Hosts of Morning Joe are having an absolute field day with President Donald Trump’s claims the Jeffrey Epstein birthday book scandal is nothing but a Democratic Party “hoax.”
Joe Scarborough, a mainstay of MSNBC’s flagship weekday morning show, was particularly savage in dismantling the president’s protestations by pointing out that it is, after all, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal that has uncovered the most sordid new allegations about Trump’s relationship with the convicted sex trafficker.
“It is now, again, safely, the most conservative, the most powerful conservative media organization on the planet. They are the ones who have broken this story, they are the ones who have continued reporting on this story,” he said Tuesday morning.
“It is Rupert Murdoch’s own conservative media empire that is running this—not Democrats, not a Democratic Hoax, not a left-wing CBS news edit or whatever they would want to say,” he added. “This is straight out of the Murdoch empire. All of it.”
The hosts’ comments follow after the House Oversight Committee’s explosive decision to release a card, allegedly sent by Trump to Epstein to mark the late pedophile’s 50th birthday in 2003, featuring a crude sketch of a nude woman accompanied by the then-future president’s signature as pubic hair, and a bizarre imagined exchange about “enigmas” and “wonderful secrets.”
The story was indeed first broken by the Wall Street Journal earlier in July. Trump is currently suing the newspaper for $10 billion over the letter, which he and his administration claim is a forgery, with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posting on Monday: “It’s very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign it. This is FAKE NEWS to perpetuate the Democrat Epstein Hoax!”
Meanwhile, the newspaper has since released a new report on how the signature on the card released by the House Oversight Committee would, in fact, appear to bear a remarkable resemblance to the signature used by Donald Trump during that period.
Scarborough’s co-host Jonathan Lemire was also quick to pour cold water on the MAGA administration’s claims of a hoax, questioning the logistics of how exactly the Wall Street Journal, or the Democrats, are supposed to have fabricated a birthday card handed directly to the House Oversight Committee by executors of Epstein’s estate.
“Let’s remember, this isn’t something they conjured up. This was in the Epstein estate since 2003,” he said. “That’d be quite the long game, to try and get President Trump, if this was indeed a hoax, to plant a birthday card more than two decades ago.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
