Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci is comparing his expletive-laden interview with a New Yorker reporter to another infamous conversation caught on tape — and Monica Lewinsky seems bewildered by it.
Scaramucci was ousted just days after his infamous rant to a journalist was made public — a conversation he said New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza recorded without his permission.
“.@RyanLizza is the Linda Tripp of 2017. People know. And he is up at night not being able to live with himself.” Scaramucci tweeted on Wednesday.
He continued later in a response to a follower: “Yes. He absolutely taped the call without my permission. #lowlife,” Scaramucci said in another tweet later.
Lewinsky retweeted Scaramucci’s Tripp reference Thursday morning, adding a wide-eyed and blushing emoji.
Scaramucci’s comparison harkens back to Lewinsky’s relationship with former President Bill Clinton. Tripp secretly recorded conversations between her and Lewinsky about the then-intern’s relationship with Clinton. Tripp, a friend of Lewinsky’s at the time, turned the 20 hours of tapes over to special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. The scandal ultimately led to Clinton’s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice, though he was ultimately acquitted in the Senate.
Both New York and the District of Columbia follow “one-party consent” laws, meaning that only one party in a conversation needs to consent in order for it to be legally recorded. Scaramucci told Lizza in a conversation that was picked up on CNN’s “New Day” that he was in New York at the time of the call.
In an interview with New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick, Lizza said he and Scaramucci had never discussed any off-the-record arrangement.
“When you have the White House communications director, a conversation like that, you set some ground rules, but there were no ground rules set,” he told Remnick, adding that he made this clear to Scaramucci the following day when giving him notice that the story would be published.