The allegations raise questions over White House conduct, and intensify the ongoing conflict between the president and the morning-show hosts. On Thursday, Trump lashed out at Scarborough and Brzezinski on Twitter, calling Brzezinski “low I.Q.” and “Crazy” and Scarborough “Psycho.” He claimed the two had “insisted on joining” him at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida “3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve.” In his tweets, Trump made a graphic allegation that, at the time, Brzezinski “was bleeding badly from a face-lift.”

Trump’s decision to single out and criticize Brzezinski’s physical appearance fits his pattern of making disparaging remarks in reference to a woman’s physical appearance. In August 2015, Trump said that then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly “had blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever” after she challenged him during a presidential debate. In an interview with Rolling Stone during the presidential election, Trump said “Look at that face!” when he saw an image of then-Republican presidential contender Carly Fiorina. Fiorina responded by saying that “women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.”

Trump’s feud with the hosts of Morning Joe is also the latest in a series of attacks and accusations the president has made against the media, often with the effect of sidelining news coverage of other administration priorities in the process.

The hosts elaborated on their own accusations against the White House on MSNBC on Friday:

Scarborough: “We got a call that ‘Hey, the National Enquirer is going to run a negative story against you guys,’ and it was, Donald is friends with, the president is friends with, the guy that runs the National Enquirer. And they said, ‘If you call the president up, and you apologize for your coverage, then he will pick up the phone and basically spike the story.’ I had, I will just say, three people at the very top of the administration calling me. The response was like, I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I don’t know what they have. Run a story? I’m not going to do it. The calls kept coming, and kept coming, and they were like ‘Call. You need to call, please call. Come on, Joe, just pick up the phone and call him.’” Brzezinski: “And let me explain what they were threatening: They were calling my children, they were calling close friends.” Scarborough: “You’re talking about the National Enquirer.” Brzezinski: “And they were pinning the story on my ex-husband, who would absolutely never do that. So I knew immediately it was a lie, and that they had nothing. These calls persisted for quite some time. And then Joe had the conversations that he had with the White House where they said, ‘Oh, this could go away.’”

It was not immediately clear what National Enquirer article the president and the television hosts were referring to, though in his report on Friday, Sherman cites a June story in the tabloid headlined: “Joe & Mika: TV Couple’s Sleazy Cheating Scandal.”