Republican officials are taking a cue from President Donald Trump and unloading on Anthony Scaramucci – with aides anonymously blasting his professional conduct with female colleagues during his brief 11-day stint at the White House.
And the White House is now saying on the record the man who President Trump brought in to head the communications shop has no ‘relevance’ or ‘credibility.’
The allegations come after President Trump on Monday publicly accused Scaramucci of having ‘abused staff’ as White House communications director, without further explanation.
Trump had brought in Scaramucci in part to clean up a leaky press operation. It didn’t take long for him to make some enemies.
Scaramucci was fired after giving a profane interview to a New Yorker reporter that the longtime talking head and investor says he believed was off the record.
White House aides are coming forward with new claims about Anthony Scaramucci’s brief and rocky tenure now that he has broken with President Trump
Now that he has publicly broken with Trump – Scaramucci said on TV Monday that Trump was ‘off his rocker’ – White House aides are coming forward with new claims about his brief and rocky tenure.
While he was working there, Scaramucci told a female White House official he had heard she was sleeping with a more senior male official, the Washington Examiner reported, citing unnamed sources.
The report said sources considered the allegation ‘gross’ and an effort to intimate and humiliate the female official.
According to the report: ‘A person who spoke with Scaramucci said he defended himself as merely wanting to make the woman aware of what others were saying.’
Scaramucci said Monday Trump was ‘off his rocker’
One of his enduring acts was to elevate Sarah Sanders as White House press secretary
Anthony Scaramucci, a member of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team executive committee, and founder and co-managing partner of investment firm SkyBridge Capital, and Kellyanne Conway, campaign manager for President-elect Donald Trump, whisper at Trump Tower in New York, NY on Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016
Incoming White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci talks with reporters during ‘Regional Media Day’ at the White House July 25, 2017 in Washington, DC
Founder of Skybridge Capital and former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci (R) greets guests with his wife Deidre Ball during the 10th annual SALT Conference at the Bellagio on Wednesday, May 8, 2019, in Las Vegas
Anthony Scaramucci and Deidre Ball are seen on August 10, 2019 in Los Angeles, California
Another individual source claimed several female staffers ‘felt he repeatedly verbally harassed them and would physically loom over them as an intimidation tactic. Several staffers were preparing to quit before he was let go.’
A Scaramucci spokesman called the charges a ‘dishonest orchestrated attack’ on Scaramucci ‘because he chose to speak out against the President’s erratic and divisive behavior.’
White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham trashed Scaramucci in a statement. Scaramucci elevated Sarah Sanders to the press secretary job in one of the most enduring acts of his brief tenure.
He ‘has no relevance, credibility, or notoriety, and his ravenous appetite for attention has led him to lash out at a president he once strongly supported,’ Grisham said. She said he was fired for ‘numerous issues,’ and did not specifically mention the alleged statement to a female official.
Scaramucci hit back after Trump called him ‘Just another disgruntled former employee’
Trump retweeted RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who said the media should not give Scaramucci airtime
‘Predictably, many in the media are choosing to promote anyone who says a single unkind thing about this President but the facts are simple; Anthony got a job at the White House, was fired 11 days later for numerous issues surrounding his conduct, and has begged to come back many times since. For someone who purports to have a successful business and happy home life, he is sure spending a lot of time on TV talking about things he has no knowledge of.”
President Trump has said previously Scaramucci was ‘begging me to come back’ to the White House – a charge Scaramucci has specifically denied.
Trump hit Scaramucci again Tuesday as ‘Just another disgruntled former employee who got fired for gross incompetence!’
The president also retweeted RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel. During his tenure, Scaramucci clashed in meeting with former RNC aides brought in by fired chief of staff Reince Priebus during the tumultuous handoff to successor John Kelly.
Wrote McDaniel: ‘Anthony Scaramucci has ZERO credibility. He’s a disgruntled employee attacking @RealDonaldTrump for his own personal gain. The media shouldn’t even give him airtime.’
Scaramucci hit back at McDaniel on Twitter.
‘.@GOPChairwoman this is the standard bearer of @gop Ronna are you saying there is no room for other voices?’
He continued: “You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry.” Abraham Lincoln.’ Then he added: ‘Someone else is about to get fired for gross incompetence. . .’
The attacks came as Scaramucci continued to flood the airwaves and print media unloaded on Trump and explained his conversion process from booster to harsh critic.
‘I’ve been accused of turning on Trump only because he turned on me. If that were the case, the time to be vindictive would have been after I agreed to sell my company to serve in the administration, only to be used as a hatchet man and then summarily fired after 11 days as White House communications director simply because I used naughty words to tell a reporter, whom I had mistakenly trusted, the truth about bad people,’ Scaramucci vented in an op-ed in the Washington Post published Monday night.
‘I broke from Trump because not only has his behavior become more erratic and his rhetoric more inflammatory, but also because, like all demagogues, he is incapable of handling constructive criticism,’ Scaramucci continued.
‘As we lie on the bed of nails Trump has made, it’s often difficult to see how much the paradigm of acceptable conduct has shifted. For the Republican Party, it’s now a question of whether we want to start cleaning up the mess or continue papering over the cracks,’ he added.
Trump on Monday attacked Scaramucci as a ‘nut job.’
Scaramucci also explained how he could go from praising Trump as the ‘Blue Collar president’ to someone who risks tearing the nation apart.
‘For those paying attention, my public criticism of the president has been mounting over the past two years. His response to the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville was repellent. I was appalled by the administration’s child-separation policy along the southern border. His ranting about the news media as the “enemy of the people” was dangerous and beyond the pale. But the final straw came last month when Trump said on Twitter that four congresswomen — all of them U.S. citizens, and three native-born — should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Scaramucci wrote.
‘While it’s difficult and embarrassing to admit my errors in judgment, I believe I still have the ability to make amends,’ he added.
Trump on Monday lambasted Scaramucci after he once again questioned the president’s mental capacity and said he was recruiting Republican challengers against him.
‘Anthony Scaramucci is a highly unstable “nut job” who was with other candidates in the primary who got shellaced, and then unfortunately wheedled his way into my campaign,’ Trump wrote, misspelling ‘shellacked’ – a word President Obama once used to describe a Democratic defeat.
‘I barely knew him until his 11 days of gross incompetence-made a fool of himself, bad on TV,’ Trump wrote after Scaramucci disparaged his fitness for office in a morning television interview.
‘Abused staff … got fired. Wrote a very nice book about me just recently. Now the book is a lie? Said his wife was driving him crazy, “something big” was happening with her,’ the president continued. ‘Getting divorced. He was a mental wreck. We didn’t want him around. Now Fake News puts him on like he was my buddy!’
Scaramucci told CNN in a Monday morning interview: ‘You know the situation is unstable. You know that the president is off his rocker. Scaramucci implored Republicans to run against Trump in the primary.
‘What are you going to say in 2024? Well, I knew that but I didn’t want to hurt my prospects in the future, so I kept my mouth shut? You have to operate in an environment like this without fear,’ he said.