Bob Woodward said the House committee investigating the Capitol riot brought to light his own reporting on former President Donald Trump’s CIA director during its first prime-time hearing on Thursday night.
The Watergate sleuth praised the leaders of the panel, Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), for orchestrating a “brilliant” presentation. In particular, Woodward appeared to be taken by Thompson’s assertion that the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, was “the culmination of an attempted coup” and hearkened back to a finding in his book Peril with fellow Washington Post reporter Robert Costa.
“This is a real serious evaluation done by Gina Haspel, who was the CIA director,” Woodward said during a panel on CNN, along with Carl Bernstein, soon after the hearing ended.
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“This is a controversial CIA director. Maybe it’s impossible to be a CIA director and not be controversial. But tough, was a case officer, spent years and years evaluating leaders, and their stability, and who they were. And this is what she said a week after the election that Trump lost, when he fired Mark Esper, the defense secretary,” Woodward added.
The journalist shared quotes from Haspel reported in the book, including the CIA director telling Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley that Trump was “acting out like a 6-year-old with a tantrum” in refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election, and her warning, “We are on the way to a right-wing coup.”
“I think that’s what we saw tonight,” Woodward added, remarking on the hearing.
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He also compared the presentation to Sen. Joseph McCarthy famously being asked, “Have you no sense of decency?” during a hearing in the 1950s as he pushed allegations of communists infiltrating the government. “And this committee has essentially said to Donald Trump, ‘Do you have no shame?'” Woodward said.
Bernstein, who helped expose the 1970s Watergate scandal in the Nixon administration with Woodward, assessed that after the hearing, “We have a picture now of the audacity of a criminal, conspiratorial president of the United States. Not just sedition, but a coup that he attempted in which he tried to take over the vice presidency, the Department of Justice, the attorney general, the state’s attorneys general.”
