Former Richard Nixon White House Counsel John Dean and famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein on Tuesday tore into Donald Trump over the FBI investigation into possible ties between the president’s campaign and Russia, concluding, as Bernstein argued, that there’s no “question there is a cover-up.”
“As somebody who’s been involved in a cover up on the inside, this has the sound and look and feel of a coverup,” Dean told CNN’s Don Lemon.
Bernstein concurred, telling Lemon, “The question is, what is being covered up—and we don’t know. How might that go to Donald Trump or might not go to Donald Trump—we don’t know.”
Lemon played a clip of Nixon deriding the press during the early stages of the Watergate scandal, asking if Trump’s constant lambasting of the media “[feels] like it did during Watergate?”
“Nixon tried to make the issue in Watergate the conduct of the press instead of the conduct of the president and his men,” Bernstein said, adding, “Donald Trump is doing the same.”
Still, Bernstein argued, there is a distinct difference between Trump and Nixon.
“Richard Nixon was a far less dangerous man than Donald Trump,” Bernstein said.
“Richard Nixon was a capable, able man who understood history, understood the institutions of the United States government,” the Watergate journalist said. “We don’t have that with Donald Trump.”
Pointing to Trump’s unfounded claim that Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential election, Bernstein noted we have a “serial, compulsive liar as the president of the United States.”
“Richard Nixon was a criminal president,” Bernstein continued. “He lied to cover up his criminality. But I think it’s very different when you have someone like Trump who lies in a way we have never seen a president of the United States lie—routinely, make things up out of whole cloth.”
Watch the video below, via CNN:
