Scaramucci Pulls Back the Curtain After Bannon Departs Breitbart
Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci joined CNN’s Chris Cuomo Tuesday night to discuss former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s inclusion in the Trump administration and recent resignation from Breitbart News.
“The president says he always hires the best people, how do you explain him having Steve Bannon?” Cuomo asked Scaramucci to begin the segment.
“Well, I would say that Steve had a voice. Steve was a good writer. Steve — the biggest problem that Steve had in my opinion and I said it, I didn’t say it perfectly, he was more focused on Steve.” Scaramucci said, adding that Bannon is “not a team player.”
Scaramucci, who by his own accord successfully started two businesses “from scratch,” noted that he is exceptional at evaluating talent. And while Bannon had a lot of talent, he wanted to go outside of the box too often, according to Scaramucci.
“I think he was a bad hire, not because he wasn’t talented, not because he wasn’t smart and quote on quote strategic, he just didn’t want to play inside the sandbox with the other people,” Scaramucci told Cuomo. “He was splitting people between nationalism and globalism, and to really understand the president, you know, there’s a nuance to him as well. He is a globalist by nature.”
Cuomo then asked The Mooch if he was capable of seeing the “confusion” created by President Donald Trump by hiring a White House chief strategist who directly opposes many of his values.
“I can’t speak for the president,” Scaramucci said. “But I think what the president was trying to do is that there was a sleeve of the president’s agenda, which is an ‘America First’ agenda, it’s for the middle-class families, it’s for what the president would call ‘the forgotten man or woman,’ it’s for lower-middle-class standards rising, wages rising.
“And so there’s a sleeve of the president’s personality for that,” the former White House communications director continued. “But then there’s also a sleeve of the president’s personality that someone like Gen. Kelly, Gen. McMaster and Mattis would fit.”
Cuomo continued to pressure Scaramucci, asking him to clarify the decision to place Bannon, a “propagandist” who “sells a lot of negativity,” in the White House alongside a “minted professional” like Kellyanne Conway.
“I put them together because they were recommended at the same time,” Scaramucci responded. “And they were recommended by Bob and Rebekah Mercer.”
As noted by Mediaite, when asked if he felt any “satisfaction” over Bannon’s resignation from the conservative news giant, Scaramucci responded diplomatically.
“I feel a sense of relief for the President that he can now put this distraction beside him, he doesn’t have to deal with it anymore,” he said.
On Tuesday, Bannon stepped down from his position as executive chairman of Breitbart News. His resignation comes amid a media firestorm started by comments Bannon had made in controversial columnist Michael Wolff’s White House tell-all, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”
In the book, Bannon made disparaging comments about Donald Trump Jr. and also questioned the mental stability of the president, according to The New York Times.
Wolff’s controversial book has been panned by many after crucial details surfaced regarding the validity of claims made within it.
As reported by The Western Journal, Wolff admitted last week that he isn’t even sure if the details found in the book are true.
“Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue,” Wolff wrote. “These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.”
In a Monday interview with “CBS This Morning,” Wolff admitted that he never actually spoke to any members of Trump’s Cabinet as part of the research for his book.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
