WASHINGTON — Mark J. Penn, one of the primary architects of President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, met briefly with President Trump in the Oval Office last week, according to two people in attendance.

The face-to-face meeting, the first between Mr. Trump and a onetime loyal adviser to the Clintons, marked what some saw as the inevitable conclusion of Mr. Penn’s long-running political metamorphosis.

As Democrats have moved to the left, Mr. Penn, with his centrist politics, has become alienated from a party in which he once reigned as a winning pollster and is a frequent guest on Fox News and the author of op-ed articles criticizing the special counsel’s investigation as a “partisan, open-ended inquisition.” He has even adopted the president’s term, “deep state,” to describe people he views as Democratic operatives sabotaging the Trump administration from within the government.

Mr. Penn arrived at the White House last week with Andrew Stein, a Democrat and former president of the New York City Council, who has known Mr. Trump for decades.

Mr. Penn, who was credited with helping to keep Mr. Clinton focused during his impeachment, sat across the Resolute Desk from the president at a moment when Democratic lawmakers are wrestling with whether to begin impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump as the special counsel’s investigation finally comes to an end.

But people in attendance said the meeting was not about politics or impeachment, and was brief.

It was scheduled, according to one person who was there, by Mr. Stein. Mr. Penn, who last fall helped write an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal titled “Hillary Will Run Again,” came along at Mr. Stein’s invitation.

In the meeting, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Penn for his commentary on the special counsel’s investigation and pumped him about how to interpret the findings of his public poll, the Harris Poll, which puts the president’s favorability rating at about 45 percent.

The three former New Yorkers also spent time discussing Edward I. Koch, the New York mayor who was Mr. Penn’s first client and a longtime nemesis of Mr. Trump’s. The two engaged in heated battles over Mr. Trump’s development projects.

Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff, and Kellyanne Conway, the counselor to the president, also attended the meeting, which lasted about 20 minutes.

In an email, Mr. Penn played down the significance of the visit. “I tagged along with my friend Andrew Stein at his request to one of his meetings, and for the first time to meet the president,” he said. “I have had hundreds of meetings with presidents and I don’t relay their conversations but this was a cordial meeting and no advice was given or taken — but old-time politics was discussed.”

Mr. Penn added, “Despite my misgivings about the Mueller investigation, let me be clear as a lifelong Democrat under no circumstances would I work paid or unpaid for President Trump nor was this meeting about that in any way.”

Mr. Penn was one of three advisers who helped Mr. Clinton navigate toward the political center when he battling a newly empowered Republican majority in Congress led by Newt Gingrich, then the House speaker. He stuck with the Clintons longer than some of Mr. Clinton’s other political gurus, like Dick Morris and Douglas E. Schoen, who became highly vocal Clinton antagonists. Mr. Penn also helped Mrs. Clinton win a New York Senate seat in 2000.

But his fallout with the onetime reigning brand in Democratic politics began during Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, where he clashed with other advisers and was ultimately removed as the chief strategist. Over the past year, like Mr. Schoen and Mr. Morris, he too has won praise on the other side of the political spectrum as he has become seen as a heretic on the left.

Mr. Penn has been praised internally at the White House, and by the president himself, for his fulsome attacks on the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. In his appearances on Fox News — he has been banned from appearing on MSNBC and CNN — and in his opinion pieces in the conservative-leaning opinions pages of The Hill, Mr. Penn has accused Mr. Mueller of overreaching in his investigation.

But an actual sit-down meeting with the president in the Oval Office was, for some former colleagues of Mr. Penn, the inevitable outcome of what they see as his rightward lurch. “Some people are loyal to Republican red, some people to Democratic blue and some capitalism green,” said Philippe Reines, a longtime aide to Mrs. Clinton, who served as her gatekeeper in the Senate and at the State Department.

Mr. Penn currently runs the Stagwell Group, a private equity firm, and claims his political career is behind him, even though his firm owns two public affairs agencies that have worked for both Democratic and Republican officials.

In an interview with Politico Magazine last year, Mr. Penn said that as a White House adviser during Ken Starr’s investigation into Mr. Clinton, he saw up close the emotional damage that a special counsel can wreak on a president and on a functional White House. And he said he saw little difference in how the investigation affected Mr. Clinton then and Mr. Trump now — even though Mr. Clinton never tweeted the words “Witch Hunt!”

“The Clintons didn’t put their emotions on Twitter, but trust me, they had them, and they weren’t particularly different from Trump’s,” he said.

Mr. Clinton, for his part, has dismissed his former adviser’s commentary. “He wasn’t invited back into the campaign,” Bill Clinton said in a “PBS NewsHour” interview last summer. “He’s been mad about it, and I think it’s silly.” Mr. Clinton called Mr. Penn’s arguments attacking Mr. Mueller “silly and dangerous.”

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