During the podcast interview, she paid tribute to the people targeted by Mr. Roof, calling them “amazing people” before she turned her attention to him and the flag.

“Here is this guy who comes out with his manifesto, holding the Confederate flag and had just hijacked everything that people thought of,” she said on the podcast. “We don’t have hateful people in South Carolina. There’s always the small minority who are always going to be there, but people saw it as service, sacrifice and heritage. But once he did that, there was no way to overcome it.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, Ms. Haley called for the flag’s removal from the Statehouse.

She accused the “national media” of “wanting to define what happened.”

“They wanted to make this about racism. They wanted to make it about gun control. They wanted to make it about the death penalty,” Ms. Haley said on the podcast.