The Briefing

by Sean Spicer

  This constant wrestling with the media over words, terms, agreements, and understandings was getting old.

  I gave considerable thought to how I could continue to serve while wearing a different hat. I questioned if I would be of greater service to the president if I became a full-time communications director or if I moved into a larger strategic role. Either course of action was better for me—and, frankly, better for the media—than to continue where I was.

  And then came Anthony Scaramucci.

  When Scaramucci joined the White House, he wanted to make sure that everyone knew he had the power to make changes he saw fit to implement. He was to report directly to the president and not, as is custom, to the chief of staff. So, for ten days, whether he was official or not, Anthony Scaramucci acted as a White House communications director and, in truth, as a deputy chief of staff. During those ten days, I kept my nose down, stayed busy keeping the White House tax reform meetings on pace, and met with a list of staff that had requested time with me. And I had to manage as best as possible the awkwardness of watching the White House communications staff grapple with the looming presence of this powerful, pungent personality.

  My first and only interaction with Scaramucci at the White House was when he showed up in my office on his first day. I had called the entire communications staff—all forty of them—into my office to make sure they heard my news from me before they saw it on TV or their phones. As I told them the news, I saw a lot of eyes with tears welling up in them. I felt as emotional as anyone. These were people I believed in, had fought for, and cared deeply about. I had worked in the trenches with many of them for several years, others for a few months. But we had worked through some tough times and shared some fun memories. We had slugged it out together during the 2016 presidential election when all the polls showed Trump losing, giving many media outlets license to write his political obituary long before election day. We had worked long hours, seven days a week, to rebuild the RNC and to launch first-rate digital media and rapid response teams. I was fortunate to work alongside such strong, intelligent, and dedicated people. I was going to miss them. And they were concerned about what the future held for them.

  As I was in the middle of breaking my news to my colleagues, Scaramucci bounced in. Not realizing that he was interrupting something, he walked directly to me and gave me a faux “man hug.” I am not much of a hugger, especially not with people I don’t know well.

  Other than that brief appearance, not once during the ten days of his tenure did Scaramucci ask to meet. And that was fine with me. Some of my staffers tried as best as they could to ingratiate themselves with Scaramucci. (Many reporters also tried ingratiating themselves with “the Mooch” by sending out flattering, congratulatory tweets in the hope of cultivating a friend on the inside.) Some tried to ignore him as best as they could. But ignoring him proved impossible because Anthony Scaramucci had made it clear that he was going to fire somebody. It wasn’t that anybody in particular needed to be fired; it was that Anthony Scaramucci needed to fire someone to establish himself and express his dominance over the staff. He singled out one very competent and loyal staffer and compelled him to submit his resignation. He threatened and intimidated others.

  Scaramucci did this because he had promised the president he would do what no one else had done—root out the leakers. There was no evidence that the man he sought to fire was a leaker, but perhaps the firing would intimidate those who did. I remained convinced that while there was some leaking coming from my shop, 90 percent of the White House leaks came from outside of the communications team. It was out of concern for this 10 percent that I had clumsily tried to check for messaging apps months earlier. But for the most part, the White House communications shop— which has to manage the fallout from leaks—was a place that got headaches from leaks. Still under pressure from his promise to the president, Scaramucci began to more loudly accuse his staff— women and men who worked tirelessly for the president—of being disloyal. Morale plummeted.

  While Scaramucci began to publicly denigrate his own staff, I busied myself with trying to line up the external pieces Scaramucci would need to manage the orchestration of surrogates. The White House communications director must manage a wide field of surrogates in Congress, think tanks, and the lobbying industry. I wanted to make sure I continued giving everything I could to the White House and the country while I still had the honor and privilege of walking through those gates every day. I also wanted to ensure that no one would blame me for placing a banana peel in front of him should he trip and fall flat on his face.

  The first slip up came one day into his job. Anthony Scaramucci called Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker. Because he believed they had similar backgrounds—supposedly, their fathers had been friends—Scaramucci assumed that he could vent to Lizza and that he would treat the call as an off-the-record, background conversation, without any attribution. The first rule of going off the record is to get an explicit agreement from the reporter. But Scaramucci didn’t run the basic disclaimer.

  Lizza, of course, immediately published the whole interview. In it, Scaramucci displayed the charming habit of referring to himself as “the Mooch.” “Okay,” he told Lizza, “the Mooch showed up a week ago. This is going to get cleaned up very shortly.”

  “This” being a communications shop that needed public humiliation and firing.

  Scaramucci claimed, “What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team . . .” He also stated, “I’m going to fire every one of them, and then you haven’t protected anybody, so the entire place will be fired over the next two weeks.”

  There are many ways to build morale in a team during a management change. Publicly declaring that you will fire everyone is not one of them.

  Scaramucci reserved his greatest ire for the chief of staff. He continued to blame Reince Priebus for the release of his financial information, still not understanding that those documents were a matter of public record. In fact, he wanted the FBI to investigate the White House chief of staff.

