NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (July 22): Fractures in the White House over President Donald Trump’s legal and communications strategies erupted in abrupt and dramatic fashion on Friday, when Press Secretary Sean Spicer resigned after Trump hired financier Anthony Scaramucci as his communications director.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Spicer’s principal deputy, would assume his job, Scaramucci said. In his first appearance at the White House briefing room podium, he deftly wished Spicer well -- “I hope he goes on to make a tremendous amount of money” -- and brushed away his own old criticisms of the president.

“He brings it up every 15 seconds,” Scaramucci said of a 2015 television appearance in which he called Trump “a hack.” Scaramucci said he’s repeatedly apologized for “one of the biggest mistakes I made because I was an inexperienced person in politics. He’s never forgotten it. You’ve never forgotten it.”

A day earlier, Trump appointed attorney John Dowd to lead the legal team representing him in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, replacing Marc Kasowitz. Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the legal team, confirmed he resigned, and a person familiar with his decision said he had grown frustrated with the White House’s defense strategy.

The inconsistency of that strategy was demonstrated on Friday. Dowd said in an interview that Trump did not plan to attack the credibility of lawyers working on Mueller’s team, even as Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said in a Fox interview that Mueller’s investigation was “all a hoax” and criticized campaign contributions to Democrats by some of Mueller’s deputies.

Scaramucci, 53, is expected to appear frequently on television speaking on Trump’s behalf, a role he’s voluntarily filled for months. He was a campaign fundraiser for Trump and regular adviser during the presidential transition who’s been considered for multiple jobs in the administration, most recently ambassador to the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

He told reporters that his job would be to improve the perception of Trump’s performance as president.

“There has been an arbitrage spread between how well we are doing and how well some of you guys think we are doing and we are going to work hard to close that spread,” Scaramucci said.

One person familiar with the changes said that Trump offered Scaramucci the communications job out of a sense of loyalty to his surrogate, whom he calls “the Italian kid.” Spicer resigned out of frustration, the person said: Scaramucci is not expected to perform the traditional duties of a communications director, such as planning messaging campaigns for the president’s policies, and that work would have fallen to the already overwhelmed press secretary.

Spice said in an interview on Fox News’s “Hannity” that Trump had asked him not to resign.

“He wanted to bring some new folks in to help rev up the communications operation, and after reflection my decision was to recommend to the president that I give Anthony and Sarah a clean slate to start from,” Spicer said, according to excerpts of the interview the network released. “He, after some back and forth, understood that the offer that I was making was something that was in the best interest of the administration.”

The White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, said he backed Scaramucci’s hiring.

“I support Anthony 100 percent,” he said in a text message. “We go back a long way and are very good friends.”

Spokesmen Frustrated

Priebus and Spicer are close, having worked together for years at the Republican National Committee before joining the White House. But Priebus has no plans to leave his job, a person familiar with his thinking said.

Scaramucci said he’s been “personal friends” with Priebus for six years. “A little like brothers, we rough each other up once in a while,” he said.

Scaramucci agreed in January to sell his approximately 45 percent stake in SkyBridge Capital. The buyer group included a subsidiary of HNA Group, the Chinese conglomerate, as well as a little-known company called RON Transatlantic.

Kushner’s Role

Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, began planning a couple weeks ago to bring Scaramucci into the communications office at the White House, according to a person familiar with the matter. Kushner was impressed by the fact that CNN retracted a story about Scaramucci in June, said the person. That story cited an anonymous source saying the Senate Intelligence Committee was reviewing an alleged meeting between Scaramucci and a Russian investment-fund executive.

Kushner has suggested giving Scaramucci a larger White House role over time, said the person, who asked not to named because the discussions haven’t been made public.

The New York Times first reported Spicer’s resignation, which it said was in protest over Scaramucci’s hiring. The White House communications staff gathered in Spicer’s office Friday morning, where applause was heard shortly after the news broke.

Spicer’s Struggles

Spicer’s departure from the administration was sudden. On Thursday, Spicer traveled with the president to a meeting at the Pentagon and told reporters he was still planning his family’s summer vacation schedule around his duties. He attended a farewell drinks for a White House reporter departing the beat Thursday night, mingling with members of the media and even former Obama White House press staffers.

Spicer struggled to adjust to the demands of the job from the outset. During his first official press event a day after Trump’s inauguration ceremony, Spicer berated reporters about the crowd size at the inauguration, using false information that was quickly debunked.

In the weeks that followed, Spicer’s press briefings were regularly packed with reporters and aired on live television as he repeatedly flummoxed the media with incorrect or inconsistent statements.

He has been regularly lampooned on NBC’s Saturday Night Live by actress Melissa McCarthy, who portrayed Spicer as a belligerent and unprepared spokesman often struggling with his words.

But Spicer more recently had retreated from public view. It has been more than a month since he has briefed reporters on-camera, and his deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has instead increasingly taken over the podium in the White House briefing room.