White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci knew that his profanity-laced telephone interview with The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza, during which he railed against chief of staff Reince Priebus and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, was on the record and that it would be published, the journalist said Friday morning.
"I had a conversation with Anthony yesterday afternoon," Lizza told CNN's "New Day" program."I didn't want to post the piece until I had a chance to talk to him and walk him through what was going to be in the piece and explain it."
During that conversation, which Lizza said he recorded, Scaramucci "made 100 percent clear to me, look, 'I understand that interview was not off the record, [it's] totally within your rights to publish it.' I don't want to say anything more about that conversation, but that was the takeaway from that conversation."
He admitted Scaramucci was not excited about the fact the article would be published, but he did know that the conversation was "100 percent on the record."
On Thursday, Lizza reported that Scaramucci had called him the night before to complain about a tweet the reporter posted revealing President Donald Trump's dinner that night with Scaramucci, Fox News host Sean Hannity and a former Fox executive.
Scaramucci demanded Lizza identify his source, but Lizza said he declined to do so.
"I fired one guy the other day. I have three to four people I'll fire tomorrow. I'll get to the person who leaked that to you. Reince Priebus — if you want to leak something — he'll be asked to resign very shortly," Scaramucci said.
"Reince is a ***** paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac."
During the course of the telephone call, the new communications director also railed against Bannon, using obscenities to insist the former Breitbart owner was in the White House to please himself.
"The communications director at the White House called me and we conducted an interview without setting any ground rules at the top," Lizza told "New Day" anchor Chris Cuomo, who also had received a call from Scaramucci on Thursday morning.
"It's just as if he called into your show right now and started talking and later says 'wait a minute, I wish I hadn't said that,'" said Lizza.
According to Axios, there may be more coming from Scaramucci's interview with Lizza. A New Yorker spokesperson said that late in the conversation between the two men, "Scaramucci requested that one part be off the record, and we respected that. The rest was on the record. Today [Thursday], Ryan [Lizza] and Scaramucci had another conversation and Scaramucci was clear and agreed that the conversation was on the record."
Scaramucci has not apologized for the interview or the words against Priebus and Bannon, instead tweeting Thursday that he "made a mistake" trusting a reporter.
Meanwhile, Lizza denied on Friday that Priebus had leaked the information about the dinner, and that he believes Scaramucci knows who did.
"Basically, as he worked himself up, talked about it as if it was a fact that Reince leaked it to me," said Lizza. "I said it a couple times yesterday, Reince did not leak it to me. He was not the source.
"Privately, I know Scaramucci now knows one of my sources about that dinner. I think that source actually went to Scaramucci and told him this person was a confirming source."
In addition, said Lizza, a revelation about a White House dinner is "not very interesting," as "it happens all the time."
"It's frankly one of the things that the White House is fairly open about," said Lizza. "It's strange that the dinner set him off. The backstory is, he had been increasingly upset, paranoid that negative stories in the press were coming from the chief of staff. So that's how the conversation started."