The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Scaramucci Call

Episode Date: August 3, 2017

David Remnick and Ryan Lizza listen back to the phone call from Anthony Scaramucci that ended his brief term as White House communications director.     New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent. I think it would be interesting to really try to unravel what his ties. There's a sort of country city divide for their own convenient, and it's not clear where it goes next. From one world trade center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. A little more than a week ago, the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza got a late-night phone call. that turned out to have fateful consequences. Who leaked that to you?

Oh, man, I can't tell you that. What's that? I can't tell you that. Okay, so I'm just going to, what I'm going to do is I will eliminate everybody in the comms team and we'll start over. So it's no problem. So I ask these guys not to leak anything and they can't help themselves, so we'll eliminate everybody. Is somebody in the comms team leaked that to you? That's Anthony Scaramucci just days into his appointment.

as communications director. He wanted to know who had given Lizza a certain piece of information, very minor information about dinner at the White House and who was there. But the leaking thing had him really angry. Okay, but you're an American citizen. This is a major catastrophe for the American country. So I'm asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense for a leak. The only thing I can tell you is two people in the White House who I know wouldn't lie to me. You know what I mean? Come on. I can't tell you, buddy.

You know I can't do that. So, girl, you can give me, is it, is it an assistant to the president? In the course of the conversation, he savaged his rivals in the White House. He accused Reince Prebus of being a leaker, and Prebus was fired within two days. Some of what Scaramucci said to Ryan Lissa was stunning, even by the standards of the Trump administration. And Wright is a fucking paranoid. schizophrenic, paranoiac. What he's going to do is, oh, maybe Bill Shines

come in. Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked these people the way I cock-blocks Garamucci for six months. Okay, but he leaked the Siffy stuff on me. You know, my financial disclosure has been leaked to Politico. Yeah, which is a felony.

Ryan wrote a story for New Yorker.com that included some words that we can't say on the air. But I wanted to ask you if you wanted to be profiles. I don't want to be profiled. I'm not Steve Bannon. What you're trying to do? I'm not Steve Bannon.

I'm not trying to suck my own cock. I'm not trying to build my own brand off the fucking shrink to the president. I'm sure to serve the country. At first, the reaction from the White House was more or less nothing or seemed to be. But then Scaramucci was fired as communications director after a term that lasted a total of 10 days. Okay. The moot showed up a week ago. This is going to get cleaned up very.

shortly, okay, because I nailed these guys. I got digital fingerprints on everything that they've done through the FBI and the fucking Department of Justice. What's the first thing? It's no. Or the felony, they're going to get prosecutor probably for the felony. They'll probably get prosecutor in that. Yeah. Wow. They're a lot of detector stars. Yeah. I'm speaking now with Ryan Lizza and Ryan, I have to ask you, now that you look back on this affair, who was Anthony Scaramucci and why is he here? What is it about Trump that he reflects? Why does Trump have such obvious affection for him? I think that he convinced Trump and Trump and him both believed that the real problem at the White House. As so many politicians believe when they're failing, they

believe that the real problem is just a communication strategy that if only the American public heard and saw what the most loyal supporters saw in the president, that everything would be solved. And he convinced Trump that the leadership in the White House, that their view was you had to contain Trump. You had to treat him like a child, essentially, and that Scaramucci playing to Trump's love of being flattered so that, you know, let Trump be Trump is the cliche, right? That was Scaramucci's communication strategy. And I think that that's how he helped convince the president that he should take over the communications shop, even though he had no experience doing this. I mean, usually the communications director at a White House is a conversation.

kind of staff guy, you know? Think of, you know, Dan Pfeiffer or Stephanoplas back in the day of the Clinton administration. You know, Trump being Trump thinks that political professionals are actually idiots and that he needs to do things his own way. And so I think he was looking for a shortcut to fixing all the problems that the White House had. And Scaramucci was telling him he could do it. Ryan, let's talk about the call itself. You've been in Washington for quite a long time. writing for quite a long time. Have you ever had a call from a senior White House official trying to squeeze you for sources? No, it was so unusual, David. I mean, I've said this now. In 20 years of doing this, I've never had a phone conversation like that. I mean, I got off the

phone and just sort of stood there silently in my, I was in my bedroom. I just sort of stood there. This was 10.30 at night. And I just stood there shaking my head saying that is the most unusual conversation I have ever had with a senior government official. I downloaded the audio clip off my little recorder, and I gave it the name on my computer. I called it insane scaramucci interview. And then I started to think hard about, you know, what's the news value here? Were there any ground rules? You know, when you have the White House communications director a conversation like that, you set some ground rules. But there were no ground rule set. And, you know, off the record and background are bargains between a source and a journalist.

There has to be an offer of, okay, hey, I want to talk to you off the record. Is that acceptable? And the journalist has to agree to that. That didn't happen. As I told him, frankly, the next day when I called him to tell him we were publishing this, I told him, you know, you speak for the most powerful institution in the world. A conversation like that is presumptively on the record. And what you said was extremely newsworthy. He didn't push back. He knew he had made a mistake, at least it seemed he had made a mistake. And yet we hear from the White House, at least from anonymous sources, that at first the president of the United States thought this was fine. In fact, he was speaking, Skaramucci was, in his master's voice, no? Yeah, those are the first indications. But, you know, sometimes with this White House, when people are anonymously channeling what Trump believes, you know, you have to be so careful with some of that reporting. because often it is, you know, agenda-driven, right?

But clearly something changed once Reince was gone and once Kelly, John Kelly, the new chief of staff, was in. And perhaps it was as simple as John Kelly being a military guy and a bit more of a grown-up compared to some of the people in this White House telling Donald Trump this is an intolerable situation. I can't have a communications director who, one, doesn't even report to me and who, two, would call up a report. order at 10.30 at night and go off on a rant like this.

What does the call tell us about what's going on inside the White House? It seems to me, at least, that everybody hates everybody. Everybody's leaking on everybody. There's no sense of cohesion or continuity, and every day, every day ends with at least one bombshell that is just jaw-dropping. Yeah, you already had three or four factions fighting with. with each other in the White House. And by dropping Scaramucci in, Trump created a whole new faction with its own new leader. So just from a management perspective, I mean, I know Trump thinks playing people off of each other can be a successful management strategy. But it shows that Trump still has this ad hoc management strategy where he makes decisions without necessarily thinking through all the consequences. Are you just being polite there? That sounds like a polite interpretation.

He's a bad manager. And White House management, I mean, there's a lot that's been written about this. It's no mystery. And the first thing everyone knows is you have a strong chief of staff and everyone reports to the president through the chief of staff. And you have clear lines of authority. Trump never adopted that system. Instead, he set up competing power centers, his son-in-law and his daughter and one power center, Steve Bannon and another power center. Reitz Prebis and a third. Those are the three main ones. And as someone once told me, the key

to getting any decision made in the White House was you had to have two against one. So you had to win Reitz and Bannon against Kushner and you could win a debate or sometimes Bannon and Kushner would team up against Reince and then you could win something. During campaigns, a lot of our readers in the public feels that the press is too obsessed with the horse race. During times of governance, we're too obsessed with just this, palace intrigue. But why is this palace intrigue important when it comes to everything from healthcare to Russia and onward? If you do not have a well-run, normal functioning White House, how do you solve any of the multiple crises that are going on around the world? Everything flows from having a structure that is coherent and can get decisions

to the president that he can make with a process where all the different policy advisors weigh in. So having a sane, normal White House is key to dealing with any of the other crises. So I was talking to some national security officials recently and doing some other reporting, and everyone is on pins and needles waiting for some international crisis. God forbid a terrorist attack, something bad happening on the Korean Peninsula. And then all of this palace intrigue and sort of. so proper thing is not going to seem so funny anymore because we're going to have a dysfunctional White House that has to grapple with that. So now we have another general in charge, this time General Kelly as chief of staff. Great faith has been put on generals in the Pentagon, national security. Generals are ascendant. What are the odds that General Kelly can bring some cohesion and continuity and sanity to the White House. That's one thing. And secondly, what does it mean that generals are in charge with such a

