White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany challenged MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to explain why he joked about having sex with and killing his dead intern.
Scarborough’s intern, Lori Klausutis, died in 2001 after she fell and hit her head at his Florida office as the result of an undiagnosed heart condition, according to the coroner’s office.
White House journalists repeatedly pressed McEnany about why the president raised questions on Twitter about the conspiracy theory, prompting Scarbrough’s co-host and third wife Mika Brzezinski to publicly demand Twitter’s CEO take the tweets down.
But McEnany said reporters should question Scarborough.
“It was Don Imus and Joe Scarborough that joked about killing an intern, joked and laughed about it,” McEnany replied, citing a conversation from 2003.
The Media Research Center unearthed clips of radio host Don Imus in 2003 joking about Scarborough leaving Congress because he had sex with his intern and “had to kill her.”
“Exactly, what’re you gonna do,” Scarborough replied with a laugh.
Timothy Klausutis, the husband of the intern, wrote a letter to Twitter asking CEO Dorsey to delete the tweets. The letter was obtained by the New York Times on Tuesday.
“Our hearts are with Lauri’s family at this time,” McEnany said.
Reporters had over a dozen questions for McEnany regarding the president’s tweets about Scarborough.
“I would just refer everyone, for those of you who haven’t heard it, go back and listen to the Don Imus soundbite, it was very callous, it was very cruel, and I think laughing and joking about the death of an intern is really uncalled for, and that’s something that we can all agree to,” she concluded before leaving the podium.