(CNN) White House chief strategist Steve Bannon gave an unusually, um, frank interview to the editor of the liberal American Prospect magazine this week in which he boasted of "fighting" with other top Trump administration aides "every day" and acknowledged that there was no military solution to the North Korea morass -- among many, many other things.

The explanation for Bannon's odd interview? It wasn't an interview at all!

A source close to Bannon told CNN Wednesday night that he -- a man who ran a quasi-media company before coming to the White House -- was unaware that he was being interviewed by the Prospect's Robert Kuttner. "It was no interview," the source told CNN.

Uh. OK.

Bannon's media misunderstanding came just weeks after then-White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci launched into an expletive-laden tirade against his new colleagues in an interview with the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza . Scaramucci accused Lizza of violating some sort of Italian trust code in publishing the contents of that conversation. He -- Scaramucci, not Lizza -- was fired after just 10 days on the job.

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