president? I do think that in a normal presidency, there would be a lot more concern about generals being, one, being in charge of the Pentagon. But with Trump and because folks both in the Senate and other people who think about this stuff were so worried about the quality of the people that would go work for him, I think a lot of people were relieved that General Mattis would take that job. And so I think that, you know, Trump gets graded on a curve. As for Kelly in the White House, I'll tell you three things that I know about him from other national security officials that have dealt with him. The first is that he has expressed recently disdain for Congress and the press. That's not a good sign.

As a general, he didn't have to deal with the press the way that a more – a politically minded person would. Also, Congress, you know, most members in the House and Senate, they want the chief of staff to be there for them. They want to be able to calm up and they want him to understand their issues. Kelly is not a huge fan of dealing with Congress. So that's something to watch for. On whether he can solve one of the core problems at the White House, just the managerial dysfunction, it looks like there are some positive signs. It looks like Trump has made him more of a traditional chief of staff. So far, it looks like everyone will report through him.

I used to say this during the campaign, but there was a lot of soap opera-like coverage of palace intrigue in the Trump campaign. It was really fun to report on because there were such crazy characters. But at the end of the day, staffing didn't matter. What's dysfunctional about Trump world all stems from Donald Trump himself.

And as long as he continues to be the same person he has been for the last 71 years, I don't really expect major changes, even if the White House has perhaps run a little bit more professionally. Trump is Trump. And I don't see that changing. Ryan, thank you so much and make sure to keep answering your phone late at night. Thanks, David. Take care.

Ryan Lizza, Washington correspondent for the New Yorker. We spoke last Tuesday one day after Anthony Scaramucci was full. fired from the White House. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Does this ring a bell at all? Finally, the race is on tonight to solve a mystery dating back to World War II and collect the riches that may come along with it. Legend has it that a Nazi train filled with gold was lost seven decades ago. But is it just that? A legend? It's a story from a couple of years ago. In Poland, a pair of men announced that they knew Where to find a train loaded with treasure, looted by the Nazis, and buried underground at the end of the Second World War.

Gold, fine art and rare documents stashed underground. For days, fortune hunters have descended on this railroad track in Valkic, Western Poland. It said the treasure hunters were led here by a deathbed confession. It sounds like an Indiana Jones sequel or maybe a weekly world news story, but the tale of the gold train, whether or not it exists, is more complicated. than you might think. Contributor Jake Halpern wrote about the gold train last year. In his reporting, he traveled to the province of Lower Silesia to see what he could dig up. Okay, so we're really close. It looks like we're like 200 meters from his house. So here I am. I'm in a car in the foothills of Lower Silesia.

I'm riding with my translator, Carol. What number of 67? Might be this one. We're pulling up this really steep driveway and this big, burly guy. That's the way. Yeah, exactly. He's waving. It kind of comes out, and he's yelling at us, oh, over here.

And then we see what turns out to be this treasure hunter's clubhouse. It's like up on these pylons, and it's got like this Teutonic style. It looks like a tree house. So we're there to meet this guy named Andre Bojek. It's Andrew Bacon in English. And he looks like an Andrew Bacon. He's like this big, beefy guy. He's a well-known treasure hunter in this really.

He's not, by the way, one of the men who claimed to have found the gold train, but Andre has been looking for hidden Nazi lute of his own. So we walk in, and it's clear right off the bat that he's not maintaining some sort of strict museum protocol. He says to me, like, have a beer, and he grabs this Nazi knight, uses it to crack open the cap of the bottle and hands it to me. Yeah, so we're in this room here, and there's like these old rusted helmets and some knives and a compass and some canisters. So, this is the clubhouse for the treasure hunters? It belongs to a friend of mine. We have the same passion, the same hobby. There are a lot of treasure hunter groups here.

