Politico’s Lorraine Woellert said that Anthony Scaramucci is all worked up for nothing because her report on his personal finances was based on publicly available records, not a leak of classified information as the White House communications director alleged on Twitter Wednesday night.
“My first reaction was, ‘Oh!’ But as I said, my second reaction was ‘This is nuts’ because the stuff that our story wrote about is easily, publicly available to anyone who wants it. No leak,” Woellert said Thursday on SiriusXM’s “The Michael Smerconish Program.”
Twitter went bananas late Wednesday night when Scaramucci tagged White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus in a tweet that said, “In light of the leak of my financial disclosure info which is a felony. I will be contacting the FBI and the Justice Department.”
Trump’s newest staffer is angry because Politico obtained his financial disclosure forms that showed he was still making money from his investment in Skybridge Capital, but Woellert said the information was available to anyone.
“There was no leak,” Woellert repeated. “He’s been at the Ex-Im Bank for just over a month, so I got his documents. It’s as simple as that. And it just laid out his financials, and I just typed it up. I mean, it was pretty simple.”
Scaramucci’s tweet was deleted after political Twitter assumed that he was accusing Priebus of being the leak by tagging him in the tweet. Scaramucci called into CNN on Thursday morning to clarify what he meant, but didn’t exactly clear Priebus.
“When I put out a tweet and I put Reince’s name in a tweet, they all make the assumption that it’s him because journalists know who the leakers are,” Scaramucci told Chris Cuomo.
Scaramucci continued: “So if Reince wants to explain he’s not a leaker, let him do that. But let me tell you about myself. I’m a straight shooter and I’ll go right to the heart of the matter.”
Meanwhile, the Politico reporter said that the White House knew in advance the story was going to drop.
“They knew this story was coming out. It wasn’t a secret to them. They weren’t blindsided by it….They would have known 24 hours ago that we were working on the story,” Woellert said.