Trump touts conspiracy theory
He links MSNBC host, woman’s death without evidence
A little after 8 a.m. on July 20, 2001, a couple arriving for an appointment opened an unlocked front door at an office in the Florida panhandle town of Fort Walton Beach and discovered a woman on the floor, dead. Her name was Lori Kaye Klausutis and she was just 28.
The police said they found no signs of foul play. The medical examiner concluded her lonely death was an accident. She had fainted, the result of a heart condition, and hit her head on a desk, he said.
Now, nearly 20 years later, Klausutis’ death has captured the attention of the country’s most prominent purveyor of conspiracy theories — the president of the United States — who has without evidence speculated that she might have been murdered and that the case should be reopened.
The reason for President Donald Trump’s fixation: At the time of her death, Klausutis was working for a Republican congressman from Pensacola named Joe Scarborough — the same Scarborough who today, as host of MSNBC’S “Morning Joe,” is a fierce critic of Trump and has in recent weeks decried the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as a failure.
“A lot of interest in this story about Psycho Joe Scarborough,” Trump tweeted Sunday, the latest in a string of recent tweets on the matter in which the president has unleashed a torrent of false allegations, mischaracterizations and baseless rumors. “So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think there is a lot more to this story than that? An affair? What about the socalled investigator?”
A day earlier, Trump claimed without evidence that the case was now a “big topic of discussion in Florida,” calling Scarborough a “Nut Job (with bad ratings)” and declaring to his followers: “Keep digging, use forensic geniuses!” In a tweet earlier last week, Trump mused: “Did he get away with murder? Some people think so.”
No one in Klausutis’ family would talk about Trump’s tweets for this article, fearing retaliation by online trolls of the type who went after parents of the Sandy Hook massacre victims. Their grief has been disrupted by conspiracy theories before — not only over the past few years from the White House, but from some liberals who at the time of her death sought to portray then-conservative
Republican congressman Scarborough as a potential villain.
“There’s a lot we would love to say, but we can’t,” said Colin Kelly, who was Klausutis’ brother-in-law.
Scarborough, who was 900 miles away in Washington, D.C., on the day Klausutis died, and his co-host and wife, Mika Brzezinski, have both expressed outrage on the air in recent days — saying that Trump’s false accusations were most hurtful to Klausutis’ family. Brzezinski called Trump a “cruel, sick, disgusting person” and said he was using the episode to distract from the pandemic.
The attacks from Trump come as the country’s death toll from the virus nears the 100,000 mark and the ensuing economic devastation worsens. As criticism of Trump’s handling of the crisis has mounted, he has turned to his Twitter feed to air grievances and settle scores. He has baselessly accused a stream of perceived opponents of committing crimes, including illegal espionage and election rigging.
In the case of the 2001 death in Florida, Trump is pushing a claim that was debunked from the outset by local officials.
Despite drawing scrutiny and wild claims repeatedly over the years, there has never been any indication that local authorities planned to revisit the matter. Officials there could not be reached to respond to the president’s claims.