Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, one of the leading media experts at Watergate, as he and Bob Woodward were the famous Washington Post journalists who released the story that led to President Nixon’s resignation, formed a very different reputation in the era of President Trump .
On Sunday, Bernstein offered his reaction to the breaking news about the recording of a heated telephone conversation between Trump and Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, about the state election results that were certified for President-elect Biden.
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“It is not déjà vu, it was much worse than what happened at Watergate,” Bernstein told CNN. “We have 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, subverting the very foundations of our democracy and wanting to act criminally in that subversion.”
While such comments by Berstein may sound quite frightening to the journalist whose reports torpedoed Nixon’s presidency, the comments may also sound as familiar as the CNN political analyst has repeatedly invoked Watergate repeatedly during Trump’s presidency.
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In September, while Bob Woodward released his Trump audio tapes talking openly about the severity of the coronavirus outbreak in the early months of the pandemic, Bernstein declared them “the smoking weapon of his neglect”.
“It is an abandonment of duty, recorded as no other abandonment of presidential duty was, even more than Nixon’s tapes in this case,” said Bernstein. “The last time this happened during the end of Nixon’s presidency, the Republican leadership … went to the White House and told Nixon that he needed to resign. And the facts here are even more serious than at Watergate.”
During CNN’s coverage of the Ukraine scandal, Berstein said there were “echoes” of Watergate and later indicated that it was “perhaps worse in some ways”.
In 2018, amid a Russian investigation led by Special Adviser Robert Mueller, Bernstein called the entire Trump presidency “worse than Watergate”.
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“What we’re seeing in the Trump presidency is worse than Watergate. It’s worse than Watergate, as I said, because the system worked at Watergate,” explained Bernstein. “The heroes at Watergate were the Republicans who demanded that the president be held accountable, who demanded that he be transparent, who demanded to know what the president knew and when he knew, and who conducted a bipartisan investigation that led, in fact, to understand and find out what Nixon did, while Republicans on Capitol Hill have so far done almost everything they could to prevent and undermine legitimate investigation. Therefore, it is a totally different and much more dangerous situation. “
Bernstein also invoked Watergate while criticizing Trump’s intimacy with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2018 joint press conference in Helsinki, referred to the resignation of FBI director James Comey in 2017 as “potentially more dangerous” than Watergate, and he even made comparisons with Nixon before Trump took office, claiming in December 2016 that “Richard Nixon was nothing, in terms of lies, compared to what we saw from Donald Trump.”
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However, during the 2016 election, Bernstein sang a different tune, just to verify Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton’s email scandal was “bigger than Watergate”, saying that “by no means” the comparison it was accurate.
“Watergate was about a criminal president of the United States who presided over a criminal administration from the day he took office until the day he left office,” Bernstein said during a panel discussion in October 2016, although he later emphasized that the Clinton’s conduct was still “reckless.”
After the leak of Trump’s phone call, critics on social media pointed to Bernstein’s repetitive claims.
“Is there anything that is NOT worse than Watergate for this guy?” Commentator Drew Holden asked, estimating more than a dozen Watergate comparisons on a long Twitter topic.
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“Lol, you can’t invent these things,” reacted federalist taxpayer Benjamin Weingarten.
“Carl Bernstein literally calls everything worse than Watergate,” wrote GOP strategist Chris Barron.