The investigative journalist famous for his original news reporting on the 1972 Watergate scandal, Carl Bernstein, weighed in on Thursday on the explosive controversy surrounding the fallout of a July 25 call President Donald Trump made to the Ukrainian president.
According to The Hill , Bernstein, a CNN analyst, didn’t mince words in his opinion on the matter, claiming the president appears to be in a serious predicament given what he labeled as a clear-cut case of corruption.
“We are seeing both in real time, with the president’s remarks and also through documentary evidence, his corruption,” Bernstein said during a CNN segment.
He followed that remark by taking a jab at Trump’s ability to perform his presidential duties.
“We’re watching, too, an unraveling in front of us, both factually and also temperamentally, in terms of the conduct of the President of the United States,” Bernstein said.
Bernstein claimed the president was well aware of his own act of corruption, given what was contained in the official report from the whistleblower who issued the complaint which sparked the entire controversy.
“And why?” Bernstein added. “Well, partly because the President of the United States recognizes that there is in this whistleblower’s documents terrible evidence of the President’s corruption.”
The famous reporter also explained that there were parallels between the Ukraine scandal and what he witnessed during the Watergate scandal, claiming that the president “clearly” doesn’t want particular documents uncovered, which in Bernstein’s opinion, amounts to a cover-up.
The whistleblower’s complaint, which was declassified and released on Thursday, accused Trump of inappropriately pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to help his prospects for winning the 2020 presidential election.
“The President used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests. Namely, he sought to pressure the Ukrainian leader to take actions to help the President’s 2020 reelection bid,” the whistleblower’s complaint read.
In addition, the complaint also alleged that White House lawyers demanded the electronic transcript of the call between the two leaders be removed from the storage system where such documents are typically stored.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr , Bernstein also accused U.S. Attorney General William Barr of taking actions to protect the president amid the growing White House crisis, saying he has information on the matter.
Bernstein claims that Barr is attempting to shape a narrative that connects the Ukraine scandal to the Democrats’ Russia probe so that the president can claim that it’s all a so-called “deep state” conspiracy to undermine his presidency and ultimately take him out of office.
In a Thursday afternoon tweet , Trump accused House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff of attempting to hurt his presidency and the Republican party for three years and called Democrats’ interest in pursuing the Ukraine phone call investigation a “Democrat scam.”