'Morning Joe' hosts: White House threatened us with tabloid story
By The Hill staff - 06/30/17 11:56 AM EDT The hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday made the startling allegation that senior White House officials threatened them with a negative story in the National Enquirer unless they called President Trump and apologized.
Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, who are engaged to be married, revealed the alleged threat in an op-ed in The Washington Post that was published the morning after Trump attacked Brzezinski in two widely condemned tweets.
"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. We ignored their desperate pleas," they wrote.
Brzezinski and Scarborough detailed the alleged blackmail attempt during Friday's episode of "Morning Joe."
“We got a call that, hey, the National Enquirer is going to run a negative story against you guys, and it was, Donald is friends with — the president is friends with — the guy that runs the National Enquirer,” Scarborough said.
Scarborough said “three people at the top of the administration” were calling him about the story the tabloid was preparing.
“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 the story,” he said.
“The calls kept coming, and kept coming, and they were like, ‘Call, you need to call, please call, come on Joe, just pick up the phone and call him.'”
Brzezinski said the National Enquirer was “threatening” her children at the time with phone calls.
“These calls persisted for quite some time, and then Joe had the conversations that he had with the White House, where they said, ‘Oh, this could go away.’”
“Our response was screw it, just let them run it,” she said.
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http://thehill.com/homenews/media/340245-morning-joe-hosts-white-house-threatened-us-with-tabloid-story