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After the effects of the big ol’ swig of flip-flop juice or whatever it was that motivated incoming White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci to pick up the phone and perform highlights from the Quentin Tarantino-inspired screenplay he’s been working on about life in Trump’s White House wore off, Scaramucci seemed surprised that The New Yorker took him seriously. (Very seriously—the story is littered with asides noting that various officials declined to comment on The Mooch’s profane comments about them, indicating that some hero fact-checker actually called up Steve Bannon and asked him if he sucked his own cock.) And like a proper, if newly converted, Trumpian, he completely failed to understand who was at fault here:


Now Ryan Lizza, the reporter who was on the receiving end of Scaramucci’s wild ravings, has come forward to defend the honor of his profession by saying what we all already suspected: That The Mooch is full of shit. According to Deadline, Lizza responded, “of course not,” when asked if he had taken advantage of Scaramucci by CNN. “When the Communications Director for the White House calls you and tells you, on the record, that he’s about to fire the entire communications staff, that he has called the FBI to investigate the Chief of Staff at the White House, and that the Chief Strategist is engaged in autofellatio, I think that is a fairly newsworthy set of comments,” Lizza said with elegant understatement.

Lizza added that he later made a follow-up call to Scaramucci where the two parties confirmed that, yes, their earlier conversation had been on the record. The Mooch told Lizza that he was having second thoughts on that follow-up call, but by that point it was tough shit for him, because, as Lizza puts it, “it was on the record and extremely newsworthy. And my job is to put that in the public domain.” Lizza concluded with a bit of advice, saying that Scaramucci “needs to learn a little bit about what it means to be Communications Director and how to interact with reporters.” In any other set of circumstances, that would probably be helpful, yes. But if he knew what he was doing, he wouldn’t have gotten this far with Trump in the first place, would he have, smart guy?