Anthony Scaramucci is out as White House communications director, the latest sign of chaos inside the Trump administration.
Scaramucci’s ouster is the most recent high-profile departure from the Trump White House. Chief of Staff Reince Priebus resigned at the end of last week, replaced by John Kelly, whose first day was Monday, CNN reported.
“Anthony Scaramucci will be leaving his role as White House communications director,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement Monday afternoon. “Mr. Scaramucci felt it was best to give chief of staff John Kelly a clean slate and the ability to build his own team. We wish him all the best.”
“General Kelly has the full authority to operate in the White House and all staff will report to him,” Sanders said.
A White House official said Kelly, a retired marine general who is known for his fastidious nature, wanted Scaramucci removed from his new role as the communications director because he did not think he was disciplined and had burned his credibility.
“John Kelly is in charge now,” one source close to Kelly told CNN as Scaramucci resigned, noting that it was clear Kelly “had no confidence in him.”
Scaramucci’s departure comes days after he unleashed a vulgar tirade against two top White House officials in a conversation with a reporter. He suspected that Priebus was the leaker of White House conversations making it to the media and slammed the former chief of staff.
Scaramucci is the third White House communications director to leave the post that had been vacant since late May, when Mike Dubke left after about three months on the job. Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary, also assumed some of the communications director role before he resigned when Scaramucci was hired July 21. In addition to Priebus, Katie Walsh, the former White House deputy chief of staff, left the administration in March, and Michael Short, an assistant press secretary, resigned earlier this month when it became clear Scaramucci was going to fire him.
Russiagate Saga
Washington Post reported on Monday, yet another episode of the Russiagate saga, saying that Trump dictated a statement, later shown to be misleading, in which his son Donald Trump Jr. said a meeting he had with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 was not related to his father’s presidential campaign.
Trump Jr. released emails earlier in July that showed he eagerly agreed last year to meet a woman he was told was a Russian government lawyer who might have damaging information about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as part of Moscow’s official support for his father. The New York Times was first to report the meeting, Reuters reported.
The Washington Post said Trump advisers discussed the new disclosure and agreed that Trump Jr. should issue a truthful account of the episode so that it “couldn’t be repudiated later if the full details emerged.”
The president, who was flying home from Germany on July 8, changed the plan and “personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said he and the Russian lawyer had ‘primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children,’” the Post said, citing unnamed people with knowledge of the deliberations.
It said the statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared to publish the story, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.”
US investigators are probing whether there was collusion between the Kremlin and Trump’s Republican presidential campaign.
David Sklansky, a professor of criminal law at Stanford Law School, said that if Trump, as reported by the Post, helped craft a misleading public statement about the meeting, he may have bolstered a potential obstruction of justice case against himself.
Trump Approval at New Low
President Trump’s approval rating has dropped to a new low, according to a conservative-leaning pollster that has consistently given Trump better marks than other polls.
Trump’s approval fell to 39% Monday, according to Rasmussen Reports —the first time his approval has dipped below 40% in the conservative poll. The poll showed him with a disapproval rating of 61%.
The conservative poll has generally shown approval ratings higher than those of other surveys, but the new poll places it in line with the findings of other surveys like Gallup, which has Trump’s approval at 38 percent.
