Carl Bernstein touted on Sunday his effort to convince his fellow journalists to investigate the “important, crucial, dangerous story” about Republicans’ private doubts about President Trump’s fitness to be president.
The famed investigative reporter said he’s been talking to Republicans in Congress, along with members of the military and intelligence community, about their thoughts on the president, and he said the “conclusion” he has drawn is that there is a pervasive sense that Trump is unqualified to lead.
“They have been raising the very question of his stability and his mental fitness to be president of the United States. This is not me, Carl Bernstein, saying this. This is me being a reporter,” he said.
Bernstein, during a panel on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” urged other journalists to “start making [it] their business” to report on this “important, crucial, dangerous story.”
Some Republicans have come out in public to question Trump’s fitness to be president, including Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who said Trump hasn’t demonstrated the “competence” or the “stability” he needs to succeed.
Still, Bernstein cautioned that he doesn’t expect too many Republicans to follow Corker’s example and go on the record, and called on reporters to “find out” for themselves, even if it means doing so without being able to reveal these politicians’ identities.
“I think the first task is to remember that most of the good reporting, real deep reporting investigative reporting we do does involve anonymity to our sources,” Bernstein said, adding that going to Democrats for their opinion is not as valuable because they might have an “axe to grind.”
“Primarily, we need to go to Republicans in Congress, we need to go to the top intelligence officials, military officials and ask them on background, as we call it in our profession, and perhaps off the record, what do they think about the president’s stability and fitness to be president of the United States,” Berstein said. “Because many of those, for weeks and even months, that I’ve been talking to have openly questioned it and in the past couple weeks it’s become a cascade, a torrent, a river, of serious questions about whether the president of the United States is fit and stable enough to be president.”
Several Democrats have called for President Trump’s removal from the White House, with Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., pushing for use of Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to give Vice President Mike Pence and eight members of the Cabinet the authority to force Trump out for being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
Bernstein said such a “highly politicized event” is “very unlikely to happen.”
However, referring to the “national emergency” that some GOP politicians, and even some people who have left the White House, are talking about, Bernstein said it is the job of reporters to find out how pervasive that talk really is.
“Maybe what I’m being told is not as pervasive as I believe it is. Let’s find out. But we need, as journalists, to make this our primary function right now in many regards in terms of covering this presidency,” Bernstein said. “But doing it very thoughtfully and carefully and this is not about our opinions. This is about what others are saying who know the president and the institution, and incidentally there are people who have left the White House that I’ve talked to that say the same thing and are very worried about the stability of the president of the United States.
