Wall Street Journal: Trump 'smear' about Scarborough staffer death is 'same sort of trash' as Steele dossier

The Wall Street Journal compared President Trump's accusations that Joe Scarborough committed murder to the Steele dossier.

The publication's editorial board published a new piece Tuesday night titled "A Presidential Smear," condemning the president for promoting the unfounded conspiracy theory and calling the line of attack "ugly even for him." It went on to note that Trump "always hits back at critics" but argued that his allegations that Scarborough was involved in the accidental death of one of his former congressional aides, Lori Klausutis, was "a smear."

"Mr. Trump always hits back at critics, and Mr. Scarborough has called the President mentally ill, among other things," the piece read. "But suggesting that the talk-show host is implicated in the woman’s death isn’t political hardball. It’s a smear. Mr. Trump rightly denounces the lies spread about him in the Steele dossier, yet here he is trafficking in the same sort of trash."

Trump, on social media, has repeatedly questioned whether Scarborough was involved in the death of Klausutis, 28, who died in 2001 in Scarborough's congressional office in Florida. He has also called for an open investigation into her death. According to the police report, however, Klausutis lost consciousness from "a probable cardiac arrhythmia secondary to valvular heart disease" and collapsed. As she fell, the 28-year-old hit her head on a desk and later died as a "result of an acute subdural hematoma," which occurred from the head trauma.

The president has asked whether Scarborough “got away with murder” and claimed it may be why the MSNBC host stepped down from Congress. Scarborough, who has vehemently denied any involvement in the woman’s death, announced his resignation from Congress months before she died.

The Wall Street Journal acknowledged that it don't expect the editorial to convince the president to stop and noted that its board "can't imagine how" the president could think "this helps him politically."

"But Mr. Trump is debasing his office, and he’s hurting the country in doing so," the piece concluded.

The Steele dossier was created by British ex-spy Christopher Steele in 2016 at the behest of opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn was being paid by Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm. It included several salacious, unverified claims that some intelligence experts have suggested originated as Russian disinformation. The Justice Department and FBI used the dossier to obtain a FISA warrant for then-Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz criticized the department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA warrants against Page in 2016 and 2017 and for the bureau's reliance on the dossier.