CLAY: We’re joined now by Kari Lake. She is a candidate for governor of Arizona, and you down on the border as you are in Arizona, Kari, I know you’ve got a plan for the border. Appreciate you joining us. Tell us what the reaction in Arizona has been like to Title 42 being announced that it’s going to be ended and what the expectation is for what that will mean for the border regions of Arizona.

LAKE: Thanks for having me on, guys. Well, we already have an invasion at our border. I mean, if you’ve been down there, if you’ve seen the video footage, if you’ve seen the footage from above where you watch people just running across the border, it’s going to get worse. And people are nervous. The good people of Arizona are very nervous about what’s happening because they’ve already seen an influx of people coming across and drugs coming across. And now it’s just gonna…

The floodgates are open. The question is, do we have the elected officials who are willing to do the tough work? And that means finishing that wall on the border. The materials are right there. The federal government abandoned them at the border and we need to take those materials back and finish the wall and get troops on the border — and I’m talking about our Arizona National Guard.

My plan calls for arming them and putting them at the border and literally stopping people from coming across. I believe I have the toughest border plan in the entire country. I offered it to our current governor, Doug Ducey, on January 4th before I released it. I said, “Please take this. It’s yours. You can have it. But just implement it and save Arizona from the misery of this crisis we have at our border.” Just now, he’s starting to pull little pieces from it out but you really have to go the full measure and just get very serious with these cartels. You can’t kind of half-ass it with the cartels. You have to go full bore.

BUCK: Kari, you’re in a border state, and there are people who make the case and I think it’s a fair one that under the Biden administration in particular every state that is a border state, and the governor of Texas just next door is busing migrants who cross into the U.S. illegally into Washington, D.C. That’s already happened. A number of buses have been sent up there.

But he’s trying to raise the profile of the issue so people even who aren’t living close to or along the border understand the implications of what’s really going on. What does the illegal immigration mean for your state, Arizona specifically? I mean, what are the challenges that come from people coming into the country at unprecedented numbers in violation of U.S. law?

LAKE: I was just down in Cochise County where I think it might be the worst down there. I mean, police chases with going after people who are being smuggled in have gone up 300% to 400% since Joe Biden took office. I saw footage and photos of cars that have crashed full of drugs and illegals in them. And they’re actually using social media to lure our young people into this life of crime.

They’re saying, “Hey, we need drivers! We’ll provide the gas and the car. You just come down, and it’s a thousand dollars a head to basically move people who are here illegally, illegal aliens from Cochise County at the border into Phoenix and points beyond. And so our young people are getting sucked into this world where they’re taking money to actually haul and move and transport people illegally.

Not to mention the fentanyl — enough fentanyl pouring in to kill every man, woman, and child in this country seven times over. As far as I’m concerned, that is a weapon of mass destruction, and we’ve gotta start treating this as what it is, which is a war on America. They’re trying to poison us, not trying to… These aren’t overdoses. These are poisonings, and that’s coming in — that fentanyl is coming in — through China through Mexico being trafficked by the cartels.

I was in North Carolina for the Trump rally — I’m a Trump-endorsed candidate — and they were chanting in North Carolina, “Build the wall.” This is a 50-state problem. And this is why my election, this election for governor of Arizona is the most important election in the entire country. If we don’t get a strong governor in office here who’s gonna take this border seriously, then we don’t have a country ’cause we don’t have a border. We can’t lose another border state to either a RINO — which is what I’m running against, unfortunately — or a socialist Democrat or we’ll just have another California-style border here where it’s wide open.

CLAY: Kari, you mentioned that there’s a national interest in your local state election. That also means there’s going to be a national overall storyline in 2022, and that is a referendum in some way on Joe Biden. What are you hearing as you travel around the state of Arizona about Arizona voters’ opinions of Joe Biden?

LAKE: Well, I don’t know if you’ve been following my race, but we had a corrupt election here. Our election was stolen from the people of Arizona. Joe Biden didn’t win this state. And everywhere I go, the people just as concerned about the border are concerned about our corrupt election. And this is why I’m doing so well in the polls, because I’m gonna take on both of those issues. And stolen elections have consequences.

