There’s not much more to add to what Anthony Scaramucci told the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza on Wednesday night. Shortly before publicly making a false accusation against Reince Priebus, the brand new White House communications director laid into Priebus, White House aide Steve Bannon, and many other White House staff for allegedly leaking and otherwise acting against the interests of President Donald Trump—all while speaking on the phone with Lizza, who published a report of their exchange on Thursday.
Aside from the vulgar descriptions of his colleagues and his ludicrous demand that Lizza reveal his sources, we learned Scaramucci conveyed some of the same things to Lizza that he did to the public a few hours later. Chiefly this: that he has contacted the FBI and the Department of Justice about prosecuting White House leakers.
“O.K., the Mooch showed up a week ago,” Scaramucci told Lizza. “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.”
On Thursday morning, in his extensive phone interview with CNN, Scaramucci also mentioned getting in touch with DoJ and his “buddies” at the FBI about the leak problem. “I talked to Attorney General Sessions,” he said “I’ve got buddies of mine in the FBI that I’ll be calling.”
The Justice Department released a statement Wednesday night, which spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said was in response to Scaramucci’s appearance on Fox News blasting leaks. “We have seen an astonishing increase in the number of leaks of classified national security information in recent months,” said Flores. “We agree with Anthony that these staggering number of leaks are undermining the ability of our government to function and to protect this country. Like the Attorney General has said, ‘whenever a case can be made, we will seek to put some people in jail,’ and we will aggressively pursue leak cases wherever they may lead.”
I’ve asked the White House if Scaramucci has contacted the FBI about leaks and whether or not he’s discussed this with the president. I have not heard back.
How Will Trump Vote on Russia Sanctions?
The Senate, my colleague Jenna Lifhits reports, has passed a bipartisan bill of new sanctions targeting North Korea, Russia, and Iran by an overwhelming margin, 98-2. With the House passing the package with the same sort of lopsided margin earlier this week (419-3), the bill goes to President Trump’s desk—and no one’s quite sure whether he’ll sign it or not.
On Sunday, after reports of a deal among congressional leaders on the sanctions package, newly minted press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said “We support where the legislation is now and will continue to work with the House and Senate to put those tough sanctions in place on Russia until the situation in Ukraine is fully resolved.” After weeks of grumbling from the White House about the sanctions, this seemed like a good sign the president was backing down from an implicit threat to veto them. On the same day, however, Anthony Scaramucci emphasized that Trump had “not made a decision yet” on the sanctions.
Then, on Tuesday, Sanders was backing off the idea the White House supported the sanctions bill. “The White House is reviewing the House legislation and awaits a final legislative package for the president’s desk,” she said. The next day, after Senate Foreign Relations chairman Bob Corker expressed his desire to make some additional changes to the bill, Sanders reiterated the president remained undecided. “We expect that there’s a possibility that more changes take place,” she said at the press briefing Wednesday. “And so we’re going to see what that looks like before we make a final decision.”
Before Thursday’s vote in the Senate, Scaramucci said Trump “may sign the sanctions exactly the way they are, or he may veto the sanctions and negotiate an even tougher deal against the Russians.” With whom would Trump negotiate this “tougher deal against the Russians”? Congress? It’s more likely a Trump veto would prompt a congressional override, which I’m told the president has been made aware of.
Trump’s foreign policy and national security teams are urging him to approve the sanctions, despite his own concerns that the legislation pulls back on the president’s powers to conduct foreign policy. Trump tends to side with these aides, even when he wants to act otherwise.
Read more about the details of the final sanctions bill here.
Defining Trumpism Down
An editorial in the new issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD looks at the treatment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions by President Trump over the last 10 days and finds a lesson in what “Trumpism” really means:
Read the whole editorial here.
