MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski eviscerated President Trump for repeating a conspiracy theory that her husband and co-host Joe Scarborough killed one of his former interns.
As the hosts of Morning Joe have criticized the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus over the past few weeks, the president has repeatedly brought up the death of Lori Klausutis, who was interning for then-GOP lawmaker Scarborough when she was found dead in his Florida district office. Trump mostly recently accused Scarborough of being responsible for her death, which was ruled accidental, on Wednesday morning, tweeting, “Low Ratings Psycho Joe Scarborough are allowed to walk the streets? Open Cold Case!”
“He’s tweeting again all sorts of crazy things,” Brzezinski said on the air in response to the president’s allegation. “Once again tweeting conspiracy theories about Joe, falsely accusing him of murder, talking about the death of a young staffer in his congressional office years ago and calling him dangerous to walk the streets.”
“That’s sick,” she added. “Donald, you’re a sick person! You’re a sick person! To put this family through this, to put her husband through this, to do this just ’cause you’re mad at Joe, because Joe got you again today, because he speaks the truth, and he speaks plainly about your lack of interest and empathy in others, and your lack of ability to handle this massive human catastrophe, the fact that you have made it worse, and you make it worse every day.”
Brzezinski also called on Twitter to ban the president.
“Attempts to intimidate and bully the free press, including through the bizarre peddling of fringe conspiracy theories, will not prevent Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, or any of MSNBC’s journalists or analysts from holding power to account,” an MSNBC spokesperson previously told the Washington Examiner. “We’ll continue to accurately and thoroughly report on the White House’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.”
The president first shared the conspiracy theory in a November 2017 tweet in which he referred to Klausutis’s death as an “unsolved mystery” and urged for unspecified people to “investigate!” In a 2005 letter to Variety Fair, Scarborough said he had only met Klausutis three times and was never alone with her in response to conspiracy theories that they had a love affair.
