President Donald Trump continued to use the 2001 death of Lori Klausutis to baselessly accuse MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough of murder, suggesting on Tuesday that law enforcement should get involved in the case. Trump’s tweets, the latest in his ongoing attacks against Scarborough, came after it was revealed that Klausutis’s widower had penned a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, imploring him to remove Trump’s “horrifying lies” about his deceased wife.
“The opening of a Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough was not a Donald Trump original thought, this has been going on for years, long before I joined the chorus,” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. “In 2016 when Joe & his wacky future ex-wife, Mika [Brzezinski], would endlessly interview me, I would always be thinking about whether or not Joe could have done such a horrible thing? Maybe or maybe not, but I find Joe to be a total Nut Job, and I knew him well, far better than most. So many unanswered & obvious questions, but I won’t bring them up now! Law enforcement eventually will?”
Lori Klausutis’s death was ruled an accident nearly 20 years ago.
According to the medical examiner’s report, the 28-year-old congressional staffer fainted while working late in Scarborough’s Florida office and, due to an undiagnosed heart condition, hit her head on a desk. She wasn’t found until the following morning. Scarborough himself was more than 900 miles away in Washington at the time.
Trump also tweeted several times about the baseless conspiracy theory over Memorial Day weekend, pushing debunked stories from sources like TruePundit.com to bolster his claims and literally asking, “Did [Scarborough] get away with murder?”
In a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Lori Klausutis’s widower Timothy Klausutis begged the social media platform to delete the president’s tweets, saying he had “taken something that does not belong him — the memory of my dead wife and perverted it for perceived political gain.”
On Tuesday, Twitter said it would not be removing any of Trump’s tweets insinuating that Scarborough was involved in Klausutis’s death.
“We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement to CNN. “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.”
No details were provided as to what changes the platform is contemplating or how they would address the circumstances in this particular case.
[Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images.]