Ari Melber calls Ted Cruz’s bluff by matching audio for audio of his public vs. private comments about 2020

On Tuesday, MSNBC host Ari Melber revealed secret recordings of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in a conversation with Fox host Maria Bartiromo in which he discusses ways to potentially challenge Joe Biden's victory in 2020.

In response, Cruz took to Twitter attacking the host as a clown for "breathlessly reporting that I 'secretly' said in a phone call . . . the EXACT same thing I said on national television the next morning! And then said again on the Senate floor four days later."

Cruz certainly did say a lot of things publicly that were said on the recording. But Melber fired back on his show Wednesday that admitting to it doesn't make it acceptable. He brought up Cruz's battle with Trump in the Iowa Caucuses in 2016 in which Cruz won.

"Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!” Trump wrote on Twitter, ABC News recalled.

He also wrote, "Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified."

"If we were writing a movie and were trying to prove a sort of an unreal extreme shift of a person in a semi-autocratic political bind, Ted Cruz was on the receiving end of this exact strategy in '16, and he went all of the way around to start helping in it," said Melber. "But not for his own election, for Trump. Cruz becoming this key player — and we put it together side by side and this is material we had, and we are press presenting it right now, with the receipts, to make sure people understand what Cruz said, sometimes what he said when he thought he was speaking privately to fox news and people that he thought were planning with him for the 6th and what he really thought compared to what he did to try to steal the most recent presidential election."

"It is no surprise that Donald is throwing another temper tantrum like another Trumper-tantrum," Cruz said on Feb. 4, 2016. "Donald finds it very hard to lose."

Melber then played the 2020 recording with Bartiromo saying that it isn't good if Biden wins when half the country doesn't believe it was a real election.

He played Cruz calling Trump a "pathological liar" in 2016. Then the 2020 audio of Cruz saying that they'd make a commission that could make Trump the president.

"It can't just be, you know, somebody tweeted this. It's got to be demonstrable facts that can be laid out with evidence," Cruz said on Nov. 7, 2020.

Just a few months later, on Jan. 2, 2020, Cruz said, "The mechanism to try to force that is denying certification on the sixth."

Melber went on to say that it isn't opinion or editorializing, he's simply posting the things Cruz was saying publicly and what he was saying privately. They don't match.

He brought on former Republican Party Chair Michael Steele championing what Melber revealed.

"Dude, master class. Look, this absent paper trail and kernels here and there is confusing. It is difficult because there are so many pieces that we don't have, right?" said Steele. "You filled in a lot of that information and the fact that you got the reaction from the senator's office and the senator himself tells me that you struck a nerve. And the reality right now, and this goes to what you said in the beginning of this — in your conversation with the audience — is Jack Smith and the entire Jan. 6th team now are looking at this? And this is another piece that's going to fit in very nicely it's not just what the players that we once knew about. Now you've added a senator who says, 'Hey, yeah. I had this conversation, and then you've got the back — the quiet part, right?"

See the discussion below or at the link here.