Scaramucci, Scaramucci, can you do the Drumfdango?

[AmazonGrace]

In this episode of "The Mooch", some NSFW language but you gotta read this. 

http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/anthony-scaramucci-called-me-to-unload-about-white-house-leakers-reince-priebus-and-steve-bannon

It doesn't sound like The Mooch can handle the stress very well. 

Spoiler

 

Ryan Lizza

Anthony Scaramucci Called Me to Unload About White House Leakers, Reince Priebus, and Steve Bannon

He started by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. It escalated from there.

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 for 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.

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.”

 

 

[47of74]

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

In this episode of "The Mooch", some NSFW language but you gotta read this. 

http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/anthony-scaramucci-called-me-to-unload-about-white-house-leakers-reince-priebus-and-steve-bannon

It doesn't sound like The Mooch can handle the stress very well. 

  Hide contents

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.)

 

Yeah if he did Agent Orange might get jealous since he expects everyone in his staff to genuflect in front of him and perform oral copulation upon his person.

Edited July 27, 2017 by 47of74

[Cartmann99]

@AmazonGrace, I just came over here to post a link to that same article. This Scaramucci guy is a real charmer. 

[nvmbr02]

45 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

@AmazonGrace, I just came over here to post a link to that same article. This Scaramucci guy is a real charmer. 

 

Me too! I have a foul mouth and i am married to someone with a even worse mouth but if you would have told me a year ago that the guy in charge of white house communications told a reporter  “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” while talking about the chief strategist I would not have believed you. Everyone connected to this administration is unfit for the duties they hold. Scaramucci hasn't even been in charge for a week yet and he already has more SNL material then Spicey and I didn't think that was possible. 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 27, 2017 by nvmbr02

[infooverload]

I have to question the intelligence of getting on Bannon ' s bad side. How long until Trump's alt right/"conservative Christian" base starts posting articles critical of Trump?

[AmazonGrace]

Lordy, Ryan Lizza has the tape of the convo. 

[nvmbr02]

How long do you think this lasts? 24 hours? Less? 

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

In this episode of "The Mooch", some NSFW language but you gotta read this. 

http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/anthony-scaramucci-called-me-to-unload-about-white-house-leakers-reince-priebus-and-steve-bannon

It doesn't sound like The Mooch can handle the stress very well. 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Ryan Lizza

Anthony Scaramucci Called Me to Unload About White House Leakers, Reince Priebus, and Steve Bannon

He started by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. It escalated from there.

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 for 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.

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.”

 

 

Cocaine.....running all around my brain.

                                                         -Jackson Browne-

[infooverload]

Lordy, Ryan Lizza has the tape of the convo. 

Taking pointers from Comey and knows to record everything.

 

[Cartmann99]

46 minutes ago, infooverload said:

I have to question the intelligence of getting on Bannon ' s bad side. How long until Trump's alt right/"conservative Christian" base starts posting articles critical of Trump?

Matt Drudge already is:

Quote

Over the past several weeks, Drudge's website has covered the White House with a more critical eye, more frequently drawing attention to news not exactly flattering to the president. It displayed as a banner headline a story about Trump certifying the Iran nuclear deal, something that Trump had vehemently opposed during the campaign. It has covered stories about the investigation into Russian election meddling with increased intensity, surprising some observers with recent banners about "THE EMAIL" and how "RUSSIANS PASSED DNC DIRT DURING JR. MEET." And, last week, the site took a direct shot at the president's lack of progress with a banner declaring former President Barack Obama to be "LIVING EASY." It linked to a Los Angeles Times story headlined, "Trump set out to uproot Obama's legacy. So far that's failed."

The recent coverage has served as a red flag -- or a flashing siren, if you will -- to those who frequent the Drudge Report. Drudge hasn't turned definitively against Trump yet, and he didn't respond to a request for comment for this story, but according to two people close to him, he is certainly antsy with the rate of progress coming from the White House.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/26/media/matt-drudge-donald-trump-coverage/index.html

[onekidanddone]

45 minutes ago, nvmbr02 said:

How long do you think this lasts? 24 hours? Less? 

In five...four...three..Fuck it I don't have time for two or one...

32 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

Cocaine.....running all around my brain.

Found a good one made even better with Steve Earle

Quote

 

 

[Cartmann99]

1 hour ago, nvmbr02 said:

Me too! I have a foul mouth and i am married to someone with a even worse mouth but if you would have told me a year ago that the guy in charge of white house communications told a reporter  “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” while talking about the chief strategist I would not have believed you.

Most adults understand that there is a time and place for profanity, and we can censor ourselves when we are in an environment where it would be unwise or unwelcome to use profanity. Scaramucci obviously is not bright enough to get that using very vulgar language during a magazine interview is not a wise move.  

[Cleopatra7]

8 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Most adults understand that there is a time and place for profanity, and we can censor ourselves when we are in an environment where it would be unwise or unwelcome to use profanity. Scaramucci obviously is not bright enough to get that using very vulgar language during a magazine interview is not a wise move.  

