Anthony Scaramucci has been brought into the White House to stop the leaks. He’s not there to make friends.

It’s pretty clear that Donald Trump didn’t ask Anthony Scaramucci to join the White House just to be the “Communications Director.” He’s been brought in to figure out who has been leaking information and to force those people out. He’s not playing games either.

He called Ryan Lizza (another Italian, lol), a reporter for the New Yorker Magazine, to find out who leaked details to him about a dinner meeting attended by the President. This resulted in a lengthy conversation between Lizza and Scaramucci that Lizza claims to have recorded. The details have been documented in an article written by Lizza even though the conversation was supposed to be off the record. Lizza has disputed this, claiming that Scaramucci never asked for it to be off the record. The actual recording of the conversation – if it exists – hasn’t been released yet.

New Yorker:

“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.”

“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 repond 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.

Even if the bitch did get the information from the Import-Export Bank, she could have been tipped-off by Reince.

It’s not a totally obvious place to check.

“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.

We’re reaching levels of Dutertism that shouldn’t even be possible

The conversation took place before Scaramucci called in to talk to his kinsman Chris Cuomo yesterday, but was published after.

Lizza also appeared on CNN describing the conversation with Scaramucci.

There’s a bunch of media pundits whining about this. There’s even some Republican pundits claiming that this is counterproductive. These people don’t know what they’re talking about.

The White House needed a shake up. Trump hasn’t been served well by his existing staff. If Priebus was doing his job properly, he would have put an end to these leaks awhile ago. He’s the Chief of Staff, is he not?

Of course, Scaramucci is continually insinuating that Priebus himself is one of the leakers. If this proves to be the case, it makes sense why there have been so many leaks. The Chief of Staff is theoretically supposed to control who has access to the President. If you can’t trust him, who can you trust?

I sometimes use colorful language. I will refrain in this arena but not give up the passionate fight for @realDonaldTrump's agenda. #MAGA

— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) July 27, 2017

I made a mistake in trusting in a reporter. It won't happen again.

— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) July 28, 2017

Though he played coy on Twitter after Lizza published, it’s probable that Scaramucci knew that his off the record remarks were going to get published. Even if that’s not the case, he obviously wants everybody in the White House to know that he means business and that he’s going to put an end to these leaks one way or another. He’s effectively put the entire White House staff on notice from top to bottom.

Anglin’s Addendum

I was getting ready to write this up and found that Lee already had and covered basically most of what I was going to cover – I concur with the point that Scaramucci probably wanted it out – but there were a few other points I had, so I’m just going to do a quick addendum.

Though Scaramucci is delivering the lulz on a galactic scale, there are a few things that might raise concern.

I want to say first that the fact that he’s a Wall Street sociopath doesn’t bother in the least. He’s a “great man,” in the historical sense of that term rather than the sense of “good person.” He’s a self-made billionaire – his dad was a sand miner – and he likes winning. So the sociopath part doesn’t bother me at all.

However, his dislike for Steve Bannon, which to be fair, appears to be the result of Steve Bannon’s dislike for him. Bannon pushed for him to not be brought on board. However, this could be due to the fact that Bannon is an Irishman from Virginia, who takes personal issue with the brashness of Scaramucci. Probably he doesn’t think a super-aggressive Italian gangster is the right image for the administration. I think it is probably less likely that he views him as having an agenda.

The best part about Scaramucci is that he doesn’t have an agenda beyond loyalty to Trump and winning.

However, Scaramucci dislikes that Bannon does have an agenda. Or that is what he’s communicated above (could be layers of psyops). This is strange to me. Trump didn’t have an agenda, really, other than a general desire to make America what it was when he was growing up in the 60s. It was the Bannon agenda that won Trump the election. Bannon is the architect of Trumpism.

I can see how Scaramucci would view it as annoying that Bannon would be there in the White House trying to get Trump to do things, but at the same time, surely this guy is smart enough to understand that there has to be an agenda and that Trump himself doesn’t exactly have a real fleshed out agenda.

The other disturbing thing is that we are told that Kushner likes him. Though I have not seen any direct evidence supporting this claim. Kushner himself never speaks, presumably because he’s so creepy. He also doesn’t give written interviews. Bannon keeps a low profile, because he’s Alt-Right, but the Scaramucci statements about Bannon seem to indicate the claims of Bannon opposing him are accurate.

However, his attacks on Reince – who I now believe probably is the leaker – make up for both Bannon disliking him and Kushner potentially liking him, as far as the interpersonal drama goes. Reince is the old GOP cuckservative establishment. He’s not as bad as Kushner, but he has more influence and power than Kushner.

If Reince is leaking, then one would think he would be liable for criminal prosecution. Which is interesting.

We need criminal prosecutions of leakers and of journalists. That would – like the bashing of trannies and the declaration of a theocracy – serve as a massive distraction. Prosecuting a journalist in particular would be fantastic. These media Jews wouldn’t be able to handle it. They would completely lose it, and act even more erratically than they are right now.

You’d think the media would be chilling out a little bit.

But the thing about Jews is that they have zero chill.

Washington Post:

President-elect Donald Trump faces a growing backlash against his decision to name campaign chairman and former Breitbart News head Stephen K. Bannon as chief strategist at the White House, a choice critics say will empower white nationalists.

A chorus of advocacy groups, commentators and congressional Democrats denounced Bannon as a proponent of racist, anti-Semitic and misogynistic views as Trump began his first full week as president-elect. Trump named Bannon his chief strategist and senior counselor on Sunday while also appointing Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus to be his chief of staff.

