Morning Joe: Who Else Has The National Enquirer Blackmailed For Trump’s Benefit?

Morning Joe‘s Joe Scarborough put a hypothetical question Friday morning: Has the National Enquirer blackmailed anyone to benefit President Donald Trump? Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and guests were discussing the bombshell claim from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos that the Enquirer‘s parent company, AMI, had tried to blackmail him.

Panellist Susan Del Percio suggested that Bezos’ story shows a pattern of behavior from AMI and wondered what else publisher David Pecker might have in his safe. Scarborough picked up on the idea of a potential pattern of extortion and blackmail.

“A good question to ask is – and again, please don’t answer because we don’t have evidence – but a good rhetorical question, Susan, is: Who else has the National Enquirer blackmailed for the benefit of Donald Trump?” Scarborough asked. “Any House members? Any Senate members? Any political adversaries? Any editors? We know he tried it with talk show hosts. That didn’t work.”

Scarborough was referring to an attempt to blackmail him and Mike Brzezinski using a hit piece in the National Enquirer. The hosts addressed the issue live on air in 2017.

“Who else has the National Enquirer blackmailed since Donald Trump became President of the United States? What political enemies, who actually didn’t have the means to push back in the same way as Jeff Bezos pushed back?” Scarborough said.

Del Percio agreed that it is possible the Enquirer went after other people.

“And I’ll add one more thing,” Brzezinski said. “And that is that you really get the sense of this sort of Keystone Cop nature of doing business from Trump to his friends, his stooges. I mean, to send Jeff Bezos an e-mail extorting him and blackmailing him in black and white, you’ve got to be incredibly stupid. Incredibly stupid and incredibly arrogant to do it under these circumstances.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.