“I’m not allowed to joke anymore, I’ve learned that,” Scaramucci told Stephen Colbert after telling the host he was adding the show’s writers to his “kill list.”
Just one day after breaking his silence with George Stephanopoulos in his first televised interview since leaving his White House post, Anthony Scaramucci sat down with none other than The Late Show’sStephen Colbert on Monday night. Scaramucci’s first remark was to jokingly tell Colbert he’s added the show’s writers to his “kill list,” to which Colbert responded: “So you’re comedically threatening to kill people who work for me?”
“I’m not allowed to joke anymore, I’ve learned that,” Scaramucci said.
“This is on the record, this is being recorded right now,” continued Colbert, referring to Scaramucci’s now-infamous phone call with New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza, which Scaramucci contends was supposed to be off the record. Scaramucci lightly confronted the host about previous coverage and jokes about Scaramucci while at the White House. “You guys have been super hard on me and you’ve been super tough on [Trump],” he told Colbert, which began a contentious discussion about pitying Trump because of his “tough” position as president.
In the interview, during which he repeatedly referred to his guest as “The Mooch,” Colbert directly asked Scaramucci if he was “brought in just to get rid of” Reince Priebus, who was ousted from his White House post as chief of staff only three days before Scaramucci himself left.
“I don’t want to say it that way,” he said, dodging the question.
“Was it part of your job?” Colbert pushed. “Say it like The Mooch,” he added, to chants of “Mooch” (or boos, but Scaramucci decided “Mooch” was better) from the audience.
“So The Mooch from Long Island would say there’s no love lost there,” Scaramucci told him. “The weird thing about my relationship with Reince is that we were actually pretty good friends when I was a political donor writing checks to the RNC, but once I became part of the administration, for whatever reason, it was a little more adversarial.”
Colbert also asked The Mooch if Steve Bannon should “be gone in a week” for being an alleged “leaker.”
“If it was up to me, he would be gone,” Scaramucci said, “but it’s not up to me,” stressing that it was President Donald Trump’s decision. He also told Colbert: “Whatever you think about me, I was pretty open about how I felt about people.”
Scaramucci, admitting that he was fired from the White House rather quickly (“I thought I’d last longer than a carton of milk”), told Colbert that he would do “absolutely nothing” differently if he were to do it all again.
Watch the whole interview:
This article originally appeared on The Hollywood Reporter.
