Joe Scarborough says he might sue Donald Trump for repeatedly accusing him of murder

Joe Scarborough has considered legal action against Donald Trump, who wrongly accused the MSNBC host of murder last year.

Mr Scarborough said on Sunday that he had lost patience with Mr Trump since the storming of the US Capitol by his supporters, many of whom alleged the 2020 election was “stolen”, and that he could sue the US President over allegations levelled against him.

Mr Trump, whose presidency ends on Wednesday, will no longer be protected against legal action. Mr Scarborough suggested to Times Radio that could lead to the one-term president being sued by him.

“I called lawyers after about the tenth time he accused me of murder,” said Mr Scarborough, who sought advice from lawyers in New York and Washington DC after Mr Trump’s allegations in May last year.

“I get the best lawyer in New York, the best lawyer in DC who was supposed to be the best for handling these sort of defamation cases and they said, well you can't sue the president because he's the president and he's got immunity, which I disagree with,” Mr Scarborough said.

The MSNBC host then added: “I think there may be a challenge there and I may sue him in the future.”

Mr Trump wrongly alleged that Mr Scarborough murdered a woman when he was a Republican congressman almost two decades ago, and suggested on Twitter that the two had an “affair”.

The president wrote about Mr Scaraborough and the death in a series of Twitter posts in May 2020, as the MSNBC host attacked the Trump administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“A lot of interest in this story about Psycho Joe Scarborough,” Mr Trump tweeted at the time. “So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think there is a lot more to this story than that? An affair? What about the so-called investigator?”

An intern working for Mr Scarborough, Lori Klausutis, collapsed and died after fatally hitting her head. She had suffered from a heart condition prior to the fall, and police found no evidence of foul play for the death, as The Washington Post reported.

Mr Trump continued to make the accusations against the television host, despite widespread condemnation at his comments, which Mr Scarborough warned were hurting Klausutis’s family.

Twitter, where Mr Trump made those accusations, said at the time that it was “deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family,” Vanity Fair reported.

The social media site permanently banned the president last week, after posting misleading election-related information and inciting his supporters to storm Congress.

Mr Scarborough added on Sunday that Mr Trump “won’t be back” because “he's probably going to either spend time in jail or do a deal that will stop him from ever entering politics again”.

“What we can't understand is how he continues, even today, to maintain a grip on the Republican Party,” the MSNBC host added. “That is the real crisis in American democracy, not Donald Trump because Donald Trump's going away.”

The US president is currently under investigation in New York in relation to his business dealings, and has faced calls to be criminally prosecuted over the Capitol riot, for which he has been impeached a second time.