Anthony Scaramucci said on ABC’s ‘The View’ he wouldn’t ‘hit back’ at former White House spokesman Sean Spicer – moments before he ridiculed him with an insult that was a play on the Spice Girls.
‘I was calling him “Liar Spice” from the Spice Girls,’ Scaramucci said, describing his brief tenure as White House communications director.
But he denied calling him another name. ‘I wasn’t calling him Melissa McCarthy – the SNL comedian who played Spicer. ‘Totally different name,’ he said.
Serving as guest host a few months after flaming out after just 10 days at the White House, Scaramucci got asked to respond to Spicer’s dissing of his experience in an interview on ABC.
‘I still don’t believe that he had the skill set and the experience for that job,’ said Spicer, who resigned as press secretary immediately after Scaramucci got brought on.
Anthony Scaramucci guest hosted ABC’s ‘The View’ and said he used to call White House press secretary Sean Spicer ‘Liar Spice’
The Mooch declined the first invitation to take a shot at his rival. ‘I could hit back at him but I’m not gonna hit back at him,’ he said.
Scaramucci complained: ‘Here’s the problem with the Republican Party, we have Republican-on-Republican crime all the time,’ he said.
Then he got asked if it was true he used to call Spicer ‘Melissa McCarthy’ behind his back – in reference to the merciless portrayal by the Saturday Night Live comedian.
Scaramucci denied it.
‘I still don’t believe that he had the skill set and the experience for that job,’ said Sean Spicer of Anthony Scaramucci
EXTRA SPICE: Spice Girls (L-R) Victoria Beckham, Melanie Chisholm (Mel C), Geri Halliwell, Emma Bunton and Melanie Brown (Mel B) pose for a photocall at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich ahead of their news conference later today on June 28, 2007 in London, England. Scaramucci created his own addition: ‘Liar Spice’
Anthony Scaramucci appears as a guest co-host on ABC’s ‘The View’
‘I was calling him “Liar Spice” from the Spice Girls,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t calling him Melissa McCarthy. Totally different name,’ he said.
He also hit back at former chief of staff Reince Priebus, who he blamed for keeping him out of the White House for months.
He brought up ‘cockamamie stories that came out to delay my arrival into the administration.’ Scaramucci had to unload his company before he could join the administration.
But he cast his brief tenure as a partial sucess.
‘That’s a lot of infighting. Those guys are gone …I’m gone too. But I think it’s moving a lot better.’ He called the White House ‘more functional’ under new chief of staff John Kelly, who pushed him out, and new communications director Hope Hicks, who replaced him.
He also criticized former chief strategist Stephen Bannon for having white nationalist ‘tendencies.’
“He has those tendencies. If you read Breitbart [the news site Bannon helped found], there’s a lot of that white nationalist economic fervor,’ Scaramucci said.
He repeatedly pointed to Bannon’s supposed ‘messianic’ complex.
‘His worst quality to me was that he had a little bit of a messianic complex. He got very mad at me for going to Davos, Switzerland to speak at the World Economic Forum which was sanctioned by the communications team,’ Scaramucci said.
‘But because he’s an anti-globalist and he was hitting that economic forum at Breitbart for so many years, that put me in disfavor with him.’
On the upside, the Mooch said Bannon had ‘great linguistic skills.’
He brought up Bannon when asked to name the two most unlovable White House officials.
‘How do you think I got along with Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon. You thought that was a good relationship? You thought we were a triumvirate, the three of us? That was rough.’