Report: Kushner, Trump Blackmailed MSNBC ‘Morning Joe’ Hosts

New York Magazine reported that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner told “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski they would need to apologize to Trump in order to avoid the National Enquirer publishing a story about their relationship.

The magazine reports that Kushner texted with Scarborough about the tabloid story before it ran in mid-April.

Kushner used this story as blackmail, saying that it could be stopped Scarborough and Brzezinski, who are engaged to be married, apologized to Trump for their negative coverage of his first months in the White House.

After they refused, the National Enquirer ran a story on June 5 titled, “Morning Joe Sleazy Cheating Scandal!”

In an op-ed written by the Morning Joe hosts in the Washington Post, they hinted at the threat.

“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 op-ed read. ““We got a call that, hey, the National Enquirer is going to run a negative story against you guys, and it was, you know, Donald is — the President is friends with the guy that runs the National Enquirer,” Scarborough said. Trump’s relationship with Enquirer CEO David Pecker is well known.

During the Morning Joe broadcast this morning, the two briefly discussed this blackmail: “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,” Scarborough continued. “I had — I will just say three people at the very top of the administration calling me, and the response was like: Are you kidding me? I don’t know what they have, run a story. I’m not going to do it.”

“The calls kept coming,” Scarborough said. “And kept coming. And they were like, ‘Call. You need to call. Please call. C’mon, Joe, just pick up the phone and call him!’”We ignored their desperate pleas.”

Brzezinski said the magazine called her children and close friends. They were pinning the story, she said, on her ex-husband, “who would absolutely never do that, so I knew immediately it was a lie and they had nothing.”

The pair refused to apologize to the President, they said. And the eventual story, Scarborough said, was not accurate.

The president himself weighed in via Twitter a few minutes later. He said he heard what Scarborough said on “Morning Joe,” but claimed that it’s untrue: “He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show.”

Scarborough quickly responded to Trump’s tweet: “Yet another lie. I have texts from your top aides and phone records. Also, those records show I haven’t spoken with you in many months.”