Legendary Watergate journalist torches Republicans: “This is a cover-up, plain and simple.”
The legendary Washington Post journalist whose dogged reporting uncovered President Nixon’s crimes of the office just slammed Senate Republicans for conducting a bald-faced coverup. (video embedded below)
Carl Bernstein knows a thing or two about Presidential misconduct, and he’s been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump since inauguration three years ago.
But his newly found target of ire is the prostrate GOP caucus in the Senate, whom he excoriated on CNN’s top-rated prime-time program with Anderson Cooper last night. Mediaite reports that Bernstein unloaded on Republicans in epic fashion:
“This is a cover-up. Plain and simple. And there has been no attempt throughout this proceeding by the Republicans in this Senate of the United States — the so-called world’s greatest deliberative body, which we now can see how deliberative it is — that we have seen now a really shameful episode in our history that’s going to read down for many, many years.”
Bernstein is, of course, talking about the Senate GOP’s twisted logic elucidated by retiring Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) in a late-night twitter thread after the close of last night’s ninth day of trial hearings with the final “question and answer” period that followed both sides opening arguments.
The Tennesee Republican ex-governor hyped his decision on voting for witnesses, then released a statement saying it’s not a question of if the President did it.
Add your name to tell the Senate: CONVICT DONALD TRUMP!
In other words, the longtime GOP senator and former Tennessee governor admitted that House managers had entirely proven their charges of abuse of power—though he believes Congress should be obstructed forever—to the point where he wouldn’t seek witnesses to prove more.
Alexander concluded that he would vote to cover-up Trump’s impeachable offenses anyway.
Carl Bernstein reserved his strongest fire for the Senate GOP’s strict desire to not know what really happened, even if the truth could exonerate Trump. He told AC360:
“They have covered up what the President of the United States has done in his grievous action when they had the the ability to find out more. And reach a bipartisan, as it were, decision if we could hear from the witnesses, if Mr. [John] Bolton could come in and tell us, is there anything else there? No. Maybe it would be exonerating.”
“The idea that somehow testifying to what you think is true is destructive to the system of government that we have,” said former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton last night, talking about the possibility that GOP senators will forgo testimony from the eleven-year Fox News contributor and longtime DC Republican insider. “I think, [it is] very nearly the reverse, the exact reverse of the truth.”
Yet Bolton’s fellow party members seem hellbent on sticking their heads in the sand. While Politico reports that today may not be the final day of Trump’s removal trial, Republicans have indicated they will vote against calling witnesses and end the precedent of literally every other impeachment trial of a president in American history.
Senate Republicans led by the oleaginous “Moscow” Mitch McConnell have consistently made it clear that they will give Donald Trump slavish obedience in utter violation of their constitutional oaths of holding a fair trial.
If they seal the deal by acquitting Trump on abuse of power charges for extorting a foreign power using all of the powers of his office, it will open up a Pandora’s box for the rule of law in our nation. Right now though, it’s still not too late for GOP senators to turn back and do the right thing, however unlikely that may be.
Here’s the complete video:
Bernstein calls it "a cover up, plain and simple."
"We have seen now a really shameful episode in our history that is going to read down for many, many years." pic.twitter.com/N2G7zagA91
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) January 31, 2020
