Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein compares Trump legal team’s 2018 e-mails to ‘The Godfather’
Carl Bernstein, now 75, is among the reporters who covered the Watergate scandal extensively back in the 1970s. In the Trump era, Bernstein has often discussed the legal problems of President Donald Trump and his associates during his guest appearances on cable news—and during a March 14 CNN appearance, the veteran journalist/author compared the Trump legal team’s communications with attorney Michael Cohen in 2018 to something out of the Mario Puzo novel/Francis Ford Coppola film “The Godfather.”
Cohen recently shared an April 2018 e-mail with Congress in which a Trump Organization lawyer tried to reassure him about possible legal difficulties. Cohen was told, in that e-mail, “Sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places.”
Asked if he saw, in those 2018 communications, an effort to obstruct Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, Bernstein responded that it “sounds like a little bit of Shakespeare and a lot of Mario Puzo combined.”
Bernstein elaborated, “Do I see this pattern? Of course, the pattern is there—the suggestion of pardons for many people involved in the Russia investigation is out there. There’s no question about it. There’s some ambiguity in the language, but any reasonable person, I think, would conclude that the president wants these people to be under the impression that he may pardon them so that they won’t talk.”
Bernstein (whose 1974 book, “All the President’s Men,” was released a few months before President Richard Nixon’s resignation) went on to say that publicly, Trump has been even more openly brazen than Nixon.
“It is a horrible thing to watch the president of the United States act like this,” Bernstein told CNN. “Nixon didn’t talk like this in public. It’s extraordinary…. There is the matrix of a cover up in front of our very eyes.”
When Bernstein reported on Watergate for the Washington Post in 1972 and 1973, he often teamed up with Bob Woodward—another veteran journalist/author who has been making Nixon/Trump comparisons. Together, Bernstein and Woodward wrote “All the President’s Men” as well as the 1976 book “The Final Days,” which discussed Nixon’s final months in the White House.
