Charles Krauthammer is a lion in the world of conservative politics. As such, his words on major news stories come with much more gravity than your typical pundit of any philosophical leaning. So tonight was an interesting night to learn how Mr. Krauthammer would react to the bombshell firing of former FBI Director James Comey.
One of the many news items that came out today regarding this ever-evolving story-cum-scandal is President Trump’s admission that he asked Comey whether or not he was being investigated, something that runs counter to the original reporting of the Comey sacking led by the White House Press Department.
Simply put, Krauthammer stated that, while he didn’t think it illegal for a sitting President to ask an FBI Director about an on-going investigation, “it looks pretty improper,” adding that the accepted standard for such behavior for an FBI chief is that he or she is “not supposed to tell someone whether they are (under investigation) or not.”
Like many other conservative commentators who have opined on this story, Krauthammer compared Trump’s questioning of Comey to the story of Bill Clinton buttonholing of then AG Loretta Lynch regarding an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server.
Watch the clip above courtesy of Fox News. Rough transcript below:
And that came up on Tuesday night when we first read the statement from the president, that very odd statement. By the way, he says I’m not under investigation. The question is, I don’t think it’s illegal for that to be asked or answered. But it looks pretty improper. I thought that’s the standard. You are not supposed to tell someone whether they are or not.
I think the analogy could be drawn to what happened with Loretta lynch. We assumed she was improperly approached by Bill Clinton and that he may, or even the fact that he might have asked was, as you showed in the clip earlier, something that Trump himself has called a disgrace. There is a line here, apparently what we hear from Grassley and Feinstein, it happened, which clears away one question. The other, should it have happened? I think that’s still a question.