Scaramucci confirms to Colbert there's no love lost between him and Bannon

If the man known as "the Mooch" were calling the shots, there would be at least one more big-name departure from the White House: chief strategist Steve Bannon.

“If it was up to me, he would be gone,” former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said during an interview that aired Monday night on CBS’ “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” “But it’s not up to me.”


The short-lived White House communications director talked about his White House tenure and some of his former colleagues, including Bannon.

Colbert, whose opening monologue was an extended takedown of President Donald Trump for his Charlottesville statements, pressed Scaramucci on whether he thought Bannon was leaking information about the White House.

Spreading his arms wide, Scaramucci said yes. “Listen, I’ve been pretty open about that,” he said.

Colbert asked Scaramucci about former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, showing him a picture of the two standing in the Oval Office, staring at each other from across the room.

“That’s a rough photo,” Scaramucci quipped.

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“Were you brought in just to get rid of him? And Sean Spicer?” Colbert asked.

“Hmm,” Scaramucci replied. “I don’t wanna say it that way.”

Scaramucci said he would change nothing about his brief time in the White House, but joked that he thought his expiration date would not arrive so soon.

"I didn’t think I was going to last too long, but I thought I'd last longer than like a carton of milk,” he said. “If you bought your eggs and you were cooking them the day I got fired, it was totally fine, right?”

Scaramucci was greeted with boos when he came out but drew laughs from Colbert's crowd when he said he would pretend the crowd was merely chanting "Mooch."

He also joked that his remarks were "off the record," an allusion to Scaramucci's now-notorious interview with Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, and opined that Nazis are "super bad," repeating his weekend criticism of the way the president handled the Charlottesville situation.

"Did he order his spine on Amazon Prime?" Colbert asked Scaramucci about Trump in pondering why it took the president two days to strongly condemn neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

Earlier in the evening, Scaramucci promoted his visit to Colbert, tweeting after the interview taped that he “went into the Lion's Den with @StephenAtHome came out w/ a few scratches but still standing.” Earlier, he posted a selfie outside of the “Late Show” guest bathroom. “It’s not where you’ve been, it’s where you are going,” he tweeted with the photo.

David Cohen and Brent Griffiths contributed to this article.