‘Mooch’ Concedes President Trump Probably Wants to Fire This Key Official

In an interview Tuesday morning with nationally syndicated radio host Hugh Hewitt, incoming White House Communications Director Steve Scaramucci, who became known simply as “Mooch” during the 2016 presidential campaign, made a somewhat shocking revelation.

“I think the president has a certain style, a certain skill set,” he said when asked if President Donald Trump should just fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions, adding that it seems the president “wants him gone” from the administration. “He’s obviously frustrated. I said yesterday, I think, to Sarah Murray, maybe the two of them could get together. My guess is the president doesn’t want to do that. And so I think it’s going to, I think him and Jeff, or sorry, Attorney General Sessions, need to work this thing out …

“I have an enormous amount of respect for the attorney general, but I do know the president pretty well. And if there’s this level of tension in the relationship, that that’s public, you’re probably right. But I don’t want to speak for the president on that, because he’s a cabinet official. And I sort of think that has to be between the president of the United States and the cabinet official.”

Scaramucci made a sports reference in describing what he feels Sessions has been lacking that made his predecessors more successful.

“[Y]ou and I might be at odds with Eric Holder politically, but one of the things I would give him a lot of credit for is that he was a pretty good hockey goalie for the president,” he said. “He was also willing to help the president inside the bounds of the law. I’m not saying these guys did anything illegal, but I think, when you think about the relationship John F. Kennedy had with his brother as attorney general, or you think about that relationship that the president had with Eric Holder, President Obama, they probably don’t have that sort of relationship. And I think the president, and when he thinks about the architecture of his cabinet, I think he needs that sort of a relationship there.”

Hewitt, himself a former Department of Justice official in a previous administration, agreed.

The host and communications director also discussed the potential of the president “firing” Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election has seemingly jumped the rails and become a witch hunt against the Trump family. They also discussed the culture in the West Wing, which has so far resulted in an unprecedented level of leaking of sensitive information to the liberal mainstream media.

“I’m not an American military person, but I’m a big troop supporter,” he said of the latter. “I’m on the board of Business Executives for National Security. I’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan, and I’ve really studies the Army model of leadership. And as you know from the Army, the leaders, the generals eat last. They put the troops ahead of themselves. And if we’re going to work for this man, we have to start doing that in the context of the agenda and the president.

“And so for me—I said something to staff yesterday, which I really believe, that there’s 325 million people in our country, and there’s 300 of us in the West Wing. We’re one in a million. Just think about the extraordinary opportunity and the blessing that we have here to serve our country and serve our president. So if you’re going to fight with each other, and leak on each other and say stupid things about each other in the corridor, maybe we can stop doing that and stop acting like Mean Girls from the 2004 movie.”

As to the former, Hewitt said he thought it would be a “disaster” if the president fired Mueller. Scaramucci seemed to agree:

“I’ll be on the record with this. In candid conversations with the president, I have said, ‘Why would you fire him?’ Also, the other thing is people bring up this nonsense about the pardoning. There is absolutely no reason to bring up the pardoning.

“So here’s what happens is there’s like media flashpoints or dog whistles in the media. If a two-minute pardoning conversation becomes ‘oh, he’s going to want to pardon himself,’ or this or that, [it] is sort of nonsense. He does not need to pardon himself. He’s done absolutely nothing wrong. He’s going to be completely exonerated.

“I want you to think about [what] Jared Kushner did yesterday. If his legal team though he had done something wrong, do you think he’d be standing here at those sticks…

“I was with Abbe [Lowell, Kushner’s attorney] in the morning. We were rehearsing Jared’s statement, and that statement was refined and very comprehensive. He’s done absolutely nothing wrong. I will tell you, Hugh, I was on that campaign early February. You tell me the day that South Carolina primary was, maybe it was March or February.

“February, OK, so right then and there, after Jeb, Governor Jeb Bush left the race, the president and I had a conversation. I joined his campaign team and started building, with Steven Mnuchin, the apparatus for his fundraising. And so I was pretty early on that campaign, relative to other things. I didn’t see anything that [I] could testify—Nothing. Nothing. And they hit me with it, and I had to get three guys fired over the fake news story.”

Click here to listen to the entire interview. {eoa}