When we put the wrong guy who didn’t win in the White House and he tears back on day one a border policy that was effective… Remember, I covered Arizona for 27 years. President Trump knew how to handle the border. Joe Biden pulled that back on day one, exposing us to drugs, crime, illegal aliens coming over. They’re gonna be taking people’s jobs. They’re going to be causing a strain to our system.

And so broken election systems and stolen elections have consequences, and we’re feeling it. People don’t even recognize Joe Biden as legitimate. And when I’m governor, I’m not gonna take orders from an illegitimate president who is hell-bent on destroying America, and I’m not gonna let him take Arizona down with him.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Kari Lake, candidate for governor of Arizona. And Kari, just if you could… I’m sure this could be a much longer conversation, but you’re saying that there was malfeasance, there was cheating, let’s just say, there was cheating in the election as it pertains to Arizona. As you know, that is the left, the Democrats completely flip out about that suggestion. They say there have been multiple audits, they say that this is disinformation.

LAKE: (laughing)

BUCK: They want to kick it off the internet, they want to kick it off of the social media platforms. What do people need to know about what we can — not what we think, what we can — prove about what happened in Arizona?

LAKE: Well, I have in my mind right now the Maricopa County forensic election audit. Now, we let the media, we let the corrupt media try to lie about this, and they did and they did a number. Whenever the media is screaming about something and saying, “No, no, no, don’t listen to that,” it usually means the opposite. We had corruption up one side, down the other here in Arizona.

Especially in Maricopa County and Pima County and several counties, frankly, but our forensic audit proved there was corruption. We have 740,000 ballots with no chain of custody. The election laws require that those ballots don’t be counted. We don’t know where they came from. We have more people voting in some towns than there are even adults the age eligible to vote, and this is happening all through Arizona.

I could go on all day. A million election files were deleted the night before they were supposed to be turned over to our election audit investigators. That’s a crime. Each deletion of each file, that’s a crime. We have votes that were counted — 34,000 votes that were counted — either two, three, or four times each. It goes on and on and on, and the people of Arizona know it.

Unfortunately, the corrupt media is trying to swash this story. But we can’t move on with all of the issues we are facing with our energy crisis — thanks to Joe Biden — and our inflation — because of Joe Biden — until we deal with the fact that our elections are corrupt. And that’s why tomorrow I’m gonna be filing an junction, emergency injunction to stop the use of these machines, these voting machines, thse electronic voting machines where there’s so many problems.

I worked hard as a candidate to try to bring honesty back to our elections. This isn’t about Republican-Democrat. This is about preserving our great country. And if we have stolen and corrupt elections and if we allow that is to stand and if we don’t do the hard work right now, we will not have a country. So our border and our elections are critical. Without honest elections and security borders, we don’t have a country.

CLAY: How confident are you, Kari Lake…? We’re talking to her, Arizona candidate, Republican. How confident are you that the 2022 election will be reliable in the state of Arizona?

LAKE: Well, I’m not a hundred percent confident otherwise I wouldn’t be involved in filing injunctions and doing everything I can. However, because we in Arizona know what happened — the patriotic people in Arizona — we know where they cheated, we know how they cheated with these outrageous dumps of mail-in ballots and these, frankly, unconstitutional drop boxes, we’re gonna be extra vigilant.

We’re gonna be watching, and we’ll do what we have to do. We’re gonna get trained to go to the polls and be poll watchers and poll workers. And we’re not going to allow them to steal this. But I believe we’re gonna have to win by a mile in order to eke out a one-inch win, and that’s why it was so obvious the cheating with President Trump, because he won in such a landslide.

There was such huge support for him in Arizona that it really exposed where they were corrupt and where they cheated. And, unfortunately, we have weak leaders who watched the corruption take place, allowed for it to happen under the guise of covid, and then they certified a corrupt election.

And now we have to do all this work. And people say, “Just ignore it. It’s too chaotic.” They caused the chaos and now we’ve gotta dig through it and repair it because we can’t as a country go forward if we have dishonest, corrupt elections. We won’t have a country much longer.

BUCK: Candidate for governor of Arizona, Kari Lake. Kari, thanks so much for joining us today. Great to talk to you as always.

LAKE: Thanks. Thanks for having me on — and please go to my website, KariLake.com, and see where I stand on the issues. If you want to make a donation, I’m being funded by the good people of Arizona and not the swamp.

BUCK: All right. Thanks so much.