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Failed Arizona gubernatorial and senatorial candidate Kari Lake, now a special advisor to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, took a jab at her most recent opponent, Democratic Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, during a chance run-in at Ned’s Club near the White House in downtown Washington, D.C.
The private club is known as a place where cable news personalities can be seen holding meetings alongside Democrats and Trump administration officials away from prying eyes.
According to The Bulwark, Gallego was on his way out one day this winter when he ran into Lake. Gallego went in for a handshake, and Lake grasped his with both hands, seemingly a warm gesture, before she asked: “How does it feel to be bought and paid for by the cartels?”
An individual familiar with the incident told the outlet that Gallego was taken aback, as was Michigan Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens, who could hear what was being said.
During the campaign last year, Lake accused Gallego during an interview with Newsmax on September 27 of being “controlled by the cartels.”
She added: “His own father was a Colombian drug trafficker, and so he’s got links to the cartel.”
PolitiFact rated the claim as “pants on fire.”
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While Gallego’s father was arrested for drug violations when the senator was a child, there’s no evidence to suggest that he has any links to the cartels. Gallego wrote in a memoir that his father was a drug dealer who disappeared from his life after his parents’ divorce.
When asked about the chance meeting with Lake, Gallego told The Bulwark: “I mean, look, it is pretty gross.”
He said he attempted to avoid escalating the situation but jabbed back at Lake before they split up.
“My wife is very disappointed in me because she said, ‘You didn’t take the bait for two years,’” said Gallego.
“I should not have overreacted,” he told the outlet. “I did try to rub it in—when [Lake] essentially said, ‘How could you live with yourself every day?’ I’m like, ‘Easily — I won,’ and I walked away.”
Reacting to the incident, Phil Boas wrote in an op-ed in the Arizona Republic that Lake is “morally reprehensible.”
“He will never confront the cartels; he is controlled by them,” Lake said during the campaign. “He has close family members who are drug traffickers.”
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Gallego wrote in his memoir They Called Us Lucky from 2022 about how he grew up with a single mother in Chicago in an apartment so small the senator said he ended up sleeping on the floor.
“Being poor is one thing,” Gallego wrote. “Having a dealer for a dad — that’s a different level. I always knew we were poor. There was no shame in that. You worked hard, and things got better. But now, as a young teenager, I felt we were trash.”
“Lying on the floor of our apartment one night, hungry and tired because I worked after school earning money to help my mother pay for things, I told myself this was not who I was,” he added. “I was not going to be poor trash the rest of my life. I was going to college, no matter what it took.”
Boas went on to argue that “Kari Lake likes to tout her Christianity, so let me point out that The Bible very explicitly counsels that we are not to blame the child for the sins of the parent.”
