'Morning Joe' co-host Joe Scarborough claimed Friday morning that presidential strategist Steve Bannon is now effectively running the country – uttering the phrase 'President Bannon' seven times in 35 seconds for dramatic effect.

And he said Bannon, not U.S. intelligence agencies, is behind a series of embarrassing leaks about Trump adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner's alleged Russia ties.

'Steve Bannon has been leaking – I believe, based on everything that I've heard – has been leaking these stories,' Scarborough said.

'People very close to Steve Bannon were telling me before the stories were leaked that he was going to be leaking these stories.'

'Two days after I heard this – two days! – [there was a] front-page New York Times story about the links between Kushner and Russia,' he added. 'A coincidence? Absolutely not.'

White House Chief Strategist Steven Bannon, pictured Thursday in the Rose Garden, is the source of leaks that have damaged presidential adviser Jared Kushner, according to 'Morning Joe' co-host Joe Scarborough

Scarborough (right) said Friday that he heard from Bannon insiders that stories would be leaked – and then days later saw that his tipsters were right

Kushner, pictured Friday morning outside his Washington, D.C. home, is President Trump's son-in-law and one of the most senior policy aides in the White House

Two White House correspondents confirmed on Friday that Bannon has fed them negative information about Kushner in the past – but wouldn't say when, or whether they had used the dirt in their published reporting.

Bannon did not respond to a request for comment about Scarborough's accusation.

Palace-intrigue stories about tensions among Bannon, Kushner and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus have been plentiful since President Donald Trump took office in late January.

Some accounts describe a zero-sum-game atmosphere inside the West Wing, with the three top aides undercutting each other in the hope of creating power vacuums ripe for filling.

'He has a job and wants to keep it,' MSNBC panelist Mark Halperin said Friday of a scheming Bannon, 'and will do what's necessary to do that.'

Most recently, Kushner has faced tough questions about a meeting last year with the KGB-trained CEO of a Russian bank under U.S. government sanctions.

The Kremlin has framed the meeting as 'ordinary business,' saying the two were discussing a real estate venture and nothing more.

Bannon 'has a job and wants to keep it,' MSNBC panelist Mark Halperin (left) said of the leak accusations

Kushner was also rumored to have sought a back-channel means of communication with Moscow in the weeks between the November election and the January inauguration.

While The Washington Post touted the story as a major scoop, diplomats and intelligence experts were quick to point out that it's a common practice for the U.S. government.

Scarborough, though, seemed more consumed with Bannon's role in Trump's decision Thursday to pull out of the 195-nation Paris global warming treaty.

The centrist former Republican congressman-turned-TV-host slammed the outcome as a triumph of Bannon's conservative nationalism over Kushner's more moderate political thinking.

'What we saw yesterday is Time Magazine was right. Steve Bannon is president of the United States,' he said, referring to a February cover story that branded Bannon 'the great manipulator.'

TIME magazine has profiled Bannon as 'the great manipulator' and Kushner as 'the good son' in recent months

'Donald Trump doesn't know anything about policy. Donald Trump doesn't know anything about politics. Donald Trump doesn't know anything about anything,' Scarborough alleged.

'He can get up and give a good speech. You listen to him talk about any topic and he wanders from sentence to sentence to sentence. So Steve Bannon is now the President of the United States. And that was more clear yesterday than ever before.'

Later, Scarborough vented that by siding with Bannon on the Paris pullout, Trump was shooting himself in the foot politically.

By then, however, Trump's name was nowhere to be found in the host's rhetoric.

'President Bannon is on the wrong side of the majority,' he declared.

'President Bannon may be right when President Bannon is looking at President Bannon's primary base. But when President Bannon is looking at the overall scope of American voters – you can talk about the past three decades – President Bannon's not even reading the polls right for today.'

Scarborough said Trump's decision would ultimately be seen as a sop to 'a small subset of the population that President Bannon's obsessing on' in order to secure re-election.