MNSBC’s Joe Scarborough has reignited his long-simmering feud with Donald Trump over the former president’s claim that the morning show host murdered an intern while he was a congressman.
Scarborough recalled that the former president attacked him in May 2020 over the 2001 death of Lori Klausutis, while speaking on his “Morning Joe” show on Tuesday.
Klausutis was working for Scarborough, who was a Republican congresswoman at the time, when she died in his Florida district office after falling and hitting her head.
Trump has consistently suggested there was more to the incident and that Scarborough had played a role in her death, an idea that has been debunked.
“When Donald Trump decided to attack me because he didn’t like my reporting on COVID and he lied about a woman working in my office claiming we were involved and that I had her killed,” Scarborough began his rant.
Scarborough recalled that the former president attacked him in May 2020 over the 2001 death of Lori Klausutis, while speaking on his “Morning Joe” show Tuesday
Klausutis was working for Scarborough, then a Republican congressman from Florida, when she died in his district office after falling and hitting her head
“And her widowed husband begged him to stop lying because of the excruciating pain it had caused her parents and him – the fact that he couldn’t move on for 25 years because of the lies,” he continued.
‘They could find no 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 man thought. He didn’t care [about] the people whose sorrows he only made worse.”
Scarborough brought up his past confrontations with Trump when he condemned his Vice President JD Vance for ‘exploiting’ Aiden Clark’s death, seen here
Scarborough brought up his past confrontations with Trump when he denounced his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, for “exploiting the grief” of two Ohio parents.
He said Vance had politicized the death of their 11-year-old son Aiden Clark, who was killed on his way to school when his bus was pushed off the road by a van.
That incident occurred in August 2023, with driver Hermanio Joseph, a legal Haitian immigrant, later convicted of manslaughter and vehicular homicide.
During the show, Scarborough and his co-host and wife Mike Brzezinski had highlighted a New York Times story about the parents.
Their reporting says they’ve had a hard time after their son’s story was used by MAGA to attack immigrants.
Scarborough added: “I can’t imagine the pain these parents are going through. And then to see how their son, their child as a political pillar, was used, lied about, which only made the pain worse.’
Joseph was driving with an invalid license when his Honda Odyssey minivan veered across the center line and collided with a school bus, killing Clark.
He added: “We have a family that is going through that pain because their son is being lied to for political purposes and they have been informed.
“The father spoke before the city council, I think a month or two ago, and said please stop lying about my son.
‘You don’t know anything about him. And if you did, you would know that this is the opposite of what he would say now, based on the wonderful short life he lived.”
Scarborough said Vance and Trump had used the young boy’s death “without shame” and “decency.”
He said there has been a dramatic shift in norms in American politics, and that Republicans are merely exploiting Aiden’s death for power.
“If you think this is normal, then you haven’t been involved in politics long enough because I can tell you if it happened when I was in Congress.
‘If it happened while Claire [McCaskill] was in the Senate and someone did this, they would be excommunicated. Nobody wanted to talk to them.
“Their leadership would say, ‘You apologize to the parents, you take back the lie, or you’ll be stripped of your committees tomorrow. Bring it on,” he added.
Trump had posted a series of messages on his Twitter page about Klausutis’ death while in office in May 2020.
He insinuated that the two were having an affair and wrote: ‘Concast’ should open a highly anticipated Florida Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough.
Scarborough and his co-host and wife Mike Brzezinski featured a story in the New York Times about Clark’s parents, the couple seen here in 2015
‘I know him and Crazy Mika well, used them beautifully in the last elections, dumped them nicely and will go on record saying he is ‘crazy’. By the way, bad reviews! #OPENJOECOLDAFFAIR’.
This launched him into a month-long Twitter tirade as he continued to push for the case to be reopened following the death of late Scarborough staffer Lori Klausutis.
“I always felt like he got away with murder,” Trump told Fox News Channel’s Brian Kilmeade on the host’s radio show in June of that year. “That was my feeling, my very strong feeling, and I feel it too.”
Klausutis’ widower Timothy begged then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delete the tweets because they would hurt 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 she passed away. I have tried to honor her memory and our marriage.
“As her husband, I feel that it is one of my marital obligations to protect her memory as I would have protected her in life.”
The autopsy found no foul play in Klausutis’ death, and it was determined that her death was the result of an undiagnosed heart problem that caused her to pass out and fatally hit her head.