Joe Scarborough Offers Moving Elegy to ‘Lifelong Republican and Faithful Catholic’ Lori Klausutis

Joe Scarborough offered a moving elegy to Lori Klausutis, the Congressional staffer whose tragic death 19 years ago has impossibly become a hotly charged political conspiracy attack from President Donald Trump.

“She worked in an annex office and I met her a couple of times at a couple of events,” Scarborough opened. He explained that he had learned from her widower, T.J. Klautsutis, that his wife left her bank job because the “lifelong Republican, faithful Catholic” had “decided she wanted to work in something… that’s bigger than herself.”

“T.J. said she wanted to do it because she wanted to give back to the country that she loved,” he added. “A good woman, a young woman’s desire to do something good for the country that she has loved has led first to people on the far left of the Internet sullying her name and then a Republican senatorial candidate years later sullying her name, and then people on the far left later sullying her name, and now the president of the United States sullying this good woman’s name.”

President Trump has used the baseless conspiracy theory surrounding Klausutis’ passing to suggest that the Morning Joe host murdered the young women when she was working for him while he served in the House of Representatives nearly two decades ago.  Klausutis’s widower wrote a letter to Twitter recently, asking that the social media platform remove Trump’s tweets that baselessly suggested that his wife’s death was somehow nefarious, despite all evidence.

Amid this controversy, Scarborough has walked a fine line between trying to not give the conspiracy theory too much oxygen and ignore Trump’s aggressive baiting (or, not feeding the trolls, in Internet parlance) but at the same time defending his name and reputation amid these reprehensible and irresponsible claims.

But on this day, Scarborough gave his former staffer the proper respect she was due.

Watch above via MSNBC.