Anthony Scaramucci took aim at Donald Trump’s recent “poisoning the blood” remarks on Friday and told CNN that the former president’s anti-immigrant rant was a “total dog whistle.”

Scaramucci, a frequent Trump critic since his brief stint in the White House, weighed in on his ex-boss’ xenophobic comments which have been condemned for echoing the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler.

“He knows exactly what he’s doing,” said Scaramucci when asked by CNN’s Abby Phillip why Trump keeps saying a phrase “lifted” from the Nazi leader.

“He puts things out there, sort of with a forked tongue. He’ll say one thing and say, ‘Oh geez, I didn’t realize that that was from that,’ but he does know that it’s from that.”

Trump has since claimed that he’s “never read ’Mein Kampf’” and, on Friday, declared that he’s “not a student of Hitler.”

The claim conflicts with a 1990 Vanity Fair story that described Ivana Trump – the former president’s first wife – noting that her then-husband read a book of Hitler’s collected speeches and kept it “in a cabinet by his bed.”

Scaramucci told Phillip that someone wrote the “poisoning the blood” speech for the former president knowing that “Hitler said it.”

“I do believe him that he has not read ‘Mein Kampf,’ OK, because I don’t think this guy has ever read a book … The joke on the campaign is that he’s written more books than he read,” he said.

H/T: Mediaite