The hosts of Morning Joe held their secret meeting with Donald Trump over fears the president elect would allow Matt Gaetz to lead a probe into conspiracy theories surrounding the 2001 death of Joe Scarborough’s intern.
Scarborough and his co-host/wife Mika Brzezinski have faced a deluge of backlash after the revealed the Mar-a-Lago summit amid declining viewership on their beleaguered network.
Some called the meeting a feeble attempt to bring in conservative viewers.
But the pair are reportedly ‘petrified of retribution and of Gaetz opening an investigation into Joe and the intern.’
‘That’s what this was about,’ a source told Puck about the motive. ‘It has nothing to do with ratings or Comcast. It’s all about fear of retribution and investigation,’
Since 2020, Trump has spread theories that Scarborough had an affair with intern Lori Klausutis and was responsible for her death.
The 28-year-old intern worked in Scarborough’s Florida office when he served as a member of Congress, representing the same district in Florida as Gaetz.
Klausutis died on the floor of the office after she fell and hit her head. It was later revealed she had an undiagnosed heart problem.
The Morning Joe duo have worried ever since Alyssa Farah Griffin testified during the January 6 hearings that Gaetz was heavily interested in the long-debunked rumor, according to Puck.
Griffin – a former White House communications director and now co-host of The View – claimed that Gaetz carried around a folder of ‘conspiracy theories about Joe Scarborough murdering his intern’ that he passed along to Trump.
Just a week before the election, Scarborough publicly admitted he was worried Trump wanted to bring the story about Klausutis’ death back into the news.
Trump has consistently implied there was more to the incident and that Scarborough had played a part in her death, a notion that has been debunked.
‘When Donald Trump decided to attack me because he didn’t like my COVID coverage and he lied about a woman who worked in my office and claimed that we were involved and that I had her killed,’ Scarborough began his rant.
‘And her husband, the widowed husband, begged him to stop lying because of the excruciating pain that it put her parents through and put him through – the fact that he had not been able to move on for 25 years because of the lies,’ he continued.
‘They could not find rest or peace. And Donald Trump didn’t care. He just kept doing it because he didn’t care what the family thought.
‘He didn’t care what the husband thought. He didn’t care [about] the people whose grief he was only making worse.’
The hosts have been playing defense over the Mar-a-Lago summit since they made the announcement Monday, to the tune of declining ratings and backlash on both sides of the aisle.
Many have wondered if it was a ploy to bring in moderate or conservative viewers or defense in the wake of a bombshell report claiming Comcast is set to get rid of MSNBC.
Amid the backlash, Morning Joe staffers have insisted the Florida meeting was ‘f***ing worth it.’
Trump, on his part, told Fox News that he took the meeting because in order to ‘Make America Great Again, it is very important, if not vital, to have a free, fair and open media or press.’
Trump and the ‘Morning Joe’ stars have had a contentious relationship since the Republican entered politics – with Scarborough leaving the Republican party as a result.
During the 2024 election, Morning Joe repeatedly denounced Trump as a racist, sexist, fascist, and told viewers he did not deserve to be president. At one point, Scarborough said Trump was acting ‘full-on Hitler’ and Brzezinski condemned him for echoing the ‘dangerous language of infamous fascist leaders.’
He insinuated that the two had an affair, writing: ”Concast’ should open up a long overdue Florida Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough.
‘I know him and Crazy Mika well, used them beautifully in the last Election, dumped them nicely, and will state on the record that he is ‘nuts’. Besides, bad ratings! #OPENJOECOLDCASE’.
This launched him into a month-long Twitter rant where he continued to push for the case to be reopened into the late Scarborough staffer Lori Klausutis’ death.
‘I’ve always felt he got away with murder,’ Trump told Fox News Channel’s Brian Kilmeade on the anchor’s radio show in June of that year. ‘That was my feeling, my very strong feeling, and I do feel it.’
Klausutis’ widower Timothy begged then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to remove the tweets due to them causing hurt for the family.
‘Please delete those tweets,’ Timothy Klausutis said in the letter to Dorsey. ‘My wife deserves better.’
He added: ‘I have mourned my wife every day since her passing. I have tried to honor her memory and our marriage.
‘As her husband, I feel that one of my marital obligations is to protect her memory as I would have protected her in life.’
The autopsy found no foul play in the death of Klausutis, and it was determined that her death was a result of an undiagnosed heart problem that caused her to pass out and fatally hit her head.
Brzezinski said on Monday they decided to reach out to Trump for ‘the opportunity to speak with the President-elect, himself’ because their viewers and ‘regular citizens’ have expressed fear following Trump’s election and his recent cabinet selections.
Scarborough continued, saying the three ‘talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets.’
Trump used to be routine contributor to Morning Joe, and Scarborough was an early cheerleader for the billionaire’s maverick bid for the GOP nomination in 2016.
But relations soured as Trump pulled off a surprise victory in the Republican primaries and began to look like a serious challenger to the Democrats’ Hillary Clinton.
The four-hour morning show became a bastion of the Democratic establishment after Trump’s first term, with President Joe Biden routinely tuning in while doing his morning exercises to see his acolytes promote the party’s talking points.
With Trump in the White House and Scarborough engaged to co-host Brzezinski he began cementing his show’s identity as an outpost of opposition to the new administration.