White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has resigned over President Donald Trump’s appointment of Manhasset resident Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director, the New York Times has reported.
His hiring is part of a White House shake up by Trump in response to a special counsel looking into possible collusion with Russia.
The communications job has been vacant since May, when Michael Dubke resigned.
Scaramucci, 53, has reportedly clashed with Spicer and the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, on multiple occasions.
Spicer, an ally of Priebus who was born in Manhasset, refused Trump’s offer of keeping his job as Scaramucci’s subordinate, The New York Times reported.
Scaramucci, a Port Washington native who was a member of Trump’s transition team, was previously slated to be the the ambassador to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris.
He was reportedly first picked to become the White House’s public liaison to the business community, but he sold his investment firm, SkyBridge Capital, to a Chinese conglomerate with strong ties to China’s ruling Communist Party.
Administration officials said Scaramucci’s appointment would have taken three months to be cleared of ethics conflicts, according to news reports. The sale reportedly netted him $180 million.
Despite once calling Trump an “inherited money dude from Queens County” and clashing on other issues with the president-elect, Scaramucci has constantly defended Trump on television and Twitter.
Scaramucci, often referred to as “the Mooch,” initially supported Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and then former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush before supporting Trump.
In June, Scaramucci was the subject of a retracted CNN story that said the Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating a meeting he had with a Russian investment fund executive four days before Trump’s inauguration.
Shortly after, conservative news organizations, including Breitbart News, criticized the story, calling it “baseless” because it was based on one unnamed source.
The story was retracted with an editor’s note that said, “The story did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted.”
In a tweet, Scaramucci said, “@CNN did the right thing. Classy move. Apology accepted. Everyone makes mistakes. Moving on.”
However, three CNN staffers, Pulitzer Prize nominee Thomas Frank, Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Lichtblau and Lex Haris resigned after the news organization retracted the story.
CNN had a procedure in place for anonymous sources, which required a sign-off by an executive editor before the story is published.
Scaramucci donated more than $210,000 to “super PACs,’’ political committees and joint fundraising committees supporting Trump in the last two years, according to Federal Election Commission records.
He donated over $177,000 to the Republican National Committee in the same period, according to the FEC.
Scaramucci, a registered Republican, donated money to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, as well as Rand Paul’s and Jeb Bush’s 2016 bids for president, according to FEC records.
He also donated money to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
Scaramucci has written three books, including his most recent, “Hopping Over the Rabbit Hole,” which focuses on his experiences in business.
A regular contributor to the Fox Business Network, Scaramucci once hosted “Wall Street Week,” an investment and stock market news show that aired on Fridays.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in economics from Tufts University and a J.D. from Harvard, Scaramucci worked at Goldman Sachs from 1989 to 1996, before launching Oscar Capital Management, which was sold to Lehman Brothers.
He founded SkyBridge Capital in 2005.
He served as a national finance co-chairman for Mitt Romney for President in 2012.
