Don siccing NYer Mooch on media
President Trump’s new communications director is a tough-talking New Yorker with a hard-charging Wall Street background who will be the administration’s point man in taking on the media, a friend said Friday.
“Anthony is a foot soldier in the president’s war on fake news,” GOP operative Arthur Schwartz told The Post about Anthony Scaramucci.
Scaramucci’s stock went up with Team Trump after the business mogul forced CNN to retract a story that linked the president to a Russian investment banker.
The network retracted the story, axed three employees and apologized.
The bungled report played into the president’s claim that probes into whether Trump campaign operatives had improper dealings with Russia were “fake news.”
Scaramucci, 53, is a frequent guest on cable TV, where he regularly defends Trump and was also a host on the show “Wall Street Week.”
At Mitt Romney’s annual Deer Valley, Utah, retreat in June, Scaramucci described how he would remake the White House’s communications team, The Washington Post reported.
“The Mooch,” as he is known, said the White House’s message has been muddled and needed to be communicated more clearly. He suggested starting a daily morning “TV” show with a desk on the White House lawn.
The communications post is the third administration gig Scaramucci was offered.
He was originally asked to be director of the Office of Public Engagement, but critics inside the administration blocked him.
He began working in June at the US Export-Import Bank, but will now move into the West Wing.
While he’s a big fan now, saying several times on Friday how much he loved the president, he wasn’t always in Trump’s corner.
In a 2015 appearance on the Fox Business Network, he said then-candidate Trump was “another hack politician.”
He also slammed Trump as someone who would become president of “the Queens County Bully Association.”
“You are an inheritedmoney dude from Queens County,” said the self-made Scaramucci, the son of a Long Island construction worker who later graduated from Tufts University and Harvard.
Scaramucci said Trump reminds him of that early criticism “every 15 seconds.”
According to Bloomberg News, Scaramucci was an investment professional at Fidelity and later became a VP in private-wealth management at Goldman Sachs. He then went on to Lehman Brothers as a managing director in its investmentmanagement division.
In 2005 he founded SkyBridge Capital, but put the $12 billion hedge fund up for sale earlier this year to join the Trump administration.
In January he cut a $200 million deal with the Chinese HNA Group and an investment partner, RON Transatlantic EG for his share of SkyBridge, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time — a deal that has yet to close.