Tucker Carlson spent much of Friday interviewing various Republican candidates vying for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, including former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, the onetime South Carolina governor who was the first to step up and challenge her old boss, Donald Trump.
At one point, Carlson asked Haley a blunt question “that caught her off-guard,” according to the Daily Signal.
“Who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline?” the former Fox News host asked during a discussion on climate change and energy policy.
A section of the pipeline, which carried natural gas under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, was blown up in September 2022.
“I mean, I don’t know, do you?” she said with some levity.
Laughing, Carlson said evidence suggested that the Biden administration was responsible, but the White House and various federal agencies, including the Pentagon, have denied involvement.
Earlier, the discussion dealt with climate and natural resources needed to power the U.S. economy.
“You dealt with this question all the time at the UN, the question of, ‘how does the world respond to climate change?’” he began. “But there are really two questions. One, is the climate changing…but the deeper question is why? We had glaciers 10,000 years ago, the climate has always changed dramatically since the formation of the Earth.
“Do you think humans are causing this change, and do you think we can stop or slow it down? Is there actual evidence?” he asked directly.
Haley took a breath and paused for some seconds before responding.
“I mean….I don’t…” she began.
“Honestly, I don’t know how much is being changed or not, as much as I know that putting electric vehicles on the road is not the answer to what you’re doing,” she finally said.
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She went on to say that the more significant problem is the U.S., at present, must go “hat in hand” to Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela to get oil.
“We should be energy independent, no matter what. I don’t care what anybody says about the environment,” Haley said. “This is a national security threat of not having energy independence.”
Carlson and Haley also discussed reforming the federal government and election integrity.
“They are saying that Joe Biden got 81 million votes, and my question is: Do you accept that, and second, how do you think he did that?” Carlson asked.
“All I care about is changing that. We can’t afford a President Kamala Harris. I will say that over and over,” she responded, noting that the biggest takeaway from the 2020 election is that more states need to adopt voter ID laws.
“What I said in South Carolina is that if you’ve got to show a picture ID to buy Sudafed, if you’ve got to show a picture ID to board a plane, you have to show picture ID to protect the election process,” she said.
According to Haley, safeguarding voter integrity involves more than just implementing voter identification measures; it is an ongoing process that must continue without pause. She emphasized that during her tenure as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., she witnessed how the erosion of public trust in the electoral system can set in motion a country’s eventual unraveling.
After Carlson asked if she thought there were problems with the 2020 election, Haley responded that there were “irregularities,” including “mail-out balloting that shouldn’t have happened.”
The host then noted that Americans are losing trust in U.S. intelligence agencies, adding he believed they “interfered” in the last presidential election to hurt President Trump.
“When I was governor, I went and replaced the heads of every agency,” Haley answered. “The American people don’t trust our intelligence agencies, so you can’t just replace the person at the top. You’ve got to go through and really look at gutting those agencies.”