I remember how conservatives were clutching their pearls during Monicagate because it caused the phrase oral sex to become commonplace on the evening news. These "values voters" claimed they had to vote for GWB because he would bring "honor" and "dignity" to the White Hpuse. Who wants to guess that these same conservatives are looking the other way at the constant vulgarity emanating out of the White House in 2017?

[onekidanddone]

2 minutes ago, Cleopatra7 said:

Who wants to guess that these same conservatives are looking the other way at the constant vulgarity emanating out of the White House in 2017?

Boys will be boys. Where is the outrage?

[AmazonGrace]

When the Onion fact checks you: 

http://www.theonion.com/infographic/onion-fact-checks-anthony-scaramuccis-new-yorker-i-56502

[Cartmann99]

3 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

When the Onion fact checks you: 

http://www.theonion.com/infographic/onion-fact-checks-anthony-scaramuccis-new-yorker-i-56502

 @GrumpyGran, you should read this, they also think cocaine is involved.

[apple1]

51 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Most adults understand that there is a time and place for profanity, and we can censor ourselves when we are in an environment where it would be unwise or unwelcome to use profanity. Scaramucci obviously is not bright enough to get that using very vulgar language during a magazine interview is not a wise move.  

Scaramucci has a very filthy mouth that he apparently IS NOT able to censor in any remotely appropriate manner. Conservative Christian Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a direct report to him. That should work out well.

I cannot understand the cognitive disconnect with the continuing support of this administration by what we are told is approximately 80% of American evangelical Christians.

And FTR - I self-identify as a Christian.

I cannot understand this, not any of it. (shaking my head)

[AmazonGrace]

 

[nvmbr02]

5 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Yep. The communications director for the white house doesn't know what an on record interview is. He may win for dumbest white house official ever. At least for now. It seems to be a race to the bottom.

Edited July 28, 2017 by nvmbr02
typo

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GrumpyGran]

48 minutes ago, apple1 said:

Scaramucci has a very filthy mouth that he apparently IS NOT able to censor in any remotely appropriate manner. Conservative Christian Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a direct report to him. That should work out well.

I cannot understand the cognitive disconnect with the continuing support of this administration by what we are told is approximately 80% of American evangelical Christians.

And FTR - I self-identify as a Christian.

I cannot understand this, not any of it. (shaking my head)

And the two of them were so cozy on the Candy Plane!

[GreyhoundFan]

Jennifer Rubin likes "Mooch" just about as much as the rest of us: "Trump should fire Scaramucci, but he won’t"

Spoiler

Since Anthony Scaramucci came on board as White House communications director, he has created such tumult that one might pine for the calm, cool, collected days of Sean Spicer.

He has repeatedly attacked Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, accusing him of leaking or creating an atmosphere of leaks. (The fish stinks from the head down, as he said.)

He suggested that his financial disclosure form was leaked and threatened to call in the FBI and the Justice Department. In fact, that form became public automatically, hence the term “disclosure.”

He told Politico himself that he would fire assistant White House press secretary Michael Short. The process dragged on for hours until the aide quit. Scaramucci then blamed the press for a leak.

To cap it off, he spoke to the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza on the record, disparaging chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon in obscene terms; browbeating Lizza to get the name of the person who mentioned a dinner that he, President Trump, former Fox News executive Bill Shine and Fox News host Sean Hannity attended; threatening to fire everyone on the communications staff; and impugning Lizza’s patriotism. And he predicted Priebus soon would be fired.

On one level, the frenetic tone and the exceptionally vulgar language Scaramucci used are the natural culmination of a campaign and now an administration that has lowered the level of discourse far below anything we have seen before. On another level, Scaramucci’s hysteria sets him apart from other spokesmen who personally have largely refrained from losing control. Scaramucci presumably will want a security clearance, but who at this point is convinced of his personal stability?

Just as Spicer and Priebus warned, Scaramucci is unhinged, vindictive and worst of all determined to call attention to himself. Trump should fire him immediately, but that would be an admission of gross error. And Trump never makes mistakes, you see.

 

[candygirl200413]

So my dad likes me to give him funny recaps of what Trump and his administration did each day and I was just like scaramucci just kept saying c*ck.

But I bet the GOP is just going to be like "he's still doing such an amazing job!"

[fraurosena]

8 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

Scaramucci then made a plea to viewers. “Let me tell you something about myself,” he said. “I am a straight shooter.”

Yep. Straight in his foot.

[fraurosena]

Aping His Boss, Scaramucci Tries To Use DOJ Like A Personal Enforcement Arm

Spoiler

White House staffers aren’t supposed to just call up the Justice Department or FBI and complain about a personal grievance. Yet that is exactly what newly-minted Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci claimed to have done during a combative Thursday morning CNN interview, disclosing that he had contacted Attorney General Jeff Sessions and various “buddies” in the FBI over his concerns about leaks coming from senior White House staff.

“You know why I like bringing up the Department of Justice and the FBI?” Scaramucci said. “Because people who’ve done something wrong, it makes ‘em nervous.”

