Even if Donald Trump’s not in the Epstein files, Anthony Scaramucci suspects the president’s real vulnerability lies somewhere even more alarming.
Elon Musk lobbed a bombshell allegation last week that his former pal has previously unknown ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, claiming that’s why the case files have not been made public. Musk later deleted the post without explanation.
Scaramucci, who briefly served as Trump’s White House communications director in 2017, told The Daily Beast Podcast he doesn’t have the answers, but he believes the Epstein claims are not true. However, he thinks Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is the one who holds leverage over Trump.
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“Did he go over the line with Jeff Epstein and do something super-malevolent and super-nefarious? I don’t believe that’s the case, because I think that would have come out. But again, I don’t know,” said Scaramucci, a financier and Trump ally-turned-critic.
“But the flip side is, while I’m saying that to you, I believe there is kompromat on Donald Trump,” he continued. “I don’t know what it is. We all used to say, ‘OK, what is it? What is the hold that Vladimir Putin has on this guy?’”
Scaramucci said it defies logic that Trump would show such deference to a leader like Putin, whose power on the world stage is waning amid economic strain and a faltering war effort in Ukraine.
“He’s in a trainwreck situation at home, and yet he owns the president of the United States,” he said of Putin. “How does he own the president of the United States? You tell me. He has to have something on him, OK, that we don’t understand.”
He speculated that the Kremlin could have gathered compromising material on Trump in the ’80s and ’90s during his prime years as a real estate mogul. He appeared to be alluding to long-standing but unverified claims that the KGB sought to recruit Trump as a Russian asset in the ’80s.
“Not a pee pee tape,” Scaramucci suggested, but “something that would be too much for Trump, even Trump himself, to deal with.”
Scaramucci dismissed the idea that Trump is soft on Putin because he admires authoritarian leaders, saying Trump only cares about himself.
“It’s bulls--t,” he said. “Trump doesn’t love authoritarians. He loves himself, OK? And he would not be kowtowing to Putin, sitting in the biggest economy with the biggest military.”
“He would be shoving Putin, but he doesn’t shove Putin because they got something on him,” he added.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
No evidence has emerged publicly to support the idea that Russia possesses compromising material on Trump, and Trump has explicitly denied ever having worked for Russia.
But Trump’s long history of praising Putin, avoiding direct criticism of the authoritarian leader and downplaying election interference, has fueled questions for years.
