Reince Priebus meets with his White House predecessors
President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus is attending a lunch meeting at the White House Friday afternoon with current Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and the small, exclusive club of former White House chiefs of staff.
A White House official said that the meeting is similar to one hosted in 2008 by then-Chief of Staff Josh Bolten to welcome his successor Rahm Emanuel.
“As part of the President’s directive for a smooth transition to the next administration, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough has invited incoming Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to have lunch with him and other former Chiefs of Staff here at the White House on Friday,” the official said.
President Obama’s five chiefs of staff are expected to attend the meeting: McDonough, Jack Lew, Bill Daley, Pete Rouse and Emanuel. President George W. Bush’s two chiefs of staff -- Andy Card and Bolten -- are expected to attend.
John Podesta, President Bill Clinton’s last chief of staff, is expected to attend. Podesta, of course, was the chairman of the Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and his personal emails were leaked to the public by WikiLeaks in the month before the election.
Their lunch takes place amid revelations by the intelligence community that Russians meddled in the presidential election, a judgment that has been attacked by the incoming Trump administration as an attempt to invalidate the election. A day before the lunch, Podesta wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, blasting the FBI Friday for being “broken” after the way it handled Russian cyberattacks intended to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.
“I was surprised to read in the New York Times that when the FBI discovered the Russian attack in September 2015, it failed to send even a single agent to warn senior Democratic National Committee officials,” Podesta wrote. “Comparing the FBI’s massive response to the overblown email scandal with the seemingly lackadaisical response to the very real Russian plot to subvert a national election shows that something is deeply broken at the FBI.”
The other chiefs of staff expected to attend are Samuel Skinner, who worked for President George H.W. Bush, Ken Duberstein, who worked for President Ronald Reagan and Jack Watson, who worked for President Jimmy Carter.
