White House's brand new communications director Anthony Scaramucci is garnering attention in news media for what appears to be a significant slip-up of information regarding Donald Trump. On Sunday, Scaramucci mentioned an anonymous source and then admitted Trump himself was the source he was referring to. The communications director had said claims of Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential election might not be true.
The seemingly unintended revelation from the communications director took place during an exchange between Scaramucci and State Of The Union's Jake Tapper over the weekend on CNN. In the clip with Tapper, Scaramucci is heard saying:
Somebody said to me yesterday — I won't tell you who — that if the Russians actually hacked this situation and spilled out those e-mails, you would have never seen it. ... You would have never had any evidence of them, meaning that they're super confident in their deception skills and hacking. My point is, all of the information isn't on the table yet."
By that point, Tapper asked Scaramucci to slow down with the statements he had been making. "Wait, wait, wait," Tapper interrupted Scaramucci. The CNN host said, "You're making a lot of assertions here. I don't know who this anonymous person is that said that if the Russians had actually done it, we wouldn't have been able to detect it." Within seconds, Scaramucci retorted, "How about it was the president, Jake?"
Scaramucci then said that Trump had spoken with him on the subject. "[Trump] called me from Air Force One. And he basically said to me, 'Hey, you know, maybe they did it. Maybe they didn't do it'."
The exchange became heated as Tapper brought Scaramucci's attention to the credible sources who assert that Russia did interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Tapper said:
This is exactly the issue here. We have experts. The U.S. intelligence agencies — unanimous — both Obama appointees and Trump appointees. The director of national intelligence, the head of the national security agency, the head of the FBI. All of these intelligence experts saying that Russia hacked the election, they tried to interfere in the election.
Scaramucci's revelation arrived shortly after Trump himself criticized "sources" circulating in "fake media."
In a tweet shared on July 12, Trump said, "Remember, when you hear the words 'sources say' from the Fake Media, often times those sources are made up and do not exist."
