Scaramucci Says Trump ‘Intentionally’ Lies To Inflame Opponents

(Bloomberg) -- Former White House aide Anthony Scaramucci labeled President Donald Trump “an intentional liar” who methodically works to incite opponents and the media, as criticism mounted of Trump's combative rhetoric after a wave of mail-bomb attempts against prominent Democrats.

“He's an intentional liar, it's very different from just being a liar liar,” Scaramucci, who served a brief tenure in July 2017 as Trump's communications director, said Thursday on Bloomberg TV.

“Yes, the president is speaking mistruths,” Scaramucci said. “Yes, the president is lying. He's doing it intentionally to incite certain people, which would include left-leaning journalists and most of the left-leaning politicians.”

Critics have argued Trump is at least partly culpable for the bombing attempts because of the hostile political climate he has cultivated in his rhetoric. Suspected explosives were discovered targeting former President Barack Obama, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, CNN, and others Trump has frequently vilified in speeches and on Twitter.

Scaramucci, who's promoting a new book, said answers by the media and Trump's opponents to the president's untruthful statements have been ineffectual. They respond like bullied schoolchildren pleading to hall monitors -- calling out Trump's lies, which doesn't work, he said.

“If someone's taking your lunch money in the cafeteria, if you call the hall monitor, it's not going to help you,” Scaramucci said. Instead, “you've got to defeat the person at the table with your peer group.”

Scaramucci's comments were his effort to clean up a blanket assertion he made Wednesday that Trump “is a liar,” something he said on CNN shortly before the first reports of the apparent pipe-bombs sent to Obama and Clinton.

Trump has blamed the news media for encouraging rancor that may have motivated the attacks.

“A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News,” he said Thursday on Twitter. “It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!”

Former CIA Director John Brennan, the target of a suspected pipe bomb discovered at CNN's Manhattan office on Wednesday, responded on Twitter that Trump should “stop blaming others. Look in the mirror.”

“Your inflammatory rhetoric, insults, lies, & encouragement of physical violence are disgraceful,” Brennan added.

Trump has spent much of the last two weeks stoking fear about a migrant caravan that's making its way north to the U.S.-Mexico border but is still several hundred miles away in southern Mexico.

He's also tweeted a video that some right-leaning politicos claim shows migrants being paid to make their journey, fueling an unsubstantiated rumor that billionaire Democratic donor George Soros is funding the caravan. Soros received a suspicious package this week that appears linked to the others, authorities said.

Scaramucci said Trump and others should tone down their rhetoric about the caravan.

“I think we've got to calm ourselves down, we have to dial back some of the rhetoric and get out a little bit of a decoder and get people to relax,” he said. “You're not having moms with their kids riding hundreds of miles to get to the U.S. border because George Soros is paying them. That's a bunch of malarkey, and we all know that.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Jennifer Epstein in Washington at jepstein32@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Mike Dorning, Larry Liebert

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