In the aftermath of MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski visiting with President-elect Donald Trump, a new report claims they are “petrified” about a potential investigation.
A Puck News report and CNN’s Brian Stelter alluded to the duo’s fears that if former Rep. Matt Gaetz is confirmed as Trump’s attorney general, in retribution an investigation will be launched over the death of an intern decades ago in Scarborough’s office when he was serving in Congress.
“According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, Scarborough and Brzezinski were credibly concerned that they could face governmental and legal harassment from the incoming Trump administration,” Stelter noted in his Reliable Sources newsletter. “The two sources generally agreed with Joe and Mika’s impression of the situation at hand – namely, that the incoming Trump administration could use its wide-ranging powers to punish people deemed enemies.”
Puck’s Dylan Byers reported Wednesday that the “Morning Joe” hosts’ “paeans to diplomacy belied the true motivation for their visit to Mar-a-Lago. In fact, the couple made the trek to Palm Beach because they feared retribution.”
“Since Trump’s victory on November 5, Joe and Mika have privately told friends that they’re worried the incoming president will seek revenge for their criticism of him during the campaign,” he continued, adding that Gaetz as attorney general stokes the fears.
“Specifically, Joe and Mika have told friends and associates they’re afraid that Trump and Gaetz will resurrect a decades-old, totally bullsh*t, birther-level conspiracy theory about the death of Lori Klausutis, a 28-year-old intern in Scarborough’s former Florida congressional office who died in 2001 from complications relating to a heart condition, and use it to apply legal pressure on Scarborough and otherwise make his life a living hell,” Byers wrote.
Scarborough and Brzezinski “are petrified of retribution and of Gaetz opening an investigation into Joe and the intern,” a source told Puck. “That’s what this was about. It has nothing to do with ratings or Comcast. It’s all about fear of retribution and investigation.”
“Another source close to the matter said Joe and Mika believed that by meeting with Trump, they could assuage his potential desire for reckless payback and thus nuke any possibility of having to endure the headlines of a Gaetz witch hunt or legal torture campaign,” the report continued.
Byers noted that an MSNBC spokesperson “denied this characterization of the motivations.”
Stelter alluded to the fears during a CNN panel discussion and was blasted by Scott Jennings.
Hysterical. https://t.co/kGLOXDFH5i
— Bo Snerdley (@BoSnerdley) November 20, 2024
“I mean, isn’t it possible too that they’re just two people who are so full of themselves, so full of self-aggrandizement that they would feel like that they would be personally singled out?” he said after Stelter dropped his theory.
“If that’s what they truly believed, why did they go on TV and say that ‘We went down there to meet with the president, to tell him that, hey, anyone who’s been critical of you, you know, you should treat us like journalists and not like the enemy,'” Jennings continued.
“They didn’t go on TV and say that. They went on TV and portrayed it much differently,” he added. “So what I hear you saying in your reporting is they had a motive that they weren’t willing to disclose to their audience, which I think should get them more scorn today than they were already getting to begin with.”
