Former President Donald Trump has surpassed Richard Nixon as the poster child of corruption, according to Watergate sleuths Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
The pair, famous for how they helped expose the Watergate scandal in the Nixon administration nearly 50 years ago, were again published by the Washington Post on Sunday, days ahead of when the House committee investigating the Capitol riot is scheduled to hold the first in a series of summer hearings, calling Trump the first “seditious” president.
Whereas “instruments of American democracy finally stopped Nixon dead in his tracks, forcing the only resignation of a president in American history,” Woodward and Bernstein write that Trump “not only sought to destroy the electoral system through false claims of voter fraud and unprecedented public intimidation of state election officials, but he also then attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to his duly elected successor, for the first time in American history.”
CARL BERNSTEIN SAYS JAN. 6 COMMITTEE HAS EVIDENCE TO SHOW ‘REAL CONSPIRACY’
Trump, who has denied responsibility for the Capitol riot, engaged in a “deception that exceeded even Nixon’s imagination,” they wrote, referring to the 45th president’s efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election.
Woodward and Bernstein draw a direct line between Trump’s actions and the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the day lawmakers gathered to certify Joe Biden’s presidential victory, with former Vice President Mike Pence presiding and refusing to play along with any bid to overturn the election’s outcome.
“On that day, driven by Trump’s rhetoric and his obvious approval, a mob descended on the Capitol and, in a stunning act of collective violence, broke through doors and windows and ransacked the House chamber, where the electoral votes were to be counted. The mob then went in search of Pence — all to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Trump did nothing to restrain them,” they wrote.
Trump therefore accomplished something no other commander in chief in history has done since the founding of the nation, Woodward and Bernstein said.
“By legal definition this is clearly sedition — conduct, speech or organizing that incites people to rebel against the governing authority of the state. Thus, Trump became the first seditious president in our history,” they wrote.
Woodward, who remains an associate editor at the Washington Post, and Bernstein said what they wrote was published as a new foreword in the 50th anniversary edition of All The President’s Men, a book on the Watergate scandal first published in 1974 months before Nixon resigned.
Some allies of Trump claimed the rioters who swarmed the Capitol, disrupting the counting of electoral votes, messed up a plan, dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep,” to enlist members of Congress and put pressure on Pence to stall the Jan. 6 certification and send electoral votes back to several battleground states where GOP-led legislatures could try to overturn the results over concerns about fraud and irregularities. Lawmakers, along with Pence, reconvened that night and certified Biden’s victory.
The select Jan. 6 committee has promised to present “previously unseen material” when it holds a prime-time hearing on Thursday.
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The panel, which Trump has disparaged as a political witch hunt, has been investigating whether the former president oversaw a criminal conspiracy, sources told the Guardian in a report published earlier this year. Woodward and Bernstein seem to agree Trump is culpable in such a scheme.
“Carl and I in our endless discussion agree on, really, one point,” Woodward said during a joint appearance with Bernstein on CNN host Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources on Sunday. “There is an abundance of overwhelming evidence that this was a criminal conspiracy to subvert a lawful function of government. It’s in the law. It just says that that is a crime,” he added, with Bernstein giving an approving nod.
