Woodward and Bernstein Can’t Stop Comparing Hillary Clinton to Richard Nixon

More than 40 years later, the reporting duo keeps going on TV to invoke Watergate.

Files/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Earlier this month, Carl Bernstein—half of the reporting duo that helped expose the Watergate scandal in 1972—went on CNN to volunteer an observation about Hillary Clinton’s failure to release the transcripts of her paid speaking gigs at Wall Street firms. “Now, you’ve got a situation with these transcripts,” he said, “a little like Richard Nixon and his tapes that he stonewalled and wouldn’t release.”

“Whoa, whoa,” interrupted CNN anchor Poppy Harlow. “I mean, your investigation brought down a presidency. You know scandal.”

 

“Whoa” is an appropriate reaction. It’s safe to assume that the transcripts of those speaking gigs would be a mild embarrassment for Clinton, who is trying to prove that she would take on Wall Street as president. Most people do not predict that the transcripts will implicate Clinton in a vast criminal conspiracy—as the tapes that had recorded all of Nixon’s Oval Office conversations confirmed about him.

Bernstein is not the only person bringing up Watergate to describe Clinton. His partner-in-exposing-crime, Bob Woodward, is also fond of comparing Clinton to Nixon. Woodward, who appears often on Fox News shows to discuss Clinton’s recent travails—her appearance before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, controversial donations to the Clinton Foundation, the investigation into her use of a private email server as secretary of state, and her refusal to release transcripts of her Wall Street speeches—has on multiple occasions given into the temptation to talk about Watergate.

It’s been more than 40 years since Woodward and Bernstein helped uncovered the Watergate scandal that ultimately took down a president and launched the two reporters to fame, fortune, and illustrious careers. Even after all this time, they just can’t stop talking about Watergate—and placing Clinton into the Nixon role.

June 17, 2015: Woodward went on Fox News to talk about donations to the Clinton Foundation with host Bill O’Reilly. “If you go back to the Nixon era, he had a campaign reelection committee, and the story was that it had really very little connection to the White House,” Woodward explained. “When you dug into it, you found that the reelection committee was taking orders from the White House. The question here in the Clinton Foundation, in all of these activities, including the speeches: Exactly how is it organized? Who decides?”

August 16, 2015: Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked Woodward, a frequent guest on his show, whether he sees parallels between Clinton’s email controversy and the Nixon tapes. “Fascinating question,” Woodward responded. “In fairness, nothing has been proven and I think the Clinton team wants to make sure this is not a protracted legal fight like happened with Nixon and his tapes. But if you look at Nixon in the history of this on the tapes, Nixon would always say, ‘Oh, yeah, everything was fine.’ It looked good. He didn’t remember the bad stuff. And that’s human nature. We don’t remember the bad stuff. And 60,000 emails, my god.”

August 17, 2015: “Follow the trail here,” Woodward said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where he often appears as a commentator. “There are all these emails…You’ve got a massive amount of data—in a way, reminds me of the Nixon tapes: thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations that Nixon thought were exclusively his.”

November 1, 2015: Howard Kurtz pressed Woodward over his comparison between the Nixon tapes and Clinton’s emails on his Fox News show MediaBuzz. “On those tapes, we later learned, we now know as part of history, he talked about cover-ups and burglaries, and wiretapping,” Kurtz said. “Are you assuming there’s something nefarious in Hillary’s—”

“No, I am not assuming anything,” Woodward said, cutting off Kurtz to walk back the implications of his comparison. “But it’s the volume, 60,000 emails. Give me 60,000 of your emails, and I will learn a lot about you. Everyone always says something in an email that perhaps they wish they didn’t say. So, you know, we’re going to see, but again it’s the in-depth work, and in this case we have the FBI doing it for us.”

January 10, 2016: Woodward, again on Fox News Sunday, raised the specter of Nixon to explain the latest development in the Clinton email scandal. “Look, here is Hillary Clinton, somebody who worked on the staff of the Nixon impeachment committee, and what was the lesson—one of the lessons from that?” Woodward said. “Never write anything down. She did years of Whitewater investigations where she was the target, and here, many years later, she’s saying, ‘Oh, let’s subvert the rules,’ and writing it out herself? You know, whether that’s some sort of crime, I think, is not the issue. The issue is, it shows she kind of feels immune, that she lives in a bubble, and no one is ever going to find this out. Well, now we have.”

October 7, 2015: When congressional Republicans brought Clinton to Capitol Hill last October to testify on the deadly attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Woodward and Bernstein continued to invoke Watergate—in order to say that this situation was in fact quite different from the Nixon scandal. “This is not Watergate,” Bernstein said on CNN, about two weeks before Clinton testified before the Benghazi committee. “Hillary Clinton is not a criminal president of the United States.”

October 18, 2015: “The successful congressional investigations eventually become bipartisan,” Woodward explained on CBS’s Face the Nation. “The Senate Watergate Committee was set up by a vote in the Senate 77-0, dozens of Republicans saying, ‘Yes, we need to look at this.’ And now we’ve got a fractured committee and so you wind up getting fractured partisan data.”

October 20, 2015: “There is no resemblance between Watergate and what we are watching now with Benghazi and Hillary Clinton,” Bernstein said on CNN, where he often appears as a commentator. “Watergate was about a criminal president of the United States who presided over a criminal presidency from his first days in office to the last. Whatever Hillary Clinton has done, it is nothing resembling that and it’s time to get the decks cleared on that once and for all.”

And yet, they can’t stop mentioning it.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate