Arizona GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters still thinks President Joe Biden wasn’t fairly elected

PHOENIX – It’s not on his campaign website anymore, but Arizona Republican U.S. Senate nominee Blake Masters said Thursday he still thinks President Joe Biden wasn’t fairly elected.

“I still believe the election was not free and not fair,” Masters told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Arizona’s Morning News. “I think if everybody followed the rules and the law as written, President [Donald] Trump would be in the Oval Office.”

That was similar to the wording on Masters’ website leading up to his victory in last month’s GOP primary, a five-candidate race he took control of after receiving Trump’s endorsement.

“The 2020 election was a rotten mess — if we had had a free and fair election, President Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office today and America would be so much better off,” the site said until at least Aug. 1, a day before the primary, according to an archived version cited by CNN last week.

CNN said that language was removed by Aug. 26. Media reports have also noted changes to the abortion section of Masters’ website since he won the GOP nomination and turned his focus from fellow Republican opponents to Sen. Mark Kelly, the Democrat he hopes to unseat.

“It’s funny, because you change one thing about the website and the media pounces. … I tweak my stump speech week over week, too, but no, I don’t run from or hide from anything I’ve said,” Masters said.

The first-time candidate said that while his campaign tactics are evolving, his stance on the issues remains consistent.

“If we change something from time to time, that just reflects a new way that we’re talking about something, but it’s not a backtrack or anything like that,” he said.

During Thursday’s interview, Masters wasn’t able to say what rules or laws weren’t followed in the 2020 election.

“Look, it’s hard to know exactly what went wrong, and I never pretended to. I just see a bunch of problems. And I think we should be talking about that, asking questions about it,” said Masters, who picked up the endorsement of the National Border Patrol Council on Thursday morning.

“And of course, if you say that, well, then you’re an election denier and the media wants to get real upset with you.”

Despite a slew of allegations, audits and court challenges – and even an investigation by Trump’s own Department of Justice — no credible evidence of widespread irregularities or fraud that would have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election has been uncovered.

While he didn’t specify what rules or laws may have been broken, Masters supported his view by criticizing Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and the FBI over their response to the Hunter Biden laptop story in the runup to the 2020 election.

Facebook has acknowledged limiting distribution of the laptop story on its platform after receiving warnings about potential election misinformation from the FBI. The FBI didn’t specifically mention the New York Post report, but Facebook determined it fit the pattern of the kind of “hack and leak” operation the FBI warned about.

“I think that one act of corporate censorship — and it wasn’t just corporate censorship, it was the FBI pressuring them to do it — that deprived millions of voters of true information about Joe Biden,” Masters said. “That would have changed their votes.”

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