Joe Scarborough isn’t ready to accept Melania Trump’s claim she was never friendly with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, arguing the first lady’s latest remarks have done little to quash speculation.
On Thursday, Trump delivered a televised address from the White House in which she went to lengths to distance herself from Epstein, who died by an apparent suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking underage girls. The first lady dismissed reports linking her to Epstein as “lies” and also downplayed a 2002 email with Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, as “casual correspondence.”
Scarborough, however, wasn’t convinced. On Friday’s installment of MS Now’s “Morning Joe,” the co-host deemed Trump’s address “beyond bizarre.”
“All of the reporting is that the people that were in the White House briefing room yesterday were just absolutely stunned … in part, that it came out of nowhere, and secondly, that she would actually pretend that she didn’t know who he was or that she had no relationship with him,” he said.
Watch Scarborough’s remarks on Trump below.
He and co-host Mika Brzezinski raised doubts about Trump’s email with Maxwell ― dated Oct. 23, 2002, and released publicly during a U.S. Justice Department document dump in January of this year ― noting that the first lady’s decision to sign the note, “Love, Melania,” felt more than casual.
“Again, everybody’s waiting for another shoe to drop,” he said. “I don’t know if it will or not, but again, the timing of that was so strange, especially bringing up something that obviously the president doesn’t want brought up and calling for hearings.”
“That’s just the opposite of what the president has been talking about for months,” he added.
President Donald Trump told MS Now’s Jacqueline Alemany on Thursday that he didn’t “know anything about” his wife’s plans to speak to the media about Epstein. “She didn’t know him,” he said.
However, a source later told CNN the president was aware of the first lady’s plans to issue a public statement.
