Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein reacted to President Trump evoking the Watergate scandal by remarking on how the commander in chief has had “remarkable success” in sowing distrust nationwide in the federal investigation, which is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Trump brought up the controversy that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 Thursday morning while tweeting about unverified reports that the FBI had a mole inside his presidential campaign.
“Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI ‘SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT,'” Trump tweeted. “Andrew McCarthy says, ‘There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign.’ If so, this is bigger than Watergate!”
During an evening segment on CNN, Bernstein, whose investigative reporting shed light on the Watergate scandal, said in response: “Watergate was about a criminal president, Richard Nixon, who conducted a criminal presidency from the first days of his office until the day he left.”
[Related: Carl Bernstein: Republicans need to confront how facts about Trump are aligning in an ‘ugly way’]
The journalist then pivoted to “one element of a big picture,” which he said is Trump’s influence over his base and Republicans at large.
Citing recent polling that shows three-quarters of Republicans agree with Trump that special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry is a “witch hunt,” Bernstein warned those numbers are going up.
“Even as Mueller makes more and more invisible progress, even as we see a staggering body of evidence that suggests, doesn’t prove, but suggests collusion, and we saw how enthusiastic the president’s son was about colluding with the Russians to get information, and yet we are finding that the conduct of the investigators, the conduct of the press, the conduct of the Democrats, the conduct of Hillary Clinton for tens of millions of Americans has been made the issue by Donald Trump and they have bought into it,” Bernstein said. “And I think we need to acknowledge, he’s having remarkable success there.”
Bernstein has previously condemned Trump’s attacks on the press and said last December that the Trump presidency has been “tainted by the president’s lies.”