Our group has been here for 20 years or so. You need a place to bring all your finds. This will be our little kind of museum. André starts taking on his loot and he shows me a whole bunch of old Nazi war helmets, an old rifle, gas mask, gas mask canisters. You know, you have such a big amount of this stuff around here. There's this ornate swastika mounted on an eagle that once clearly went on the top of a flagpole. I mean, it's everywhere.

There's like a boxhole. What's this with the swastika and the eagle here? What is? Look, he wasn't going on and on about how great the night. Nazis were. Andre's quick to tell me that his own uncle died at Auschwitz. I think Andre's position is something like this. This history is ours. All of our lives were somehow wrapped up in this, but he's excited about the fact that he's uncovered all of these relics of history around him. You know, at one point, Andre even makes a joke that his group has found the gold train,

and that's how they got the money to build this clubhouse. But actually, Andre doesn't really believe that there is a gold train. He says, though, that there are other treasures. all sorts big and small that are buried all around in these hills. We are in the most interesting spot we're in the most interesting place during world in Europe. We are in the most interesting spot

when it comes to hidden treasure in Europe. This area used to be owned by the Germans during World War II. There was a decree in April 1946 that every German family had to leave. They hid everything. Still today, people, find stuff that was hidden back then.

Because you had all these Germans that were running for their lives, basically. But before they went, they buried their typewriters, their dresses, I mean, even chocolate bars. Because they were thinking they're going to come back to get this stuff. And then all these new people are moved in. And they take over these empty homes, which had to be kind of creepy. And every time they dig in the gardens or the fields, they unearth these small buried treasures. But Andre is clear to point out. that these small treasures, that's not what he's into.

That's everyday stuff for dudes with metal detectors on Sunday in the woods. He's looking for big Holy Grail-type finds deep in the ground in tunnels beneath the mountain. He reaches behind him and he pulls out this long kind of cardboard cylinder and from it he unfurls this big black and white photograph, which is an aerial photograph taken sometime during the war of the Polish countryside, and he points a thumb at these, like, cluster of maybe like a dozen or so small black specks. And you see that, those are barracks. Those are barracks from a forced labor camp.

There was a camp here, and it doesn't exist now. There were two, two and a half thousand workers here. It's very important to find these camps. Okay, so why are they so important? Because so many people means the Germans were doing a lot of work. We also know how much work could be done in eight hours so we can calculate how long the tunnels are. Tunnels. That's what's really got Andre's attention.

And not just his, but the Gold Train guys, too, and all the other dedicated treasure hunters. You see, in the early 1940s, the Third Reich undertook a massive project, carving miles of underground tunnels beneath the mountains. In fact, it's so big that some people call it a half-completed underground sand. city. This project is called Wiza, which means giant, because it is absolutely giant. These are huge, giant underground. So here I am having lunch with a woman named Joanna Lamparska. She's a local journalist, and she's written books about these tunnels and the treasures that may or may not be in them. The most, the biggest one is a 9,000 square meter.

Thousands of people, thousands of inmates of concentration camp. were to beak those underground. Nobody knows for sure why Germans tried to do it. And there is no documents. The thing that makes exploring these tunnels so tricky is that there are no remaining maps to the complexes. And many of the entranceways were collapsed either by the Nazis or the Soviets. So far, the treasure hunters have found miles and miles of tunnels. I mean, a huge amount of space, 656,000 square feet.

I mean, picture of football field times a lot. It begs the question, why did the Nazis need that much space underground? And there's a lot of theories about this. Some people say that it was to hide the Reich's planes. Others said it was to build an underground city or refuge for the Nazi elite. You know, still others say it was to hide the Reich's bank gold. Every treasure hunter seems to have their own particular means of finding new tunnels that might lead to treasure. And for some, it's comparing maps.

others use geo-radar, even using magic. A day or two later, I'm with another treasure hunter, this guy named Christoff. He looks like Yul Brenner a little bit. He's got a shaved bald head. He's kind of a dashing guy, super deep voice. And we are standing in front of a spot where water is basically coming out of the side of a mountain. There's a bunch of collapsed rocks there. And you can clearly see a small stream just seeping out of it.

Christoph then says, look, the next step to know how big this tunnel is and where it might go involves a very special piece of equipment. And he produces a wooden briefcase. Imagine what you would carry a clarinet in in like 1890. And he opens it up and inside are these beautifully long brass rods. Divining rods. These are like what mystics use to find water in the desert. almost a compass where you ask a question and it points the direction. Is that the idea of the second?

So here he is. He's dressed in these military fatigues with a patch on the shoulder that has a wolf's head. And beneath it, it says, third Reich deposits. Fittingly surreal. So now he asked the question, if there is something that was made by human under the ground. So Christoph sets up a little demonstration for us. He takes us to this open area. And he says, you know, I think there's a tunnel beneath the ground.

here and the way that I find it is this. So you walk across this space with the wands and when you are above the tunnel when you hit the wall the wands will cross. Okay. Carol, my translator, is trying to, I'm talking quietly so it's not to mess up his

concentration. The two rods are pointing forward. He's approaching the wall. He crossed the threshold of the wall, but they didn't cross. He's now going towards he's in what would be the tunnel. marked off on the road. He's got to the other line in the dirt. Oh, man, they cross exactly when he

touched it. Exactly when he touched. Christoph won't tell me exactly how many tunnels he's found this way, but he says officially he's reported finding eight sections of tunnels. And he's taking these tunnels and he's turned them into a museum of sorts. So here we are, right? What's the name of this Rieset complex? Vodas. So there's like a hillside here. and these two big black doors going into the mountain. It's worth pausing for a moment here. Okay, we're in. Because everything I've been told about the tunnel so far

is colorful and interesting, but I'm not really sure what I make of them. Right floor, it's like a real metallic scent here. When I crossed that threshold and I entered them for the first time, two things occur to me. The first is, I'm really aware that people had died in large numbers to dig these times.

It has a crypt-like feel from the moment you walk in. And the second thing is, they're huge. It goes on for quite a while. How many are there in this complex? I mean, I've been in tunnels before. I've been in the coal mining tunnels in Pennsylvania. I mean, I've been in mines. I've seen like the Kraramarbah mines in Italy.

But they pale by comparison. First, it's kind of sort of. small, but then that tunnel gradually expands in size until it becomes larger and larger and larger. And then eventually we get to a spot where it turns into a river and there's a boat there. Wow, the boat is quite big. How deep is the water here? It's up to one and a half meter. We walk down and get into this boat and we start basically moving.

making our way down this underground river deeper into this complex. So he's pulling us along. He's got these ropes that are bolted into the ceiling, and he's pulling our rowboat down like the... It's almost like a trolley car down this flooded tunnel. The main tunnel that we're in is bisected by these kind of cross tunnels. Every like 100 feet or so. And they're all flooded.

And then it crosses with another tunnel. And then all of a sudden the ceiling will open up. Look up. Wow. Wow. There's like a huge hole above us and something. What is that? You see, there's a trolley over us.

Yeah, let's hope it doesn't dry. So there's another tunnel directly above us. So it's the show that there are another tunnel up but now. Yes. The scale in parts of it is enormous. I mean, big enough to fit like an Amtrak train through. And for the first time,

I get it. I get why it would not be a stretch of the imagination to say that someone could park a train down here. It doesn't take much to imagine how you could quickly become obsessed with this. Part of me is thinking, like, maybe I'm going to be the dude. The gold chain's over there. I mean, it fills you with wonder. You feel like there must be something down here. Back at the clubhouse, I'm talking to Andre.

Come on. What is it the year after? What do you think that's down there? And he kind of gives me this little knowing smile. And then he reaches into the vest pocket of his coat. Clearly, he's had this thing in there the whole time and he's been waiting for this moment. And he pulls out this piece of paper,

and he's flashing it around, and I'm trying to see what it is. And then he keeps it there for, like, just long enough for us, the glimpse at... It looks like a UFO. A UFO. Tell him that looks like a flying saucer. Is that what that is?

Yeah. They were built first here by the Nazis underground during the war. I was like, dude, where did you get that? And he's like, this is from a survivor. He claims it was made by one of the prisoners from one of these forced labor camps. Remember, Andre took out that map and showed us the barracks from the prisoner camp. He claims it was one of those guys that made it. I'm like, can you corroborate this?

Is there any firsthand accounts? And he says, as a matter of fact, there is. He takes out his cell phone. He's going to call my friend Edward, who's in his 80s, but was a boy during the war, and he saw. So Edward says, basically, oh, yeah. When I was a boy playing, we saw these, he called them flying barrels, these mysterious flying devices that were shooting around. I'm skeptical, but I'm listening. And it was difficult to hear Edward

because periodically there was this kind of disturbance on the line, as some sort of clicking or beeping or something when we got off the phone. Andre's like, did you hear that noise on the phone? We were being tapped. Tap? By who?

The guards? And he proceeds to tell me this legend in Lower Silesia that there are these guards that were left in place by the Germans at the end of the war to protect the secrets that they buried in the ground there. The Secret Society was founded by former SS members who escaped Argentina and Brazil after World War II. It is financed and run by siblings of those SS members and people who share their worldview. And does he think that they're still operating here?

Yes. André has all these stories about these would-be guards, suspicious locals and these Germans that come in and do spulunking that he believes are on the lookout. In fact, he says that one time he's on one of these treasure-hunting missions and he looks over his shoulder and he just knows that these guys are following them. They were looking very elegant with fancy hair styles, too fancy to be from around here. We got into a car and they started following us immediately.

They turned right when we did. We turned around and so today. It was obvious that we were being followed. So I know what you're thinking, right? We're talking about guys who are waving around magic wands and they believe in UFOs and there's some crazy Nazi secret society that's watching them. It all sounds, I know how it sounds.

But do you ever say to them, come on? Yes. Yeah, sometimes, yes. I asked them, come on, do you believe that there was gold in the gold train? And they say, come on, this is bullion. There was machines on a gold train, not gold. Yohanna Lamparska, she's the journalist who's written about the history here,

she says that there actually were a few Germans who stayed in the region right after the war. And a myth grew out of this, that these leftover Germans, they were keeping the Soviets who took over away from these real treasures that were buried. Then they said to them, don't dig here. I know the treasure is over there.

They mistaken them, you know. Confusing them, almost like mythic kind of. And people believe this. So, like, what's the deeper thing here? I mean, is this just really about people's lust for gold? I will tell you why. Okay. We have to go back to 1945.

Okay. And what Lamparska says is that this fear, comes from a deeply unsettled feeling, that you're living in a landscape that you don't know in homes that aren't yours, in beds that once belong to someone else. And then on top of that, you've got this landscape with these huge, mysterious holes in the ground.

The thousands of people were forced to dig, and you don't know why. So what do you do? Your imagination rushes into fill the void. Maybe Andre and Christoph and the rest of the rest of the world. the treasure hunters are just working hard. I mean, really, really hard to make sense of the world around. Jake Halpern, his article Nazi Underground about the Polish treasure hunters,

appeared in the New Yorker, and you can find a link to it at New YorkerRadio.org. Jake is also the author of Bad Paper, a book about debt on Wall Street. I'm David Remnick, and that's it for today. You can stick with the show all week by following us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. Thanks for listening and have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riann & Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Michael Lee Rao, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Jessica Henderson, Rob Byers, Carol Chichotky, Eric Molinsky, and Nick Palm Garden. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.