Trump responds to claim he tried to blackmail 'Morning Joe' hosts with National Enquirer story

On Friday, Morning Joe co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough delayed the start of a vacation to appear on their MSNBC show to respond to a series of widely criticized tweets from President Trump.

"We're OK. The country is not," Scarborough said.

Trump sent two angry tweets aimed at the two hosts on Thursday following a segment where the two hosts mocked a fake Time magazine cover  that reportedly had hung in his golf club in Doral, Fla. In the tweets, Trump called the hosts "Low IQ Crazy Mika and Psycho Joe" and alleged Brzezinski was "bleeding badly from a facelift" during a visit to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida club.

In a column written for the Washington Post, Brzezinski and Scarborough claimed that earlier 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."

On Morning Joe Friday morning, the now-engaged pair offered details about the allegation.

"We got a call from the White House that 'The National Enquirer is going to run a negative story against you guys. Donald is friends with the guy who runs the National Enquirer,' " Scarborough said, claiming he received multiple calls from three individuals at the top of the Trump administration saying the president would call the Enquirer's owner David Pecker and spike the story if Scarborough personally apologized to Trump for Morning Joe's coverage.

"That's blackmail," Morning Joe co-host Donnie Deutsch said.

"They were pinning the story on my ex-husband," Brzezinski added, "And I knew he would never do that. So I knew it was a lie and they had nothing. These calls persisted for quite some time. They were threatening. They were calling my children.

"These calls persisted for quite some time. Then Joe had the conversations that he had with the White House where they said, 'This could go away.' Our response, after talking to my ex-husband, talking to Joe, talking to my kids, was 'Screw it, let them run it.' "

On June 5, the Enquirer published a story about Scarborough and Brzezinski with the headline "Morning Joe Sleazy Cheating Scandal!"

After the segment aired on MSNBC, President Trump called the hosts' claims "fake news," stating it was Scarborough who called him in an attempt to stop the article from being published. It's unclear why Scarborough would have called Trump about a National Enquirer article.

Scarborough swiftly responded to Trump's tweet, claiming he has text messages from top aides to President Trump that back up his story.

Following the exchange, NBC News executive Mark Kornblau appeared to support Scarborough's claims, something the MSNBC host explained further to Jay Caruso, the assistant managing editor of the conservative website RedState.

"NBC execs knew in real time about the calls and who made them to me. That's why Mark Kornblau wrote about contemporaneous texts," Scarborough said. "I showed him and executives as they were coming in to keep them advised."

It's unclear whether NBC plans to release any further information related to the conversations between Scarborough and Brzezinski and the Trump administration.

In a statement released Friday morning, the National Enquirer denied it was involved in any discussions between President Trump and the Morning Joe hosts.

"At no time did we threaten either Joe or Mika or their children in connection with our reporting on the story," Enquirer vice president and chief content officer Dylan Howard said in a statement. "We have no knowledge of any discussions between the White House and Joe and Mika about our story, and absolutely no involvement in those discussions."

Trump and Pecker are longtime friends, and during the 2016 campaign the National Enquirer published numerous negative stories about several of Trump's opponents in the Republican presidential primary, including Ben Carson and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. According to a recent profile in the New Yorker, Pecker has been considering placing a bid to buy Time, Inc., which publishes Sports Illustrated, People, and Time.

Scarborough also revealed a conversation he claimed to have had with a senior member of Congress "that everyone knows" about a meeting between the president and House Republicans while trying to push through the GOP's health care bill in which Trump railed about the MSNBC show and Brzezinski.

Scarborough said the Republican congressman told him Trump "went on a rant" about Morning Joe in front of about 20 House members, but got especially vicious when speaking about Brzezinski, where he allegedly spoke of "blood coming out of her ears" and "out of her eyes."

"This congressman said, 'I've been in politics for decades and I've never seen anything like this,' " Scarborough said.

Brzezinski told viewers that while she isn't personally upset about Trump's comments, the president's unstable actions do cause her a great deal of concern for the country.

"He appears to have a fragile, childlike ego that we've seen over and over again, especially with woman," Brzezinski said. "It is unbelievably alarming that this president is so easily played by a cable news host. What does that say to our allies? What does that say to our enemies?"

Watch the full segment: