Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein said Tuesday explosive excerpts from the forthcoming book by his former reporting partner Bob Woodward’s lays bare how President Trump is creating a “national emergency.”
“There is not an element of this that the president of the United States can call fake news or fake book,” Bernstein said during an interview with CNN, the cable news network with which he is contributor. “This is the real story of Donald Trump naked, as president of the United States.”
Bernstein covered the Watergate scandal with Woodward in the 1970s while the pair were both working for the Washington Post. Their reporting contributed to the eventual resignation of former President Richard Nixon amid the controversy.
Woodward is still an associate editor of the Post, which on Tuesday published snippets from “Fear: Trump in the White House,” set for public release on Sept. 11.
In the excerpts, current and former White House officials are quoted making incendiary comments about Trump, including remarks from chief of staff John Kelly and Secretary of Defense James Mattis questioning the president’s intelligence.
Bernstein argued Woodward’s reporting creates “an irrefutable picture” of a troubled Trump administration because of his methodology, “which is to go exhaustively to source after source after source.”
“It is time for the Republicans to say, ‘The Trump presidency is a national emergency, and it is up to us, both parties, to treat the Trump presidency as a national emergency,'” Bernstein continued. “We’re just getting at the surface of what’s in this book.”
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Tuesday dismissed Woodward’s book as “nothing more than fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees, told to make the President look bad.”
“While it is not always pretty, and rare that the press actually covers it, President Trump has broken through the bureaucratic process to deliver unprecedented successes for the American people,” Sanders wrote in a statement. “Democrats and their allies in the media understand the President’s policies are working and with success like this, no one can beat him in 2020 – not even close.”
