Mika Emilie Leonia Brzezinski Scarborough is an American talk show host, liberal political commentator, and author who currently co-hosts MSNBC's weekday morning broadcast show Morning Joe.
33 Facts About Mika Brzezinski
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Mika Brzezinski is a visiting fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics.
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Mika Brzezinski is the author of three books; two on her career as a journalist and one on food addiction.
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Brzezinski was born in New York City, the daughter of Polish-born foreign policy expert and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Swiss-born sculptor Emilie Anna Benesova.
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Mika Brzezinski's mother, of Czech descent, is a grandniece of Czechoslovakia's former president Edvard Benes.
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Mika Brzezinski's father was teaching at Columbia University when she was born; the family moved to McLean, Virginia, near Washington, DC, in late 1976, when Zbigniew was named National Security Advisor by newly elected President Jimmy Carter.
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Mika Brzezinski's brother, Mark Brzezinski, is an American diplomat, was the United States Ambassador to Sweden from 2011 to 2015 and from 2022 has been the United States Ambassador to Poland.
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Mika Brzezinski is a first cousin of the author Matthew Brzezinski.
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Mika Brzezinski attended the Madeira School and then attended Georgetown University for two years before transferring to Williams College, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1989.
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Mika Brzezinski began her career in journalism as an assistant at ABC's World News This Morning in 1990.
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In 2001, Mika Brzezinski began a short hiatus from CBS News, during which she worked for rival MSNBC on the weekday afternoon show, HomePage, with co-anchors Gina Gaston and Ashleigh Banfield.
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Mika Brzezinski returned to CBS News as a desk correspondent in September 2001, a move that thrust her into the limelight as a principal "Ground Zero" reporter for the September 11,2001, attacks.
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Mika Brzezinski was broadcasting live from the scene when the South Tower collapsed.
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Mika Brzezinski returned to MSNBC on January 26,2007, doing the evening "Up to the Minute" news updates.
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Mika Brzezinski filed occasional reports for NBC Nightly News and appeared as an occasional anchor on Weekend Today.
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Mika Brzezinski resigned from both shows on the eve of a renewal option, said Mika Brzezinski, when Scarborough selected her to co-host on Morning Joe.
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Since the program's inception, Mika Brzezinski appeared as co-host and news reader on MSNBC's morning program Morning Joe, alongside Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist.
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On June 26,2007, near the beginning of Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski refused to read a report about Paris Hilton's release from jail.
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One hour later during another news break segment, her producer Andy Jones again pushed the story as the lead, ranking it over Indiana's Republican Senator Richard Lugar's break with President Bush on the Iraq War, which Mika Brzezinski considered more important.
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Mika Brzezinski then tore up the script, and one hour later, got up and ran another copy of the script through a paper shredder retrieved from Dan Abrams's office.
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The incident was quickly popularized on the Internet, and in the days that followed, Mika Brzezinski received large quantities of fan mail supporting her on-air protest as a commentary on the tension between "hard news" and "entertainment news".
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The 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak revealed that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, had emailed Chuck Todd, the Political Director of NBC News and host of Meet the Press, to demand that he "stop" Mika Brzezinski from criticizing the DNC's treatment of Bernie Sanders.
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In December 2016, after Clinton had lost, Mika Brzezinski suggested the Clinton campaign had tried to silence her by calling executives at NBC and telling them she "needed to be pulled off the air".
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On February 15,2017, Mika Brzezinski banned Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway from future appearances on her show.
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In March 2017, Mika Brzezinski called Trump's presidency "fake and failed", and soon thereafter Trump unfollowed Mika Brzezinski and Scarborough on Twitter.
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On May 20,2020, while hosting Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski spoke out against Trump for tweeting a conspiracy theory that her husband was involved in the death of Lori Klausutis, an intern in Scarborough's Florida office in 2001, while he was in Congress.
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On December 12,2018, Mika Brzezinski called Trump's Secretary of State Mike Pompeo "a wannabe dictator's butt-boy", referring to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, during a live MSNBC broadcast.
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Mika Brzezinski apologized later that day after her remarks were criticized as homophobic.
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On October 23,1993, Mika Brzezinski married TV news reporter James Patrick Hoffer, now of WABC-TV.
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Hoffer and Mika Brzezinski divorced in 2016 amidst allegations of an affair that started years prior in 2010, between Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough.
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In early 2017, Mika Brzezinski became engaged to her co-host Joe Scarborough, and they were married on November 24,2018, in Washington, DC, with Rep.
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Mika Brzezinski was selected for the inaugural 2021 Forbes 50 Over 50; made up of entrepreneurs, leaders, scientists and creators who are over the age of 50.
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In January 2010, Mika Brzezinski published a memoir entitled All Things at Once.