Watergate-era White House lawyer: Pres. Trump is acting 'like a 7-year-old' caught in a lie

John Dean -- the Watergate-era White House senior counsel to Pres. Richard Nixon -- said that Pres. Donald Trump is acting like "a 7-year-old" when it comes to the accusations against his presidential campaign and his unsubstantiated claims that former Pres. Barack Obama "tapped the wires" at Trump Tower in the weeks before the 2016 election.

Dean was appearing on CNN to discuss Obama's response to Trump's explosive allegations -- which many now believe were based on a conspiracy theory Trump read on Breitbart.com.

Anchor Kate Bolduan asked, "What did you think, John, when you saw this explosive allegation coming from Pres. Trump against Pres. Obama?"

"My first reaction was, 'How low will Pres. Trump go?' rather than him saying how low will Obama go," Dean replied.

Dean reiterated what many have said regarding the Trump tweets, that no president can unilaterally order a wiretap of a private citizen. He went on to note what many astute observers of Trump have pointed out, that his is a character study in projection.

"He seems to be a man that projects on to others what is falling on him," said Dean. "We saw if during the campaign. When Hillary Rodham Clinton called him Putin's puppet, he turned around and called Hillary Putin's puppet. Something like a 7-year-old might."

"He does this on a larger scale," Dean said with regards to suspicions that Trump aides were in communication with the Russian government during the 2016 campaign. Rather than face the allegations, he is trying to turn them around. "I think he sees the Watergate type atmosphere descending on his White House, so he is now turning around and charging it against Obama to try to deflect attention off of himself."

Trump is "playing the press," Dean said, but the Washington press corps is going to be a more difficult creature to tame than the New York City tabloids who Trump did battle with in the 1980s.

Watch the video, embedded below: