Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman expressed his astonishment on MSNBC over recent reporting that Vice President JD Vance was assembling a team including Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel for a secret dinner to strategize over how to make the Jeffrey Epstein case files scandal go away.

Vance, for his part, has denied that any such dinner strategy session was planned, and it appears to have been postponed following media scrutiny.

"Harry, you and I have talked many times about the fact that my legal training comes from law and order," said anchor Ali Velshi. "So I don't know about these things, but I've been led to believe over the years that it would be inappropriate for the president and the attorney general, or the president and the FBI head, to be having certain discussions. And if they were about the president, potentially, and his legal jeopardy, it would be highly inappropriate. I don't know if it crosses over a line into illegal, but it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that should be happening."

"You know a lot more, it's clear, than they do," said Litman. "There are two separate, really serious problems here. The first is, as you say, James Comey and basketball. They shouldn't be in the White House, period, in any kind of situation where there's any possible criminal investigation in the air. That is a norm, a really serious one, that has long since been bulldozed in Trump 1.0."

A bigger issue, though, he said, is that "the DOJ themselves — Bondi, Blanche, as you say, Patel — they are there as to help be political fix-it people for Trump in a political scandal. It has nothing to do with their job description, their oath of office, their service to the American people. They are there, they swore an oath of office, to execute the laws, to only think about the American people."

That being the case, "to be in on political discussions about how we handle this scandal, that's a whole new kind of departure, a very serious one," Litman added. "And it completely compromises the DOJ and its intended function. It's not simply just playing ball, it's playing ball on politics that you shouldn't be in the arena, not to mention the court."

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