Anthony Scaramucci, the guy whose appointment Sean Spicer decided to resign over, has an interesting history with the Trump campaign.
That’s because he started off backing Scott Walker's 2016 presidential campaign financially, and on television in his role as a Fox News contributor.
This isn’t the first time Anthony Scaramucci rallied against Trump either. Back in 2011-12 he was clearly at odds with him.
It wasn’t until late 2016, when Trump became the nominee, that Anthony Scaramucci started donating serious cash to his campaign. For example, here is a donation of $100,000 and a subsequent one of $45,000 to the Trump victory fund.
Scaramucci made all of this cash from being a managing partner at hedge fund called Skybridge capital. He was also a member of Hastings Capital Group, LLC, and sold off his share in this company in 2016, along with Skybridge Capital in 2017.
Before he sold his company assets though, he joined the Trump transition team.
It was under this capacity Scaramucci later met in January with the CEO of Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), Kirill Dmitriev. RDIF is a multi-billion sovereign wealth fund, that also happens to be a target of US sanctions. It should also be noted, these two apparently have conducted business together for years, quoting Bloomberg,
Speaking to Bloomberg Television Tuesday, Scaramucci said he’s long known Dmitriev and worked with him to set up the business delegation as a private citizen.
This meeting prompted Sen. Elizabeth Warren & Sen. Ben Cardin to push for an investigation into whether Scaramucci violated those same US sanctions. It’s unclear whether such an investigation has been launched or not by the Treasury department.
Speaking of Kirill Dmitriev, he has an interesting & relevant past. According to his LinkedIn, before running Vladimir Putin’s foreign investment fund, he worked for Delta Private Equity Partners, the financial arm of The U.S. Russia Investment Fund (TUSRIF).
While Dmitriev was working at Delta Private Equity Partners, the financial arm of TUSRIF, he got to work with Wilbur Ross, Trumps commerce secretary. Ross was leading TUSRIF after being appointed by Bill Clinton in 1995. There are still numerous unanswered questions about Wilbur Ross history, especially when it pertains to his involvement at the Bank of Cyprus, which is essentially an offshore bank for Russian oligarchs.
To tie it all together, Kirill Dmitriev openly praised not only Trump, but specifically Wilbur Ross & Michael Flynn in an interview with Financial Times (paywall) in late November after the election. Michael Flynn is Trump’s former national security advisor and resigned after holding conversations with Russian officials and lying about it.
Going back to Delta Private Equity Partners, in 2009 it was acquired by UFG Private Equity, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank that is based in Russia and “invests in fast-growing companies in Russia and CIS countries”. Deutsche Bank is currently caught up in the Trump-Russia investigation for years of doing business with Trump and the bank's history of money laundering. It should also be noted that the former chairman and chief executive officer of Delta Private Equity Partners is Patricia Cloherty, a business woman that received the order of friendship award from Vladimir Putin.
Hiring someone for a top White House role that has a history of working with people this close to Putin, especially given the investigation, seems like an incredibly weird thing to do. To make it even weirder, you have to look at the history of Anthony Scaramucci trying to work for the White House.
He was hired for a very high positioned role in the White House, though, ultimately George Sifakis was given the role.
The official line is it’s because of conflicts of interest. Scaramucci, in preparation for the new job, sold his business interests to a large Chinese conglomerate, deeply connected to the Chinese communist party. For all intensive purposes, it’s a way of getting influence with the Trump administration.
What's the unofficial, political gossip reason? Reince Priebus blocked him with all of his collective influence. The relationship described in this Vanity Fair piece is puzzling and it only went downhill from there. The New York Times in May wrote “Scaramucci found himself in limbo”.
Then in June, things started to change. He finally got a high ranking position at the Export-Import bank. Nearly a month later, he’s now heading to the White House, even though Sean Spicer strongly opposed it enough to quit and Reince Priebus reportedly had no idea it was happening.
To summarize, the White House staff didn’t want him, it forced Spicer out, and his interactions with sanctioned Russian investment funds makes him a prime target for Robert Mueller to prosecute.
So given all of that, why in the world did Trump hire Anthony Scaramucci?
