‘Morning Joe’ Stars Are Reportedly ‘Petrified’ Of Matt Gaetz Opening Investigation Into Death of Scarborough Intern

Screenshot via MSNBC

Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are “petrified” that if Matt Gaetz becomes attorney general, he will use a baseless conspiracy theory to investigate Scarborough, Puck News reported on Wednesday night.

MSNBC’s A.M. stars dropped a bombshell on viewers Monday, revealing they visited President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday to “restart communications” despite spending years maligning him as a fascist and a Hitler-like figure.

After the revelation, CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that the duo are concerned that Trump will seek retribution against them and that Gaetz will go after them if his nomination succeeds. Gaetz is facing his own issues on that front, as the House Ethics Committee was investigating him for allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old girl at a drug-fueled party in 2017 when he was in his mid-thirties. He denies the allegation. Several Republican senators have called for the committee to release its findings.

On Wednesday night, Puck’s Dylan Byers added detail about the nature of those concerns. A source told him that Scarborough and Brzezinski are worried that Gaetz will open an investigation into Scarborough stemming from the host’s time as a congressman from Florida.

In 2001, an intern for Scarborough named Lori Klausutis died at his office in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. An autopsy found that she passed out, hit her head, and died. She was found to have an undiagnosed heart ailment.

Trump has suggested that Scarborough, who was not present at the time, was responsible for her death.

Byers reported:

Specifically, Joe and Mika have told friends and associates they’re afraid that Trump and Gaetz will resurrect a decades-old, totally bullshit, 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. The couple’s anxiety stems, in particular, from testimony that former White House communications director and current View co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin gave in 2022 during the January 6 hearings, during which she recounted running into Gaetz outside of the Oval Office. Farah Griffin testified that Gaetz was carrying a folder filled with “conspiracy theories about Joe Scarborough murdering his intern,” which he then presented to President Trump, who later tweeted about it.

Despite the baseless nature of the conspiracy theory, Joe and Mika “are petrified of retribution and of Gaetz opening an investigation into Joe and the intern,” one source with knowledge of their concerns said. “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. (Reached for comment, Scarborough referred me to an MSNBC spokesperson, who denied this characterization of the motivations for Joe and Mika’s Mar-a-Lago visit and said it was both false and inaccurate.)

As Byers noted, a spokesperson for MSNBC denied that fear of Gaetz or retribution in general was the motivating force behind Scarborough’s and Brzezinski’s meeting with Trump.

The revelation of their visit to Mar-a-Lago was a stunning development in political media. Just as stunning was the hopeful tone the two struck while delivering the news after the two had painted him as a threat to democracy.

“We know this will be a consequential presidency,” Brzezinski told viewers on Monday. “The question is whether it will be constructive. It will take a new approach from all sides, from both parties, and a leader who can bring them together and only time will tell if Donald Trump can be that leader. As for us, we also let him know that we will continue to speak truth to power and push back hard when called for, as we have with all presidents.”