendant in a $2.7 billion lawsuit by election technology company Smartmatic — which alleges Bartiromo and other Fox News personalities defamed the company in the wake of the 2020 election by accusing it of rigging the vote against Donald Trump.

Lake joined Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures to talk primarily about President Joe Biden’s upcoming trip to the U.S. southern border. But the conversation also touched on Lake’s current crusade to prove the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election was “sabotaged” to swing it for her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs, who was sworn into office last week.

Almost everyone else has moved on. Yet Lake has taken to proclaiming herself “the duly elected governor,” even as her legal efforts to claim fraud and dispute her loss have failed to make headway. During Lake’s conversation with Bartiromo, the Fox News host entertained her guest’s farcical claims about the election being “sabotaged.”

“You, a minute ago, said the other side sabotaged you,” Bartiromo recounted. “How did they do it, and how far are you willing to take this lawsuit?”

Lake’s answer:

There’s a lot of evidence, and we saw it play out on Election Day in Arizona when 60 percent of the voting locations stopped working as soon as the polls opened on Election Day knowing that 75 percent of the people voting on Election Day were voting for Kari Lake. They sabotaged election day by printing the wrong images on the ballot, and jamming up the machines. The machines didn’t work at at least 60 percent of the polling locations, and that caused lines of two and three and four hours. People couldn’t vote. They got to the front of the line, the machines were jamming, and people were disenfranchised. And so we’re fighting this, and we’ve got excellent evidence, and we’re taking it to the appellate court now, we will take it to the Arizona Supreme Court, and we will take it to the United States Supreme Court if we need to, but we will not allow our elections to be stolen.

What Lake didn’t address was that she recently had to file appeals after a judge found no evidence of her widespread fraud claims. Bartiromo chose not to challenge Lake directly on any of her unsupported claims despite the fact that she remains caught up in the massive lawsuits Fox News is facing for her own false claims about the 2020 election.

In a November 2020 broadcast, Bartiromo baselessly accused Smartmatic of having a “backdoor” which invited infiltration into their election systems.

“One source says that the key point to understand is that the Smartmatic system has a backdoor that allows it to be, or that allows the votes to be, mirrored and monitored allowing an intervening party a real-time understanding of how many votes will be needed to gain an electoral advantage,” she said.

In December 2020, Bartiromo and other Fox News personalities including Jeanine Pirro were forced to air a PSA fact-checking claims they had made about Smartmatic. A lawsuit from that company and another voting tech company, Dominion, followed. Both remain ongoing.

Watch above via Fox News.

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