“President-elect Trump’s choice of Steve Bannon as his top aide signals that white supremacists will be represented at the highest levels in Trump’s White House,” Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), said in a statement Sunday night. “It is easy to see why the KKK views Trump as their champion when Trump appoints one of the foremost peddlers of White Supremacist themes and rhetoric as his top aide. Bannon was ‘the main driver behind Breitbart becoming a white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill,’ according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

The statement echoed sentiments from leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, other Capitol Hill Democrats and some Republican Trump critics such as Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who tweeted, “Is there precedent for such a disreputable & unstable extremist in [White House] senior ranks before Bannon?”

Wow, all Jews (yes, the NAACP is effectively a Jewish group, founded and run by Jews).

Total coincidence.

The ADL must be audited. They have so flagarantly violated their 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status, that it is insane to me that even the Jews of the IRS haven’t flipped.

A spokesman for Trump accused critics and the media of trying to “divide people” following the election when they raise questions about Bannon’s views and history.

…

Kellyanne Conway, who worked closely with Bannon as Trump’s campaign manager, also defended him.

…

Asked whether Bannon needed to explain his connections to the alt-right movement, Conway said: “I’m personally offended that you think I would manage a campaign where that would be one of the going philosophies. It was not — 56 million-plus Americans or so saw something else. . . . You should really focus on the will of the people, which was to elect Donald Trump the president.”

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) sought to calm the fears many Americans still hold about Trump’s election, which has been greeted by widespread protests.

“There is a lot of hysteria and hyperbole,” Ryan said during an interview Monday with his hometown radio station, 1380 Big AM. “I would tell people to just relax — things are going to be fine.

We are relaxed, Paul.

You should not be relaxed.

Trump’s naming of Bannon and Priebus set up what could be a battle within the White House between the populist, outsider forces that propelled his winning campaign and the party establishment that dominates Washington.

In appointing Priebus, 44, Trump has brought into his White House a Washington insider who is viewed as broadly acceptable by vast swaths of the party, and he signaled a willingness to work within the establishment he assailed on the campaign trail. But Trump sent an opposing signal by tapping Bannon, 62, who has openly attacked congressional leadership, taking particular aim at Ryan ­ — who recommended Priebus for his new job.

“I am thrilled to have my very successful team continue with me in leading our country,” Trump said in a statement. “Steve and Reince are highly qualified leaders who worked well together on our campaign and led us to a historic victory. Now I will have them both with me in the White House as we work to make America great again.”

Bannon’s senior White House role has been welcomed by prominent figures on the alt-right.

…

Groups representing Jews, African Americans and Muslims have vocally opposed Bannon’s appointment.

Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said via Twitter on Sunday night that the ADL opposes Bannon’s appointment to a senior White House role because “he & his alt-right are so hostile to core American values.”

Endorsing Greenblatt’s message, NAACP President Cornell William Brooks tweeted overnight: “Racism has been routinized; anti-Semitism normalized; xenophobia deexceptionalized; & misogyny mainstreamed.”

The Bannon announcement came as Trump highlighted some of his first priorities in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” vowing after he is inaugurated to “immediately” deport up to 3 million immigrants in the country illegally and to simultaneously repeal and replace President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. He also repeated his remark that he knows more about the Islamic State than U.S. generals do, saying, “I probably do, because look at the job they’ve done.”

Trump’s top two advisers could help him achieve different objectives. Priebus could help Trump notch early legislative victories in a Republican-led Congress and ingratiate himself with the insiders he claims to loathe but who dominate his transition team. A longtime lawyer and Wisconsin political operative, Priebus will work to smooth over residual friction from a campaign during which a number of Republicans refused to endorse Trump, reversed their endorsements or stepped away from him after a 2005 tape surfaced in which Trump is heard saying that he could force himself on women because he was a “star.”

Bannon will be the other voice on Trump’s shoulder: He helped shape Trump’s message on the campaign trail and relishes combativeness. The former Navy officer and investment banker has said the campaign was the American version of worldwide populist movements such as the British vote to sever ties with the European Union.

Bannon’s appointment drew sharp criticism from political operatives on both sides of the aisle who see Bannon as being too close to the alt-right and white nationalism. Breitbart has published stories with headlines stating that women faced with harassment online should “log off” and that taking birth control makes women “unattractive and crazy.” The site called Kristol a “renegade Jew” in 2015.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-watch group, blasted the choice of Bannon and cited Breitbart headlines that included a call to hoist the Confederate flag weeks after shootings at a black Charleston, S.C., church and another that said that political correctness “protects Muslim rape culture.”

Bannon was charged with misdemeanor domestic violence against his former wife more than 20 years ago; the charges included trying to prevent a victim or witness of crime from reporting, inflicting injury and battery. Bannon was never convicted, and the case was dismissed. His former wife also accused him of making anti-Semitic remarks, according to a court statement obtained by the New York Daily News.

The age of bitch-slapping Jew-haters has dawned.

There is no going back.

The brown people, however – they are going back.

Priebus said negative claims against Bannon do not reflect the man he knows. “He was a force for good on the campaign at every level that I saw all the time,” Priebus told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday.

“I haven’t seen any of these things that people are crying out about,” he told “Fox and Friends.”

Trump surrogate Newt Gingrich blasted the idea Sunday that Trump’s campaign catered to the alt-right, calling it “garbage.”

Morning Joe:

Fox and Friends:

Bannon is the best person who could have been placed in this key role, besides perhaps Pat Buchanan and me.

This is all going in the right direction, and I am very happy to see the Jews raging.

Remember to call your Congressman today and tell them if they vote for Paul Ryan tomorrow you will never vote for them again.