Media coverage of President Trump and his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia has been “pretty spectacular,” according to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein.
But Bernstein told CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday that mistakes happen, referring back to a time when he and former Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward hit a brief rough patch when reporting on the 1970s Watergate scandal.
“The record of the press in reporting the Russia story is actually pretty spectacular,” Bernstein, who is also a CNN political commentator, said. “What I’m saying is the reporting on the Russia story and the Trump presidency has been excellent, by and large. And yes, reporters make mistakes. News organizations make mistakes. In Watergate, we made a mistake.”
Bernstein insisted Trump’s conduct should remain the focus, rather than the conduct of journalists.
His comments come after special counsel Robert Mueller’s office pushed back Friday on a Thursday story by BuzzFeed, which reported that Michael Cohen, Trump’s ex-personal attorney, told federal Russia investigators the president ordered him to be untruthful to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
“It’s clear that from the Mueller statement that some part of what BuzzFeed wrote the special prosecutor believes was in error. Is it the substance of Cohen saying that he was directed by the president to lie, or is it about how the special prosecutor came to know such a thing, if indeed that is what happened? So we’re going to have to wait,” Bernstein said.
Bernstein himself was criticized last year for a story related to Cohen, in which he and other CNN journalists reported Trump’s former fixer saw the president speaking with Donald Trump Jr. about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between top campaign officials and a Kremlin-linked lawyer before it took place. The article stated Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis declined to comment, but BuzzFeed later reported Davis was one of the sources for the story.
Cohen pleaded guilty in November to “knowingly and willfully” making “a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement and representation” to the House and Senate Intelligence committees in 2017. He was sentenced to two months in prison for the charge, which will be served concurrently with the three years he received for campaign finance violations and tax and bank fraud.