Woodward & Bernstein: Trump’s Actions ‘Eerily Similar’ to Nixon’s Before Saturday Night Massacre
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the famed Washington Post duo, are out with a little reminder of the Nixon era and how “eerily similar” his actions leading up to the Saturday Night Massacre are to President Trump‘s.
In a piece for CNN and The Washington Post, they write, “We’re here again. A powerful and determined President is squaring off against an independent investigator operating inside the Justice Department.”
There have been a lot of invocations of the Saturday Night Massacre over the past few months, and in that context Woodward & Bernstein look at the President’s attacks on the FBI and DOJ:
President Donald Trump insists it’s all a “witch hunt” and an unfair examination of his family’s personal finances. He constantly complains about the investigation in private and reportedly asked his White House counsel to have Mueller fired. No wonder many people are making comparisons to the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when President Richard Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned.
We covered that eerily similar confrontation for The Washington Post 45 years ago. Nixon didn’t know it at the time, but the Saturday Night Massacre would become a pivot point in his presidency — crucial to the charge that he’d obstructed justice. For him, the consequences were terminal.
What follows in their piece is an adapted excerpt from their book The Final Days, released in 1976 and focused on the last few months of Nixon’s presidency.
[image via screengrab]
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