"Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough said Tuesday that three White House sources informed him that President Donald Trump never told Newsmax Media CEO Chris Ruddy that he was considering firing special counsel Robert Mueller.
The MSNBC host expressed confidence that Ruddy's insinuation was baseless, in a clip flagged by Mediaite. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Ruddy, who is a longtime friend of Trump, was not "authorized to comment," prompting Ruddy to accuse Spicer of "undermining one of your few allies."
"The people in the administration were quick to reach out to me and say Chris Ruddy doesn't speak for this administration," Scarborough said.
Co-host Mika Brzezinski told Scarborough that Ruddy maintains that his sources were good. She asked whether Scarborough's sources flatly denied Ruddy's claim, but her co-host said he trusted his sources.
"I spoke to three sources that are about as high as it gets in the White House over the past 12 hours, and every one of them said the same thing: 'Ruddy does not speak for the president and the president never said that,'" Scarborough said.
"All three of them could be lying to me; I don't think so," he said.
Scarborough speculated that the president might extend this particular story.
"He's got all these weird relationships where he says, 'I haven't talked to so-and-so in six months' and then you find out he talked to so-and-so that day," Scarborough said about Trump. "So I'm sure he'll talk to Chris Ruddy today."