CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin in a new commentary criticizes President Trump and says his firing of FBI Director James Comey represents an "abuse of power."

Toobin writes in The New Yorker that Trump has proven that he is "temperamentally and intellectually unfit" to serve in the White House.

"His belligerence and his mendacity have been astonishing even by his standards. Still, an undignified Twitter feed, albeit one that originates in the Oval Office, is just a national embarrassment, not a constitutional crisis," Toobin wrote.

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"The firing of James Comey, the F.B.I. director, on the other hand, represents not only an abuse of language but an abuse of power."

"In 1976, Congress set the term of the FBI director at 10 years, as part of an effort to "provide the director with a measure of independence from the incumbent Administration," he wrote.

"The law did allow the President to remove the director, but the prevailing norm called for this power to be used sparingly," Toobin said.

He went on to criticize the Trump administration for initially pointing to the FBI's investigation into former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonBarr criticizes DOJ in speech declaring all agency power 'is invested in the attorney general' Virginia Democrat blasts Trump's 'appalling' remark about COVID-19 deaths in 'blue states' The Hill's Campaign Report: Biden asks if public can trust vaccine from Trump ahead of Election Day | Oklahoma health officials raised red flags before Trump rally MORE's email server as the reason behind the firing.

Trump later called Comey a "showboat" and a "grandstander."

Toobin wrote that the president in the past week "all but acknowledged" that he had fired Comey "because the director had made sure that the Bureau continued to investigate the ties between Trump's campaign and the efforts by the Russian government and its allies to hand the election to him."

"This is exactly the kind of investigation that requires the F.B.I. director to have independence; Trump’s short-circuiting of the probe, with Comey’s dismissal, is a grave abuse of Presidential power," Toobin wrote.

Toobin drew comparisons between recent events and the Watergate scandal. But he said the comparisons do not hold when looking at the "Republican response to Trump's lawlessness," which he said has "ranged from full-throated support to muted statements of concern to, mostly silence."