Anderson Cooper hammers 'little man' Trump for pushing Scarborough conspiracy

CNN’s Anderson Cooper ripped into President Trump Tuesday night for continuing to push a conspiracy that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough murdered a staffer when he was in Congress in 2001. The staffer, Lori Klausutis, was found dead in Scarborough’s district office after she apparently fell and hit her head on the side of a desk, resulting in a fatal blood clot. Her death was ruled an accident, and the medical examiner concluded Klausutis had an undiagnosed heart condition that caused her to collapse. Yet Trump has tweeted multiple times in recent weeks pointing the finger at Scarborough.

Klausutis’s husband, Timothy, wrote a letter addressed to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking that Trump’s tweets be removed. In the letter, Timothy 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.”

After again pushing the conspiracy at a Tuesday press conference, Trump was asked about the letter.

“Mr. President, have you seen the letter that was written by her husband begging Twitter to delete your tweets, talking about how hard it’s been for his family, and for him to deal with that?” Trump was asked. “Yeah I have, but I’m sure that ultimately they want to get to the bottom of it and it’s a very serious situation,” Trump answered, adding, “As you know, there’s no statute of limitations, so it would be a very good… a very good thing to do.”

“What a little man. He’s just a little man. He’s the leader of the free world and he is a little, little man,” Cooper said after playing a clip of Trump’s response to the question about the letter. “The self-proclaimed wartime leader. A leader, he says, in the midst of a transition to greatness for the country, spreading falsehoods about a dead woman despite the pain and the pleas of her husband and the family. He doesn’t even have the guts to say he doesn’t care about what they think. No, no, he doesn’t have the guts to say, ‘You know what? I don’t care what they think because this serves my political purposes.’ That’s why he’s doing it. He doesn’t have the guts to say that because he is just a little man, despite his girth and size. He’s a little man inside and he knows that.”

Twitter has declined to remove Trump’s Scarborough tweets.

But the fervor surrounding Trump’s Scarborough conspiracy wasn’t the only news Trump’s tweets made on Tuesday. Early Tuesday morning, Trump posted tweets about mail-in ballots which were quickly flagged by Twitter for containing potentially misleading information. “Get the facts about mail-in ballots” appeared at the bottom of each tweet with a link to facts contradictory to the president’s unsubstantiated claims.

“You won’t find the facts in the president’s statements. I mean, Twitter is now acknowledging you won’t find facts in the president’s statements. That’s where we are,” Cooper said. “In the midst of a pandemic, this is what we’re talking about because this is what the president is talking about every single day. You think it’s normal. You, like, you start to think it’s normal. It’s not. Man, we are in trouble.”

Anderson Cooper 360 airs weeknights at 8 p.m. on CNN.

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