Mika Brzezinski cuts interview with Michael Wolff over 'disgraceful' Trump-Haley affair rumor

William Cummings | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Mika Brzezinski cuts off Wolff interview over Trump affair rumor Mika Brzezinski vs. Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff. Veuer's Nick Cardona (@nickcardona93) has that story.

MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski abruptly ended an interview with author Michael Wolff during Morning Joe Thursday after Wolff denied having anything to do with a salacious and totally unsubstantiated rumor about an affair between President Trump and Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

"You might be having a fun time playing a little game dancing around this, but you're slurring a woman. It's disgraceful," Brzezinski told Wolff.

"Mika, again, she had been accused of nothing," Wolff responded. "She has decided to deny what she has not been accused of. Certainly, I didn't accuse her of this."

"Are you kidding?" Brzezinski asked. "You're on the set of Morning Joe. We don't B.S. here."

Wolff then asked the panel to read him the exact language that might have implied an insinuation about Haley.

"Are you kidding me?" Brzezinski asked again. "I'm not reading you anything. If you don't get it, if you don't get what we're talking about, I'm sorry, this is awkward, you're here on the set with us, but we're done. Michael Wolff, thank you."

The show then cut to commercial.

After the incident, Wolff sent a series of tweets.

"My bad, the President is right about Mika," the first one read. Trump has called Brzezinski "dumb as a rock," "crazy," "very dumb," "very insecure," "wild with hate," a "clown," and said she is "off the wall, a neurotic and not very bright mess!"

Related: President Trump hurls crude new insults at 'Morning Joe' hosts

More: 'Morning Joe' hosts Mika Brzezinski, Joe Scarborough respond: 'Donald Trump is not well'

"To be invited on a show with the purpose of being thrown off ... is the new television," Wolff tweeted. "In other words, I had to say what Mika wanted me to say, or else...the hook!"

And in another tweet he said, "The last time I was on Morning Joe off camera Joe and Mika eager to gossip about who Trump might be sleeping with," referring to Brzezinski's Morning Joe co-host.

It really would be hard to gossip more eagerly off camera than Mika and Joe gossip. — Michael Wolff (@MichaelWolffNYC) February 1, 2018

During a Jan. 19 appearance on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher to promote his controversial book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Wolff said Trump was having an affair. He hinted that the identity of Trump's lover could be guessed from a passage "toward the end of the book."

Readers and online sleuths inferred the person Wolff was referring to was Haley from passages like this:

Haley — "as ambitious a Lucifer," in the characterization of one member of the senior staff —had concluded that Trump’s tenure would last, at best, a single term, and that she, with requisite submission, could be his heir apparent. Haley had courted and befriended Ivanka, and Ivanka had brought her into the family circle, where she had become a particular focus of Trump’s attention, and he of hers ... The president had been spending a notable amount of private time with Haley on Air Force One and was seen to be grooming her for a national political future.

Haley called the rumor "absolutely not true," "highly offensive" and "disgusting" in an interview with Politico last week. "He says that I’ve been talking a lot with the president in the Oval about my political future," Haley said. "I’ve never talked once to the president about my future and I am never alone with him."

In an interview with theSkimm Wednesday, Wolff said Haley appears to have "embraced the rumor."