White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany responded Tuesday to the controversy surrounding President Donald Trump’s tweet suggesting MSNBC host Joe Scarborough may have murdered one of his congressional staffers when he was a representative 19 years ago.
McEnany pointed to a follow-up tweet from Trump that stated this idea of foul play related to the death of Lori Klausutis is not an “original” thought on his part.
“I would note that the president said this morning that this is not an original Trump thought and it is not,” she said before bringing up a recently-unearthed clip of Scarborough joking with media personality Don Imus about seducing and killing interns in 2003, which was two years after Klausutis died.
“Joe Scarborough himself brought this up with Don Imus and Joe Scarborough can answer it,” she said.
When one reporter at Tuesday’s briefing said it’s slightly different when the President of the United States uses his platform to spread a conspiracy, McEnany continued to hit Scarborough and his “Morning Joe” co-host and wife, Mika Brzezinski, after a reporter at the briefing questioned Trump’s use of Twitter to spread conspiracies.
“Joe Scarborough — if we want to start talking about false accusations, we have quite a few we can go through,” she said, pointing to Brzezinski holding Trump responsible for the roughly 100,000 American coronavirus deaths and Scarborough warning about the dangers of hydroxychloroquine after Trump said he was taking the drug. “They should be held to account for their falsehoods.”
Klausutis died in 2001 while an aide for then-GOP Rep. Scarborough. She suffered from an undiagnosed heart condition and died after fainting and hitting her head on her desk. Klausutis’ widower wrote to Twitter last week imploring the platform to delete Trump’s tweets about his late wife. The letter was obtained by New York Times opinion writer Kara Swisher and read on “Morning Joe” Tuesday.
According to Swisher’s Tuesday piece, “Twitter Must Cleanse the Trump Stain,” Timothy Klausutis’ letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey read, “Please delete those tweets. My wife deserves better.”
Twitter apologized in a statement on Tuesday morning “We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “We’ve been 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.”
A representative for Twitter said the company will not be taking action against Trump’s tweets because they do not violate any specific rules.
"I do know that our hearts are with Lori's family at this time" — McEnany pretends Trump has sympathy for the woman whose death he's been pushing baseless conspiracy theories about to demean Joe Scarborough & then deflects from Qs about Trump's behavior by attacking Scarborough pic.twitter.com/8A4YuUrMII
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 26, 2020