On CNN’s “New Day” on Thursday, newly minted White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci addressed his suggestion that Chief of Staff Reince might have leaked information. [I]f Reince wants to explain he’s not a leaker, let him do that,” said the self-described “straight shooter.”
Scaramucci has made a splash since he was first named as the new White House Communications Director, including serving as the final straw for the soon to be “Dancing with the Stars” performer(?) Sean Spicer and kicking off his stint by giving reporters everything they could ask for and more, including a farewell “kiss.” In his half-hour interview with CNN Thursday, Scaramucci threw some fuel on the fire of the “Trump administration in turmoil” narrative.
A key topic of the interview was Scaramucci’s recent suggestive, since-deleted tweet copied to Priebus about White House leaks that seemed to suggest that Priebus was to blame. The tweet came in response to an article by Politico about Scaramucci’s profits from the sale of hedge fund group SkyBridge Capital detailed in his Office of Government Ethics forms. Scaramucci threatened to take action against those responsible for the “felony” and directed the tweet to “@Reince45.”
But Scaramucci told CNN that adding Reince’s name did not mean that he wanted him investigated, saying that he was “not” accusing him of leaking by adding him to the tweet, but instead is “saying senior officials are working on this together.”
“When I put out a tweet and I put Reince’s name in a tweet, they all make the assumption that it’s him because journalists know who the leakers are,” Scaramucci said in a statement fraught with interpretive possibilities. “So if Reince wants to explain he’s not a leaker, let him do that.”
As far as his rocky relationship with the chief of staff, Scaramucci elaborated on an analogy he brought up in his entertaining first appearance in front of the White House press corps last week: he and Priebus are like “brothers” who fight a lot. The big question, he suggested via a more specific analogy, is whether or not one of them ends up killing the other one…
“Now, if you want to talk about the chief of staff, we have had odds, we have had differences,” he said. “When I said we were brothers from the podium, that’s because we’re rough on each other. Some brothers are like Cain and Abel. Other brothers can fight with each other and get along. I don’t know if this is repairable or not. That will be up to the President.”
(Flashback: Cain killed Abel. So, yeah, they’ve got “differences.” Please, MORE interviews with Scaramucci — he’s headline gold.)
As for the leakers, Scaramucci reiterated what he’s said a few times now: He’s going to take them down, stressing the serious nature of foreign policy leaks, which a century ago would’ve ended up getting people “hung.”
He and Trump, he said, now have a “very, very good idea” of who the “senior leakers are in the White House.”
“It’s absolutely, completely and totally reprehensible,” he said of the leaks. “And as you know from the Italian expression: The fish stinks from the head down. But I can tell you two fish that don’t stink, and that’s me and the President.”
Partial transcript via CNN.
More from The Daily Wire on Scaramucci:
Scaramucci: Yeah, It’s ‘Probably’ As Bad Between Trump And Sessions As You Think It Is