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Trump says Steve Scully lied about Twitter account hack after chat with Scaramucci was 'leaked': 'He was an act'

Scully ended up in the middle of a huge Twitter controversy regarding a single-line tweet, poking fun at Trump

President Donald Trump has refused to believe that the Twitter account of C-SPAN political editor Steve Scully, who was supposed to moderate the presently-canceled second presidential debate, was hacked, as a result of which it appeared as if he was communicating with former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci.

The president denounced Scully during an appearance on 'Sunday Morning Futures' with host Maria Bartiromo, calling him a liar and a fraud after Scully ended up in the middle of a huge Twitter controversy regarding a single-line tweet sent from his social media account directed at Scaramucci, which appeared to be poking fun at the president. 

“They all say they were hacked. Every time something happens where they did something and got caught, the first thing they do is they say, ‘Oh, we were hacked, oh, we were hacked,’” Trump said, as reported by Fox News. “He was an act. He knows that he's ashamed. It's a shame.”

We previously reported that when people found out that the second debate was going to be moderated by someone who once interned for Biden, people were already skeptical about his capability to demonstrate a lack of bias in the face-off. So, needless to say, when Scully was caught having a heart-to-heart with Scaramucci, most people wanted him to recuse himself from the moderating the debate. "@Scaramucci should I respond to trump," Scully wrote, to which, the ex-member of the Trump administration said, "Ignore. He is having a hard enough time. Some more bad stuff about to go down."

While Scully's tweet no longer exists, Scaramucci's response to the tweet is still up.

Filmmaker Caleb Hull was convinced that Scully meant to send the tweet as a direct message to Scaramucci and instead made it public. "Yikes, dude. This isn’t a DM. This is public twitter." There were calls for Scully to recuse himself from moderating the debate. Media analyst and author Mark Dice wrote, "You should resign as the debate moderator, that’s what you should do."

Shortly after deleting the tweet, Scully claimed his account got hacked. At the time, Trump took to his Twitter to claim that the debates were biased against him and Scully's tweet proved it. “Steve Scully, the second Debate Moderator, is a Never Trumper, just like the son of the great Mike Wallace. Fix!!!” he tweeted. The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) quickly moved to salvage the situation by tweeting, “Steve Scully notified us that his Twitter account was hacked. CPD reported the apparent hack to the FBI and Twitter, and we understand that the federal authorities and Twitter are looking into the issue.”

C-SPAN said in a statement on Friday: “Last night a tweet from Steve Scully, C-SPAN’s Political Editor, appeared on his timeline communicating with Anthony Scaramucci. Steve Scully did not originate the tweet and believes his account has been hacked.”

Frank Fahrenkopf, co-chair for the Commission on Presidential Debates, told The Hill that Steve Scully was a man of integrity. “Steve is a man of great integrity, okay? I don’t know this question about whether he tweeted something out or not, I do know, and you’ll probably pick up on it in a minute, that he was hacked… Apparently, there’s something now that’s been on television and the radio saying that he talked to Scaramucci… He was hacked. It didn’t happen.”