"Morning Joe" hosts say White House threatened them with National Enquirer story
The escalating feud between Mr. Trump and the engaged MSNBC co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski took another turn Friday morning when Scarborough and Brzezinski wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post saying the president was "not well."
"This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked," the couple wrote. "We ignored their desperate pleas."
The op-ed was a response to Mr. Trump's Thursday tweets saying that he had refused to meet with Brzezinski at his Mar-a-Lago resort because she was "bleeding badly from a face-lift." In their op-ed, Scarborough and Brzezinski, who have had a long relationship with Mr. Trump, denied that this had happened.
Scarborough elaborated on the White House threat during an appearance Friday on "Morning Joe."
"We got a call that, 'Hey, the National Enquirer is going to run a negative story against you guys'…And they said, 'If you call the president up, and you apologize for your coverage, then he will pick up the phone and basically spike this story," Scarborough said.
Brzezinski also said that they received a call about the Enquirer story -- actually she said "three people at the very top of the administration" were calling her to urge her and Scarborough to apologize to the president.
On Friday morning, Mr. Trump jumped back into the fray, tweeting that Scarborough had in fact called him "to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no!" The National Enquirer, a tabloid, has been unabashedly pro-Trump since the start of the 2016 presidential campaign, and Mr. Trump's tweet implied that he would have been able to stop the publication of a story.
Scarborough then responded with a tweet of his own, saying that Mr. Trump's tweet was "yet another lie."
"I have texts from your top aides and phone records," Scarborough's tweet continued. "Also, those records show I haven't spoken with you in many months."
NBCUniversal News Group senior vice president of communications Mark Kornblau tweeted that those texts were contemporaneous.
An MSNBC spokesperson confirmed to CBS News that Scarborough and Brzezinski "kept management apprised of the situation with the White House and the Enquirer as it was happening."
At the moment, who contacted whom first remains in dispute. New York Magazine's Gabriel Sherman reported that in April, after Scarborough and Brzezinski found out that the Enquirer was writing a story about their affair, which was not yet public, Scarborough texted with Kushner about the story, and it was Kushner who told Scarborough that he'd need to apologize to the president in return for getting the Enquirer to kill the story.
The Enquirer released a statement saying that it had "no knowledge of any discussions between the White House and Joe and Mika aobut our story, and absolutely no involvement in those discussions."
CBS News' Jillian Hughes contributed to this report.
