The Story Behind The Death Of A House Staffer That Trump’s Using To Smear Joe Scarborough

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 25: U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive to the South Lawn of the White House after a trip to Baltimore, Maryland on May 25, 2020 in Washington, DC. The Trumps attended... WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 25: U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive to the South Lawn of the White House after a trip to Baltimore, Maryland on May 25, 2020 in Washington, DC. The Trumps attended a Memorial Day ceremony at the Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine despite objections by Baltimore Mayor Bernard C. Jack Young, whose residents remain under a stay-at-home order due to the coronavirus. (Photo by Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images) MORE LESS
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In 2001, the 28-year-old congressional staffer Lori Klausutis was suffering from an undiagnosed heart condition. She lost consciousness and fell, hitting her head on a desk. She died on the floor of the resulting brain trauma, according to a medical examiner’s report. She left behind a promising future and a grieving husband.

Nineteen years later, the President of the United States used Klausutis’ death to smear the man she worked for at the time of her passing, baselessly insinuating that the cable TV host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough is a murderer.

The conspiracizing about Klausutis’ death punctuated a stormy weekend on Trump’s Twitter page. As confirmed COVID-19 fatalities in the United States approached 100,000, Trump pumped out tweets by the dozen — boasting of “great reviews” of his pandemic response, boosting denture jokes about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and calling a Marine veteran a fraud, among other things.

Among the noise, Klausutis’ death became yet another weapon to vilify a political opponent.

Contrary to his tweet, the President hasn’t “joined the chorus” spreading baseless rumors about Klausutis — he’s become the conductor. He first tweeted about the “unsolved mystery” related to Scarborough in 2017.

In late April, he picked up that theme again, referring to Scarborough as “Psycho Joe ‘What Ever Happened To Your Girlfriend?’ Scarborough.” On May 4, he used the hashtag #OPENJOECOLDCASE. A week later, he wondered aloud, “When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so. Why did he leave Congress so quietly and quickly? Isn’t it obvious?” On May 16, he employed a new nickname, “Psycho Cold Case Joe Scarborough,” and on May 20 he called again to “Open Cold Case!”

The facts surrounding Klausutis’ passing were established at the time, and re-reported in several major outlets when Trump boosted the conspiracy theories in 2017. Contrary to Trump’s claims, her death is not a “cold case” nor an “unsolved mystery,” and authorities have never suspected foul play.

On July 19, 2001, Klausutis told a coworker in Scarborough’s Fort Walton Beach office that she wasn’t feeling well, the Tampa Bay Times reported. She told a mail carrier something similar. The next morning, she was found dead. Scarborough had announced his impending retirement from Congress a month prior.

The medical examiner’s report is, in light of Trump’s accusations, remarkably straightforward.

Klausutis lost consciousness due to a previously undiscovered heart issue, then died after hitting her head on her desk. Or, medically speaking, she died of “acute subdural hematoma from closed head trauma as a result of blunt force trauma sustained in a fall which was precipitated by complications of floppy mitral valve disease.”

“There is no doubt that the head injury is as a result of a fall rather than a blow being delivered to the head by a moving object,” the report stated.

Klausutis had not attempted to guard against the fall, suggesting she began losing consciousness while upright. No injuries were found on her hands or arms.

“A conscious person capable of guarding against a fall would normally not have hit the side of the desk with such a large amount of force as a near unconscious person free falling with no guarding reflexes,” the report noted. There are three events that typically “cause one to drop in mid sentence or in mid stride” it said: Blood clots that block circulation to the lungs, bleeding in the brain, or sudden cardigan arrhythmia: an abnormal heart rhythm.

The report noted that the first two possibilities had been ruled out by an autopsy, as had the possibility that her loss of consciousness was the result of drug use.

However, Klausutis had indicated to a witness hours before her death that she was “anxious and did not feel quite right.”

“These feelings could easily be those associated with extra or skipped heartbeats,” the report stated.

Trump wasn’t the first to raise questions about the nature of Klausutis’ death: Almost as soon as it happened, pundits on both sides of the aisle poked at the story to score political points. Despite that, the facts were clear. And years later, Trump has kept the theory alive with the click (or, quite a few clicks) of a mouse.

Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s MSNBC show “Morning Joe” used to be friendly terrain for Trump. But after years of appearances on the program, Trump’s 2016 campaign turned the co-hosts into reliable critics.

That criticism has intensified as COVID-19 sweeps across the country.

A couple of hours before Trump targeted Scarborough on Sunday, for example, Scarborough and Brzezinski hosted a special edition of their show focused on victims of the pandemic. At one point in the broadcast, Scarborough took square aim at Trump, listing his assurances earlier this year that the virus would “go away.”

“Look at the 100,000 dead,” Scarborough said. “It didn’t go away.”

Last week, Klausutis’ widowed husband Timothy Klausutis asked Twitter’s CEO to remove two recent tweets of Trump’s about her death, as well as one from Donald Trump Jr., for violating the site’s rules.

“These conspiracy theorists, including most recently the President of the United States, continue to spread their bile and misinformation on your platform disparaging the memory of my wife and our marriage,” he wrote, adding: “My wife deserves better.”

The influential New York Times technology contributor Kara Swisher boosted that letter on Tuesday morning, calling on Twitter to remove the tweets.

Twitter responded with a noncommittal statement a few hours later.

“We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family,” a spokesperson for the company said. “We’ve been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly.”

Notable Replies

  1. Avatar for spin spin says:

    This was a lie when folks on Daily Kos/Mike Moore, etc were pushing it, and it is a bigger lie today. She worked in a constituent office in FL, and was married. Joe was in DC, and his retirement was announced before her death.

    What Trump has done is take right wing reports, which add fake details not found in the original far left fever swamp version (like her being a “marathon runner”). Trump just shows that far left and far right all meet around the back, and Trump has to one up them in how crazy his lies are.

    And p.s. posting a version of this from the left: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/3/15/956651/-

  2. Another opportunity for people to see what a vile human being Trump is.

  3. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/twitter-paul-singer-republican-jack-dorsey

    A billionaire Republican megadonor has purchased a “sizable” stake in Twitter and “plans to push” to oust CEO Jack Dorsey among other changes, according to new reports, raising the prospect of a shocking election-year shakeup of the social media platform that conservatives have long accused of overt left-wing political bias.

    Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. has already nominated four directors to Twitter’s board, a development first reported by Bloomberg News, citing several sources familiar with the arrangement. The outlet noted that unlike other prominent tech CEOs, Dorsey didn’t have voting control over Twitter because the company had just one class of stock; and he has long been a target for removal given Twitter’s struggling user growth numbers and stock performance.

  4. Whatever happened to Melania’s cyber anti-bullying campaign? Whatever happened to infrastructure week? Whatever happened to better, cheaper, health care coverage for all citizens? Whatever happened to Trump’s fake inaugural promise to end the “American carnage?”

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