Matt Gaetz Allegedly Fed Trump Bonkers Conspiracy Theory About Joe Scarborough Murdering Staffer

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) was responsible for feeding former President Donald Trump the bizarre conspiracy theory that Joe Scarborough had murdered a staffer back when he was a member of Congress, according to Alyssa Farah Griffin’s interview with the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Griffin spoke to the committee on April 15, 2022 about her tenure as the White House communications director during the Trump administration, which she described as “a wild eight months” dealing with everything from the Covid-19 pandemic to the Trump White House’s notorious lack of structure and inexperienced staffers in key positions. The transcript of this interview was one of several that the committee released on Thursday.

“A lot of very good, more senior people decided not to go into this West Wing,” said Griffin. This meant there were many people without “the relevant experience needed for the jobs they were doing,” resulting in “near daily” problems with even “very senior staff” not understanding “just basic levers of how government works.”

Trump’s penchant for policymaking via tweet added to the chaos. Griffin explained how her office might have “the best-laid plans” but that would be derailed by whatever he decided to tweet that morning. She had hoped her prior experience with the Department of Defense and other communications roles would help “professionalize” the White House’s press operations, but Trump proved to be “a complete wild card” and it was impossible to predict what he would do or say to “throw everything off course.”

The ex-president was also easily swayed by his advisers, Griffin said, and offered an anecdote about Gaetz to illustrate the “kind of chaos” in Trump’s White House, saying that she saw him with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) in the West Wing and the Florida congressman had a folder with him.

According to Griffin, she asked Gaetz what was in the folder and then this is what unfolded:

And he pulls it out. It’s conspiracy theories about Joe Scarborough murdering his intern. And I said, “Please do not bring that into the West Wing — or to the Oval Office.” We were literally outside of the Outer Oval. And just — as I’m saying that — I said, You cannot put that in front of the President, he — he gets ushered in. And sure enough, within — by the next morning, the former President is tweeting wild conspiracy theories about a cable news host, you know, allegedly murdering his intern.

In July 2001, Lori Klausutis, a 28-year-old aide to then-Rep. Joe Scarborough’s (R-FL), died at his Fort Walton Beach office after a previously undiagnosed heart problem caused her to pass out and hit her head on a desk. Scarborough was in Washington, D.C. at the time. The coroner found no sign of foul play and her death was ruled to be from natural causes.

Trump posted several tweets in late May 2020 tweet bashing Scarborough as a “Nut Job (with bad ratings)” and “Psycho” and urging “forensic geniuses” to “[k]eep digging” into the “murder.”

Klausutis’ widower, Timothy Klausutis, sent a letter to Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey, begging him to delete the tweets.

“President Trump on Tuesday tweeted to his nearly 80 million followers alluding to the repeatedly debunked falsehood that my wife was murdered by her boss, former U.S. Rep. Joe Scarborough. The son of the president followed and more directly attacked my wife by tweeting to his followers as the means of spreading this vicious lie,” he wrote. “I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the president of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain.”

Trump’s tweets were “unspeakably cruel,” said Scarborough on Morning Joe that week.

“What the Klausutises, the entire family have had to endure for 19 years, it’s unspeakably cruel, whether it’s the president or the people following the president, it’s unspeakably cruel,” he said. “These are not public figures.”

The committee asked Griffin if she, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, or anyone was able to act like a “gatekeeper” to “prevent maybe some harmful information or unproductive information getting to the President.”

That “should have been” Meadow’s role, Griffin replied, but she never saw him or anyone do it “effectively,” describing him as often “nonexistent in the West Wing” or “just let[ting] things slide.”

Read the full transcript of Griffin’s interview (as redacted by the committee) embedded below:

Alyssa Farah Griffin interview with Jan. 6 Committee by Sarah Rumpf on Scribd

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