A
F**king Paranoid Schizophrenic: Scaramucci
Unloads
He started by threatening to fire the entire
White House communications staff. It escalated
from there.
By Ryan Lizza
July 28,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- On
Wednesday night, I received a phone call from
Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House
communications director. He wasn’t happy.
Earlier in the night, I’d
tweeted, citing
a “senior White House official,” that Scaramucci
was having
dinner at the
White House with President Trump, the First
Lady, Sean Hannity, and the former Fox News
executive Bill Shine. It was an interesting
group, and raised some questions. Was Trump
getting strategic advice from Hannity? Was he
considering hiring Shine? But Scaramucci had his
own question—for me.
“Who
leaked that to you?” he asked. I said I couldn’t
give him that information. He responded by
threatening to fire the entire White House
communications staff. “What I’m going to do is,
I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and
we’ll start over,” he said. I laughed, not sure
if he really believed that such a threat would
convince a journalist to reveal a source. He
continued to press me and complain about the
staff he’s inherited in his new job. “I ask
these guys not to leak anything and they can’t
help themselves,” he said. “You’re an American
citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the
American country. So I’m asking you as an
American patriot to give me a sense of who
leaked it.”
In Scaramucci’s
view, the fact that word of the dinner had
reached a reporter was evidence that his rivals
in the West Wing, particularly
Reince Priebus,
the White House chief of staff, were plotting
against him. While they have
publicly
maintained that there is no bad blood between
them, Scaramucci and Priebus have been feuding
for months. After the election, Trump asked
Scaramucci to join his Administration, and
Scaramucci
sold his
company, SkyBridge Capital, in anticipation of
taking on a senior role. But Priebus didn’t want
him in the White House, and successfully
blocked him
from being appointed to a job until last week,
when Trump offered him the communications job
over Priebus’s vehement objections. In response
to Scaramucci’s appointment, Sean Spicer, an
ally of Priebus’s,
resigned his
position as press secretary. And in an
additional slight to Priebus, the White House’s
official
announcement of
Scaramucci’s hiring noted that he would report
directly to the President, rather than to the
chief of staff.
Scaramucci’s first
public appearance as communications director was
a slick and conciliatory
performance at
the lectern in the White House briefing room
last Friday. He suggested it was time for the
White House to turn a page. But since then, he
has become obsessed with leaks and
threatened to
fire staffers if he discovers that they have
given unauthorized information to reporters.
Michael Short, a White House press aide
considered close to Priebus,
resigned on
Tuesday after Scaramucci publicly spoke about
firing him. Meanwhile, several damaging stories
about Scaramucci have appeared in the press, and
he blamed Priebus for most of them. Now, he
wanted to know whom I had been talking to about
his dinner with the President. Scaramucci, who
initiated the call, did not ask for the
conversation to be off the record or on
background.
“Is it an
assistant to the President?” he asked. I again
told him I couldn’t say. “O.K., I’m going to
fire every one of them, and then you haven’t
protected anybody, so the entire place will be
fired over the next two weeks.”
I asked
him why it was so important for the dinner to be
kept a secret. Surely, I said, it would become
public at some point. “I’ve asked people not to
leak things for a period of time and give me a
honeymoon period,” he said. “They won’t do it.”
He was getting more and more worked up, and he
eventually convinced himself that Priebus was my
source.
“They’ll
all be fired by me,” he said. “I fired one guy
the other day. I have three to four people I’ll
fire tomorrow. I’ll get to the person who leaked
that to you. Reince Priebus—if you want to leak
something—he’ll be asked to resign very
shortly.” The issue, he said, was that he
believed Priebus had been worried about the
dinner because he hadn’t been invited. “Reince
is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a
paranoiac,” Scaramucci said. He channelled
Priebus as he spoke: “ ‘Oh, Bill Shine is coming
in. Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I
can cock-block these people the way I
cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’ ”
(Priebus did not respond to a request for
comment.)
Scaramucci was
particularly incensed by a Politico
report about
his financial-disclosure form, which he viewed
as an illegal act of retaliation by Priebus. The
reporter said Thursday morning that the document
was publicly available and she had obtained it
from the Export-Import Bank. Scaramucci didn’t
know this at the time, and he insisted to me
that Priebus had
leaked the
document, and that the act was “a felony.”