  “Reince Priebus—if you want to leak something—he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.”

  There was more: “Reince is a f[***]ing paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac . . . ‘Let me leak the f[***]ing thing and see if I can c[***]-block these people the way I c[***]-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’ ”

  This was, of course, a very self-revealing comment. Reince had never blocked Scaramucci from the White House. He had respected the standards of financial disclosure and disinvestment that needed to be undertaken before someone—anyone—could assume a position as a top White House aide.

  And paranoia? That answers itself.

  So, here was a White House communications director telling a national reporter that the chief of staff was about to be fired for leaking.

  Finally, Scaramucci took a turn to his trademark, wise-guy vulgarity: “I’m not Steve Bannon; I’m not trying to suck my own c[***].”

  When the New Yorker broke the piece, Scaramucci accused Lizza of betraying him. Lizza told John Berman of CNN, “When the Communications Director for the White House calls you and tells you, on the record, that he’s about to fire the entire communications staff, that he has called the FBI to investigate the Chief of Staff at the White House, and that the Chief Strategist is engaged in autofellatio, I think that is a fairly newsworthy set of comments.”2

  Even worse for Scaramucci was the release of the audio tape, a cleaned-up version of his conversation with Lizza that ran on every cable and major news channel.

  In truth, if there was a betrayal, it was Scaramucci’s betrayal of Donald Trump, Reince Priebus, and the good people who were to serve under him. What had originally stopped Scaramucci from getting a coveted White House job was the approval of a government office in the Department of the Treasury to sell his company to a Chinese conglomerate. Months after his brief stint, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the government organization that approv
es the sale of U.S. companies to foreign owners, still had not approved the sale, and the Chinese conglomerate pulled out of the deal.

  Humiliated by his own words, Scaramucci was suddenly making nice with the staff and trying to give explanatory interviews in a desperate attempt to save his job. Everyone else knew that he was already a dead man walking.

  While alternating currents of outrage and amusement flowed through the White House in the aftermath of Scaramucci’s conversation with Lizza, I took great pains not to show any emotion and just keep doing my job. Some people asked me privately if I felt vindicated. I didn’t need vindication.

  I continued to meet with the president. While President Trump had appreciated the pugnacious side of Anthony Scaramucci, he was unpleasantly surprised—frankly, as shocked as anyone—by the recklessness with which Scaramucci approached his job. The president had thought he had hired an ace when, in fact, he had hired a kamikaze pilot. Even worse, the president had noticed that Anthony Scaramucci loved to give everyone the impression that he and the president were personally very tight. Now this presumed closeness had become a liability.

  Scaramucci was, however, highly effective in his one main mission—taking out Reince Priebus as Donald Trump’s chief of staff. It happened on a return flight from Long Island on Air Force One. Many people think that Air Force One is always the same plane, but Air Force One is the official military designation for whichever aircraft is flying the president. On July 28, 2017, the president was scheduled to fly to Selden, a town on Long Island, to speak about gang violence and immigration. Because the local airport there has a shorter runway, it was decided that the president would fly on a smaller Boeing 737.

  I had initially put myself on the manifest to take one last flight with the president.

  One of my deputies stuck his head in my office.

  “Did you hear who is on the manifest?” he said.

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Scaramucci.”

  I knew it was, of course, a desperate bid by Scaramucci to glue himself to the president. But it also clearly gave the Mooch an opportunity to get rid of the man he believed was his nemesis— Reince Priebus. I thought of the Boeing 737’s tight quarters and the inevitable awkwardness of all of us sitting around a staff table, and I decided not to go. Besides, my team had the president covered. So, instead, I looked forward to some calm time back at the office. I especially wanted to catch up with Sarah, who was going to succeed me.

  Back at the office, while I was working with the White House communications staff for the post-Spicer transition, a presidential tweet announced the appointment of General John Kelly, the Secretary of Homeland Security, as White House chief of staff. Several of us in the press office joined around a wall of televisions to watch live coverage of the transition. Reince later told me that he had given his resignation to the president earlier. Whatever happened on the plane, the optics were not good for my friend as he moved from the official motorcade to a car in front of the press, leaving the impression that he had been brusquely booted out.

  Scaramucci’s blistering and highly personal attacks in public had made Reince ripe for targeting, precipitating a move that was bound to happen sooner or later. From the very start, Reince had been in an untenable position, sharing authority with Kellyanne, Steve, and Jared.

  When he accepted his new job, General Kelly, true to his military background, insisted that the chief of staff position would be a centralized control and filter between the commander in chief and his staff, with a traditional chain of command.

  The most immediate loser under the new chief of staff would be Scaramucci, who was abruptly fired. He promptly sought to return to the Export-Import Bank of the United States, perhaps in hopes of downplaying the move as a transfer. Not soon after that, Steve Bannon was in the crosshairs. He had enjoyed great power as chief strategist under Reince Priebus—a cover that allowed him to operate in a nebulous and secretive way—but he would not last much longer either.

