CNN host Jake Tapper on Sunday called out newly-appointed White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci for continuing to deny Russia's interference in the U.S. election.
On Sunday's State of the Union program, Tapper asked Scaramucci if President Donald Trump was prepared to sign a sanctions bill against Russia.
"There's a lot of misinformation," Scaramucci said, dismissing the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies. "Somebody said to me the other day -- I don't want to say who -- if the Russian actually hacked the this situation and spilled out those emails, you would have never seen it. You would have never had any evidence of them. Meaning that they're super confident in their deception skills and hacking."
"Wait, wait, wait," Tapper interrupted. "I don't know who this anonymous person is."
"How about it's the president, Jake," Scaramucci revealed. "He called me from Air Force One and basically said to me, 'This is -- maybe they did it, maybe they didn't do it.'"
"This is exactly the issue!" Tapper noted. "We have experts, the U.S. intelligence agencies [are] unanimous, both Obama appointees and Trump appointees -- the director of national intelligence, the head of the National Security Agency, the head of the FBI. I mean, all of these intelligence experts, saying, Russia hacked the election, they tried to interfere in the election."
"President Trump is contradicting it and you're siding with President Trump!" the CNN host exclaimed.
"I didn't say I was siding with President Trump," Scaramucci insisted. "I'm his communications director and I'm his advocate on a show like this."
Tapper once again pointed out that Republicans in the Senate and Trump's own intelligence experts agreed that Russia had meddled in the election.
"You're saying, you're going to side with the president," Tapper continued. "Don't you owe a duty to the truth?"
"What about this conversation are you missing, Jake?" Scaramucci quipped. "There are checks and balances in the system for a reason. The president will make that decisions [on the sanction bill] when he makes that decision. You're telling me something is true that could, in fact, be true. I don't have the information in front of me."
