White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended President Trump for repeatedly pushing a conspiracy theory that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was responsible for the death of one of his former staffers.
During a Tuesday press conference, McEnany was asked about Trump’s recent questioning of whether Scarborough was involved in the death of Lori Klausutis, 28, who died in 2001 in Scarborough’s Florida congressional office despite the medical examiner concluding her death was accidental.
“I would note that the president said this morning that this is not an original Trump thought, and it is not. In fact, 2003 on Don Imus’s show, it was Don Imus and Joe Scarborough that joked about killing an intern, joked and laughed about it. So that was, I’m sure, pretty hurtful to Lori’s family. And Joe Scarborough himself brought this up with Don Imus, and Joe Scarborough himself can answer it,” she explained, turning the conversation around on Scarborough by referencing his appearance on Imus‘s radio show on May 29, 2003.
Klausutis’s widower wrote a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey urging him to take down the tweets from the president alleging she was murdered, to which a Twitter spokesperson apologized. Despite the apology, the platform left the tweets up, explaining that it is “working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly.”
McEnany added that she was unsure whether the president had seen Klausutis’s letter to Dorsey but said, “Our hearts are with Lori’s family at this time.”
“Joe Scarborough, if we want to start talking about false accusations, we have quite a few we can go through,” she added after facing pushback from a reporter. “I’m replying to you and saying this morning, as recently — I believe it was this morning or yesterday, Mika accused the president of being responsible for 100,000 deaths in this country. That’s incredibly irresponsible. They’ve dragged his family through the mud. They’ve made false accusations that I won’t go through, that I would not say from this podium against the president of the United States. And they should be held to account for their falsehoods. Joe Scarborough should be held to account for saying people will die by taking hydroxychloroquine.”
Prior to McEnany’s comments, the White House had not responded to requests for comment from the Washington Examiner regarding the matter.
Theories have circulated that Scarborough had an affair with Klausutis and was involved in her death during some sort of lover’s spat. In response to those theories, he wrote a letter to Variety Fair in 2005, explaining that he had only met Klausutis three times and was never alone with her.
According to the police report following her death, which was obtained by the Washington Examiner, Klausutis lost consciousness from “a probable cardiac arrhythmia secondary to valvular heart disease” and collapsed. As she fell, the 28-year-old hit her head on a desk and later died as a “result of an acute subdural hematoma,” which occurred from the head trauma. There were no indications of foul play.
