The Morning Joe team have just about had it with the haters.
In a Vanity Fair interview, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski go after their critics and competitors who say they’re too cozy with Pres.-elect Donald Trump.
As for that allegation they watched returns with Trump on election night:
“What’s so ironic is that CNN’s doing reports on fake news, and they have someone who writes one false news story after the next,” Scarborough says. “We didn’t sit with him to watch the returns. Even after the facts came out that we did not, they continued to churn out those lies.”
On CNN’s Chris Cuomo‘s recent tweet about them:
“First of all, you have to take whatever Chris Cuomo says or retweets with a grain of salt because he also retweeted something saying that Morning Joe was a racist show,” Scarborough says. “Unfortunately, he’s obviously unhinged by something. We’ve never said anything bad about him, never said anything negative about the show. But he apparently is becoming unhinged for some reason.”
And on how their relationship with Trump is nothing new:
Scarborough: Mika knows this better than most because Charlie Rose, Ted Koppel, Lesley Stahl, you name it, they all wanted to play tennis with Dr. Brzezinski when he was running America’s national foreign policy. Why? Because he was a great tennis player? No. Because they wanted to get access to him. Andrea Mitchell for a very long time has been right in the middle of the Washington social scene, and that’s not dirty. You could say the same thing about Cokie Roberts, who’s been a fixture in Washington, D.C., her entire life.
Brzezinski: Ben Bradlee.
Scarborough: Ben Bradlee! You can’t be tighter with anyone than Ben Bradlee was with the Kennedys. This has been going on for 200 years in Washington, D.C.
The Morning Joe duo were not spotted at last night’s NBC media holiday party which was attended by, among others, Lester Holt, Brian Williams, Tamron Hall, Andrea Mitchell, Willie Geist, Joy Ann Reid, Katy Tur, Keith Morrison, Andrea Canning, Ronan Farrow and NBC executives including Steve Burke and Bob Greenblatt.