“I’ve
called the F.B.I. and the Department of
Justice,” he told me.
“Are you
serious?” I asked.
“The swamp
will not defeat him,” he said, breaking into the
third person. “They’re trying to resist me, but
it’s not going to work. I’ve done nothing wrong
on my financial disclosures, so they’re going to
have to go fuck themselves.”
Scaramucci
also told me that, unlike other senior
officials, he had no interest in media
attention. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying
to suck my own cock,” he said, speaking of
Trump’s chief strategist. “I’m not trying to
build my own brand off the fucking strength of
the President. I’m here to serve the country.” (Bannon
declined to comment.)
He
reiterated that Priebus would resign soon, and
he noted that he told Trump that he expected
Priebus to launch a campaign against him. “He
didn’t get the hint that I was reporting
directly to the President,” he said. “And I said
to the President here are the four or five
things that he will do to me.” His list of
allegations included leaking the Hannity dinner
and the details from his financial-disclosure
form.
I got the sense
that Scaramucci’s campaign against leakers flows
from his
intense loyalty to Trump.
Unlike other Trump advisers, I’ve never heard
him say a bad word about the President. “What I
want to do is I want to fucking kill all the
leakers and I want to get the President’s agenda
on track so we can succeed for the American
people,” he told me.
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He
cryptically suggested that he had more
information about White House aides. “O.K., the
Mooch showed up a week ago,” he said. “This is
going to get cleaned up very shortly, O.K.?
Because I nailed these guys. I’ve got digital
fingerprints on everything they’ve done through
the F.B.I. and the fucking Department of
Justice.”
“What?” I
interjected.
“Well, the
felony, they’re gonna get prosecuted, probably,
for the felony.” He added, “The lie detector
starts—” but then he changed the subject and
returned to what he thought was the illegal leak
of his financial-disclosure forms. I asked if
the President knew all of this.
“Well, he
doesn’t know the extent of all that, he knows
about some of that, but he’ll know about the
rest of it first thing tomorrow morning when I
see him.”
Scaramucci
said he had to get going. “Yeah, let me go,
though, because I’ve gotta start tweeting some
shit to make this guy crazy.”
Minutes
later, he tweeted, “In light of the leak of my
financial info which is a felony. I will be
contacting @FBI and the @TheJusticeDept #swamp
@Reince45.” With the addition of Priebus’s
Twitter handle, he was making public what he had
just told me: that he believed Priebus was
leaking information about him. The tweet quickly
went viral.
Scaramucci seemed to have second thoughts.
Within two hours he deleted the original tweet
and posted a new one
denying that he
was targeting the chief of staff. “Wrong!” he
said, adding a screenshot of an Axios article
that said, “Scaramucci appears to want Priebus
investigated by FBI.” Scaramucci continued,
“Tweet was public notice to leakers that all Sr
Adm officials are helping to end illegal leaks.
@Reince45.”
A few
hours later, I appeared on CNN to discuss the
overnight drama. As I was talking about
Scaramucci, he called into the show himself and
referenced our conversation. He changed his
story about Priebus. Instead of saying that he
was trying to expose Priebus as a leaker, he
said that the reason he mentioned Priebus in his
deleted tweet was because he wanted to work
together with Priebus to discover the leakers.
“He’s the chief of
staff, he’s responsible for understanding and
uncovering and helping me do that inside the
White House, which is why I put that tweet out
last night,” Scaramucci
said, after
noting that he had talked to me Wednesday night.
He then made an argument that journalists were
assuming that he was accusing Priebus because
they know Priebus leaks to the press.
“When I
put out a tweet, and I put Reince’s name in the
tweet,” he said, “they’re all making the
assumption that it’s him because journalists
know who the leakers are. So, if Reince wants to
explain that he’s not a leaker, let him do
that.”
Scaramucci
then made a plea to viewers. “Let me tell you
something about myself,” he said. “I am a
straight shooter.”
Ryan Lizza is the Washington correspondent for
The New Yorker,
and also an on-air contributor for CNN.
This
article was first published by
The New Yorker
-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
See
also -
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Scaramucci’s profanity-laced rant to a reporter
