particularly intelligent. he likes to refer to him as mr. magoo. and that s caught several advisers of his by surprise. you know, to have conversations with him where he s referring to his attorney general as mr mr. magoo. i always thought mr. magoo was kind of sweet. anyway, that s just my personal remembrance of him. i don t think president trump thinks jeff sessions is very sweet. i guess he doesn t like mr. magoo either. thanks very much. thanks for having me. when it comes to political investigative reporting, bob woodward and carl bernstein set the standard. their work for the washington post during the watergate scandal played a huge role in the downfall of president nixon. their reporting worn the pulitzer prize and their landmark book became a landmark movie. on this night of a great deal of breaking news, i m very happy to have both of them with me in washington. thanks for being with us. first of all, what do you make of the washington post report that the spec
do you wish that nixon had twitter back then because in terms of a realtime rorschach test of what is happening in the president s mind, i mean twitter allows if that s really a full picture of what s going on in trump s mind, i don t think it is. thank god nixon didn t have twitter. but he had the tapes. yeah, he had the tapes, which he thought would always be secret, and then there are thousands of hours. and if you listen to these things and carl and i do this, you know, somewhat obsessively for the historical lesson in it, it s appalling. nixon used the presidency as an instrument of personal as carl says, the criminality was staggering. we don t know where this investigation goes. in the final days, we wrote about the firing of archibald cox, who was the special
and you see this buildup of hostility toward his own justice department, his own attorney general. you know, at some point that s going to stop. that s going to do you think that s because sessions was one of his earliest supporters out on the campaign trail, that he believed sessions would be more of an ally just as nixon hoped richardson would? in part, but he has said aloud, and he says through the white house, walking the halls and complaining to people about sessions, that sessions will not do his bidding. and sessions appointed rosenstein, who appointed mueller simply because he fired the the president fired comey. it s an explosive situation, and at the same time, part of the remedy, if we can talk about remedy, some transparency. i mean let s kind of come clean and answer some questions about that. yeah, probably it won t happen,
it s not clear who has authority or what authority. and it s been that way from the beginning. indeed. but, you know, as people disappear, like hope hicks was, you know, one of the sidekicks, and i remember talking to her about what job she was going to take after the election. and she said, i just don t want to be involved in the hand to hand combat of the daily coverage, and she did step back from that. and now, you know, off she goes. so lots of people are going or have gone or may go. i ve just been rereading the final days of an amazing book you guys wrote about the last year of the nixon administration. obviously we ve been very careful about comparisons to watergate as both of you have. just in terms of did president nixon have anybody who was as close to him as hope hicks, as jared kushner, as ivanka trump, i mean, in that sort of inner circle?
back now with bob woodward and carl bernstein. you wrote in a piece in the washington post a couple weeks ago about the conflict, the growing conflict between president trump and the department of justice. you said your article began with, we re here again, and it s interesting because president nixon thought that his attorney general, elliott richardson, who was sort of from the eastern waspy establishment, which nixon didn t necessarily like, but he needed richardson, but he sort of thought richard southern was going to be an ally of his. we tried to make him one, and also this is an interesting contrast. nixon wanted to bring richardson in, kind of mr. straight arrow, because he could redeem the justice department as attorney general, and of course that was all part of trying to suck richardson into the cover-up,