Donald Trump’s ties to the National Enquirer are close, but three years ago they were almost much closer. Jared Kushner, who is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka and serves as one of the president’s top White House confidants, almost bought American Media Inc., the company that owns the Enquirer, back in 2014.

According to sources speaking with Bloomberg Politics, Kushner and brother-in-law Joe Meyer attempted to finalize a deal with Enquirer publisher David Pecker to buy their parent company—but the deal ultimately fell through because of weak advertising revenue.

In between articles about celebrity scandals and U.F.O. sightings, the Enquirer spent last year’s campaign endorsing Trump and attacking his opponents. The feud between Trump and Morning Joe co-hosts __Joe Scarborough__and Mika Brzezinski came to a head last week when Trump tweeted Brzezinski had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when she “insisted” on joining Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort around New Year’s Eve last year.

Brzezinski and Scarborough fired back the next day with a commentary in the Washington Post titled “Donald Trump is not well.” In the article, they claim Trump is “obsessed” with their show, even threatening to have his favorite publication publish a slanderous piece unless they begged him not to: “This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas.”

Trump answered this latest attack with, surprise, another tweet, claiming that Scarborough did call him to stop the article, and he had said no—then adding a day later that Scarborough is “crazy” and Brzezinski is “dumb as a rock.”