  For those of us who had remained at the White house instead of traveling to New York on that day, a quiet day of planning had been upended. We were now handling one of the biggest news days we had seen.

  With Scaramucci out, several people asked if I would consider staying on at the White House in a different role. Sarah was ready to be press secretary, so I would have the opportunity to play a role in strategy and planning on significant policy issues. I entertained the idea and then dismissed it. Over a drink, I mentioned the idea to Rebecca. She is a staunch believer in serving our country. So, I was curious about what her reaction would be.

  “You made a decision. You need to stick to it,” she said.

  It was time to go.

  In the weeks leading up to my resignation, I took a big personal risk and began a series of deep, background conversations with four reporters to help shape my own post-White House narrative. I had seen how quickly the media judged people during the campaign and transition into the White House. I did not know the end was as close as it was when I began my conversations with them, but the palace intrigue and interest in my future was escalating. If I wanted to shape my own story, I needed to loop some folks into the situation. I needed there to be some understanding of what I was thinking and why. Four outlets in particular would be crucial to converse with: Fox News, Politico, the New York Times, and CNN.

  John Roberts of Fox News, a veteran reporter who had previous White House stints at CNN and CBS, was well respected, and I knew Fox’s initial report of my departure would be critical.

  Mark Preston of CNN was a long-time political reporter, whom I had gotten to know well during my time at the RNC. Mark and I had very candid conversations over the years. While I did not agree with all of his on-air analyses or published stories, he always listened to my points and engaged in a fair journalistic process. My relationship with many reporters at CNN had been strained, but Mark and I had kept lines of communication open and enjoyed constructive dialogue.

  Next was one of the more unlikely suspects: Glenn Thrush of the New York Times. Glenn and I had had some rather epic exchanges in the Press Briefing Room. Even out of the public eye, Glenn and I also had some significant disagreements about the tone of his coverage and the accuracy of his reporting. Like it or not, though, at the time Glenn was a leader among the pack of White House reporters, and how he framed my departure would be very important.

  The fourth reporter was Josh Dawsey, then of Politico and now of the Washington Post. My issues with Politico’s reporting could fill another book, but the publication’s growing influence among reporters, political operatives, pundits, and talking heads could not be overlooked. As with Glenn, I had some well-known issues with aspects of Josh’s reporting. I thought he placed too much focus on palace intrigue inside the White House instead of covering policy debates and achievements, but I felt Josh would try to understand my rationale. Months later, the White House Correspondents’ Association presented the Merriman Smith Award for print reporting to Josh for his coverage of my resignation. The award read, “While the resignation story was widely covered, Dawsey reported details others simply did not have. Beautifully reported and written.” No kidding—he had a great source.

  When I talked with each of these four reporters—on deep background and far off the record— my goal was to show the human side of my thinking and to provide additional context. I cared about the president, the presidency, the GOP, and the country. But I also was increasingly concerned about the toll the job was taking on my ability to be effective and the toll it was taking on my family.

  Despite the public profile that accompanies the press secretary’s role, the job does not come with any physical security detail. While I was safe within the confines of the White House, I grew more and more concerned about the safety of my family. Rebecca had countless meetings and calls with members of the Secret Service and the Alexandria Police Department. She was on a first-name basis with several agents and officers, and she had their p
ersonal cell phone numbers plugged into her phone. We cut back on being outside or in public, but that didn’t change much. The tweets and mail targeting my wife and kids were still getting old. (So were the reporters who started showing up at the front door of my mother’s house.)

  As I prepared to leave the White House, and in the months thereafter, I had plenty of time to reflect on the relationship between elected officials and the media—what is wrong with it and the best way forward.

  Today’s media is obsessed with palace intrigue instead of issues of substance, prioritizing the number of clicks, viewers, and subscriptions. The “always-on” nature of online news is driving journalists to prioritize being first over being right. The prospect of becoming a cable star is prompting previously obscure journalists to favor theatrics and outrage over insight. The inability of any journalist in the briefing room to call out the bad or misleading reporting or antics of another reporter for fear of retribution is a problem. And journalists, rather than critique and improve each other’s reporting, are captives of a pack mentality—driven largely by the shrinking economics of the news business, a sector in which you’d better be nice to your peers because you might need their goodwill to get your next job.

  There were other corrupting influences as well, such as the disappearing wall between news and opinion. The great journalists of the post-World War II era (at least most of them) were scrupulous about keeping their partisan views and opinions to themselves. Now, thanks to Twitter and cable news, many journalists tweet opinions and impressions that their job titles lend an aura of objectivity to. Because of this, one of the greatest journalists of our time privately confessed to me, “Sean, I can’t tell you how disappointed I am in my profession.”