Anthony Scaramucci, former director of communications for the White House and founder of SkyBridge Capital LLC, speaks during the Skybridge Alternatives (SALT) conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, on May 8, 2019.
Joe Buglewicz | Bloomberg | Getty Images
President Donald Trump‘s former body man went to work on Wall Street for Anthony Scaramucci after being fired from the White House just a year earlier.
John McEntee, the former personal assistant who was let go in 2018 after reportedly being denied a security clearance, went to work for SkyBridge, the vocal Trump critic’s hedge fund, during his hiatus from the White House, according to a financial disclosure report and people with direct knowledge of the matter. They declined to be named as the details had yet to be made public.
McEntee returned to the White House this year and later became head of the Office of Presidential Personnel. During his time away from the Trump administration, he worked for SkyBridge from June 2019 until September of that year, these people said. He was not an official employee of SkyBridge, but instead was paid as an independent contractor, these people added.
Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, was fired after just 11 days as White House communications director in 2017.
Part of McEntee’s tenure conducting contract work for the executive’s firm came as Scaramucci started to publicly turn against Trump. Scaramucci has since backed Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
After his return to the White House earlier this year, McEntee filed a financial disclosure report that lists SkyBridge Capital as one of his sources of compensation that exceeded $5,000. The filing only describes McEntee’s work for the firm as “political consulting.”
He was paid consulting fees through his limited liability company, the McEntee Group. People familiar with the matter said that McEntee’s consulting work revolved around Scaramucci’s famous business conference known as SALT.
In December 2019, the conference took place in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. Former White House chief of staff John Kelly was one of the featured speakers.
Scaramucci said in an interview with Worth, a lifestyle magazine, that the conference had 1,500 participants. Kelly had been interviewed during a prior SALT conference in Las Vegas.
McEntee also lists Ballard Partners, a lobbying shop run by pro-Trump bundler Brian Ballard, as a firm he worked with using an identical job description on his disclosure report. McEntee had a stint in 2018 as a senior advisor for Trump’s reelection campaign.
Representatives for the White House, SkyBridge and Ballard Partners did not respond to a request for comment.
Scaramucci, who was previously a staunch Trump supporter, began to blast the president in August 2019, while McEntee was working for the firm.
In an interview with CNN at the time, Scaramucci said Trump’s “actually dissembling a little bit, and he’s sounding more and more nonsensical.” He told Axios that same month, “We are now in the early episodes of ‘Chernobyl’ on HBO, where the reactor is melting down and the apparatchiks are trying to figure out whether to cover it up or start the clean-up process.”
The president and Scaramucci have since engaged in a back-and-forth Twitter feud.
The hedge-fund executive said in a recent interview that one of Trump’s attacks led him to picking up 50,000 new Twitter followers.
McEntee, on the other hand, appears to have settled in at his job as the chief of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel.
Axios reported in February that McEntee called on White House liaisons to identify appointees who would be deemed “Never Trumpers.”
He traveled with Trump and his team to storm-ravaged Lake Charles, Louisiana, over the weekend.