These comments came hours after Scaramucci offered an expletive-filled rant to New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza about how he believed his rival, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, was behind the latest leak, and that he’d “called the FBI and the Department of Justice” about this “felony.”

Setting aside that his concerns were sparked by misplaced anger over reporting on his financial disclosure form, which is a publicly available document, the Scaramucci kerfuffle marked just the latest example of a member of the Trump administration attempting to use the Justice Department as something of a personal enforcement arm. President Donald Trump has been the most public face of this norm-shattering: the FBI director he fired, James Comey, testified that the President asked him to swear his loyalty and end a federal investigation into ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Contacts like Scaramucci’s run up again longstanding, binding regulations that strictly limit contact between the White House and Justice Department. Since the Watergate era, each new attorney general and each White House general counsel has laid out an updated version of their contact policy, dictating that only senior members of each body may be in contact with each other about investigations, and even then only in very specific instances.

Kenneth Starr, the former independent counsel who led investigations into President Bill Clinton, laid out the importance of this division in a Thursday Washington Post op-ed.

“The attorney general is not—and cannot be—the president’s ‘hockey goalie,’ as new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci described Sessions’s job,” Starr wrote. “In fact, the President isn’t even his client. To the contrary, the attorney general’s client is ultimately ‘We the People,’ and his fidelity has to be not to the president but to the Constitution and other laws of the United States.”

Thomas Perrelli, former associate U.S. attorney general under President Barack Obama, told TPM that communications with the White House would occur in cases where the DOJ was defending government policies or where there were national security implications.

“With respect to law enforcement matters, pending investigations, that pretty much never happened,” Perrelli said. “If the White House said ‘I would like to get briefed on what is going on with respect to x criminal investigation,’ the answer would be no.”

“It just does not occur in your normal criminal probe, and it also has to be appropriate from a law enforcement perspective so if you’re investigating people in the White House, it’s probably never appropriate,” Perrelli said. As Trump’s inner circle has made very clear, the administration does believe many of the most damning leaks about the President and his policies are coming from inside the White House itself.

Trump’s White House counsel, Don McGahn, laid out his own contact policy in a Jan. 27 memo. Sessions has not yet crafted one for his DOJ, meaning former Attorney General Eric Holder’s remains the binding standard.

The communications director is not on either list of individuals approved to contact law enforcement officials. Nor is there any mention of the FBI at all, as Allison Murphy, counsel at United to Protect Democracy, a government transparency organization, pointed out.

“Only the senior leadership of the DOJ are permitted to speak with only a few people at the White House when it comes to specific investigations or prosecutions,” Murphy noted. “And nobody at the FBI is included in that list.”

Asked about his potential violation of the contact policy during Thursday’s press briefing, Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said only, “I’m not going to speak about conversations between cabinet members and other individuals that I wasn’t a part of and haven’t had a chance to talk to either individual about.”

The DOJ did not respond to TPM’s request for comment on the conversation Scaramucci said he had with Sessions, but issued a statement Wednesday night saying the agency planned to “aggressively purse leak cases wherever they may lead.”

“We agree with Anthony that these staggering number of leaks are undermining the ability of our government to function and to protect this country,” department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said in the statement.

Further complicating the contacts Scaramucci said he had with DOJ is that it appears he’s not even a formal member of the Trump White House yet. When he came onboard last week, he announced he would not formally assume his post until Aug. 15, pending the approval of the sale of his investment firm, SkyBridge Capital (Huckabee Sanders said Thursday she doesn’t believe he’s yet taken an oath of office). The Justice Department has a seat on the committee responsible for approving that deal, the Treasury Department-led Committee on Foreign Investments in the U.S.

There is also Sessions’ tenuous position, as Trump and his staffers have shellacked him in the press as insufficiently loyal and a “disappointment” because of his recusal from the Russia investigation.

Combined, these circumstances are ripe for abuses of power, Matthew Miller, a former director of the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs under Obama, told TPM.

“You have Sessions probably feeling a little like he wants to curry favor with the President and he can do that by starting leak investigations, or by approving this sale that would put millions of dollars into Scaramucci’s pocket” and allow the communications director to fully move into his White House role, Miller said.

The DOJ has in recent days signaled that it plans to pursue an intensive criminal investigation of intelligence leaks, as the President has requested. Though the Obama administration also aggressively pursued leakers, this marks a radical break in how leak investigations are carried out. Instead of analyzing referrals from security agencies or pursuing specific leak probe requests based on their gravity and type, as Miller said had been the precedent, Trump’s DOJ appears to be embarking on a full-scale investigation into leaks of sensitive information to the press.

“The DOJ is not supposed to make assessments based on general complaints from the White House communications director,” Miller said, “but when you have an AG fighting for his job and unwilling to fight for the department’s independence, it brings all this into question.”

Corrupt. Collusion. Canker. Coarse. Callous. Crude. Cruel. Contemptuous. Crooked.

The many C's that describe this WH.