Jennifer Rubin writes in today's WaPo, The Right Turn:
"President Trump’s unprecedented meeting on Monday with the FBI director and deputy attorney general regarding a case in which he is directly involved may turn out to be the defining moment of his presidency and for his party. Bob Bauer at the Lawfare blog writes:
[The meeting] was a brazen assertion of presidential authority over the investigation. It was a flaunting of Trump’s belief that even in a highly sensitive matter that bears on his own interests, Trump controls “his” department and can call it to account as he wishes. It is true that the meeting was publicly disclosed, and that the White House issued a statement after-the-fact, but this is not so much an exercise in transparency as it is a victory lap. In his flagrant disregard of a vital norm, Trump is bent on sending a message, and perhaps that message is just as important to him as the substance of the agreement reached by the meeting’s participants.
The meeting’s goal of answering a demand from senior Republican congressional leadership contributes significantly to this fouling of appropriate process. It injects a directly partisan note into the meeting’s function. If the intention was to address a serious and sincerely raised question about the integrity of law enforcement procedures, then the White House would have made a public point of also engaging the Democratic leadership. The president could have directed that that congressional leadership across the aisle be briefed on the issues raised, the agreement reached, and the reasons for extraordinary measures.
[note: end of Bauer quote: having trouble formatting this]
Naturally, Democrats protested vehemently. On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sent a forceful letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray declaring that the meeting “is completely improper in its proposed form and would set a damaging precedent for your institutions and the rule of law.” They warned, “We can think of no legitimate oversight justification for the ex parte dissemination – at the direction of the president – of investigative information to the president’s staunchest defenders in Congress and, ultimately, to the president’s legal defense team.” However, they wrote, if Rosenstein and Wray think the meeting is necessary to prevent things from “devolving into an outright constitutional crisis,” then the only proper body to receive information was the so-called Gang of Eight (the majority and minority leaders of both houses and the chairmen and ranking members of the House Intelligence Committee).
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