‘Morning Joe’ Hosts Say Ronna McDaniel Won’t Be Invited On Their Show And Call For NBC News To Reconsider Decision To Hire Her

deadline.com:

MSNBC‘s Morning Joe co-anchors Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski called on NBC News to reconsider its decision to hire former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel as a paid contributor.

They are the latest network voices to publicly criticize the decision to retain McDaniel, who was ousted as chair earlier this year. “We learned about the hire when we read about it in the press on Friday,” Scarborough told viewers. “We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons, including, but not limited to, as lawyers might say, Miss McDaniel’s role in Trump’s fake electors scheme and her pressuring election officials to not certify election results while Donald Trump was on the phone.” Brzezinski added, “To be clear, we believe NBC News should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election converage, but it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier, and we hope NBC will reconsider its decision.” She added that “it goes without saying” that McDaniel will not be a guest on Morning Joe in her capacity as a paid contributor.

Morning Joe then cut to a segment on Meet the Press from Sunday, in which moderator Kristen Welker pressed McDaniel on her past refusal to say that Joe Biden was legitimately elected president in 2020.

Welker played a clip of an interview McDaniel, when she was still RNC chair, gave to CNN’s Chris Wallace last year, in which she said that she didn’t think Biden “won it fair.” But in the interview with Welker, she said that she now thinks that Biden won it “fair and square.” A spokesperson for NBC News said that they had