Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, one of the media’s experts on Watergate, as he and Bob Woodward were the famed Washington Post journalists who broke the story that led to the resignation of President Nixon, formed a very different reputation in the era of President Trump.
Bernstein on Sunday presented his response to the breakthrough of the leaked recording of a heated telephone conversation between Trump and Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger about the state election results certified for President-elect Biden.
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“It’s not déjà vu, it was something worse than what happened in Watergate,” Bernstein told CNN. “We have both a criminal president of the United States in Donald Trump and a subversive president of the United States at the same time with this one person, who is undermining the foundation of our democracy and willing to act criminally in that undermining . “
While such comments by Berstein may be just as cool of the journalist whose reporting torpedoed Nixon’s presidency, the comments may also be as well-known as what current CNN political analyst Watergate repeatedly called out during the Trump presidency. .
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In September, when Bob Woodward released his audio tapes of Trump speaking candidly about the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak in the early months of the pandemic, Bernstein declared them the ‘smoking weapon of his negligence’.
“This is a breach of duty, which is recorded as no other presidential breach of duty, even more so than the Nixon ties in this case,” Bernstein said. “The last time this happened during the end of Nixon’s presidency, the Republican leadership … went to the White House and told Nixon to resign. And the facts here are even greater than in Watergate. ‘
During CNN’s coverage of the Ukraine scandal, Berstein claimed that there were ‘echoes’ of Watergate and later indicated that in some respects it was ‘perhaps worse’.
Back in 2018, amid the Russian investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Bernstein considered the entire Trump presidency “worse than Watergate.”
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“What we’re watching in the Trump presidency is worse than Watergate. It’s worse than Watergate, as I say, because the system worked in Watergate,” Bernstein explained. ‘The heroes in Watergate were Republicans who demanded that the president be held accountable, who demanded that he be transparent, who demanded to know what the president knows and when he knows it, and who conducted a dual inquiry has led, in fact, to understand and find out what Nixon did, while the Republicans on Capitol Hill have so far done almost everything in their power to obstruct and undermine the legal investigation. So this is a totally different and much more dangerous situation. “
Bernstein also appealed to Watergate while beating Trump’s struggles with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2018 joint press conference in Helsinki, referring to the dismissal of FBI Director James Comey in 2017 as ‘potentially more dangerous’. ‘as Watergate, and he even hit Nixon comparisons before Trump took it. office, and in December 2016 claimed that “Richard Nixon was nothing in terms of lying, compared to what we saw of Donald Trump.”
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However, Bernstein sang a different tune during the 2016 election, only to actually check Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton’s email scandal was ‘bigger than Watergate’, saying that ‘no way’ the comparison was accurate.
“Watergate was about a criminal president of the United States who presided over a criminal administration from the day he left until the day he left,” Bernstein said during a panel discussion in October 2016, although he later stressed that Clinton’s behavior was still ‘reckless’. . “
Following Trump’s leaked phone call, critics on social media pointed to Bernstein’s repeated allegations.
“Is there anything that is NOT worse for this man than Watergate?” asked commentator Drew Holden, estimating more than a dozen comparisons to Watergate in a long Twitter estimate.
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“Lol, you can not make this stuff up,” federal contributor Benjamin Weingarten responded.
“Carl Bernstein calls everything literally worse than Watergate,” wrote GOP strategist Chris Barron.