Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

Veteran reporter Carl Bernstein, best known for his journalism during President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that President Donald Trump’s “authoritarian” behavior is more blatant than Nixon’s abuse of power.

“Richard Nixon is a criminal president who abused his authority in secret throughout his presidency and had to leave office because of it,” Bernstein explained. “Donald Trump, by contrast, is a president of the United States who has claimed authoritarian powers for himself and exercised them not in secret but openly, and now because of that it looks like he may well have obstructed justice, among other possibily illegal acts.”

Trump’s behavior is arguably worse than Nixon’s before the former president fired the special prosecutor, an example Trump may choose to follow as the Russia investigation inches further into his inner circle.

“The conduct of Donald Trump in office as we’ve seen it publicly is much more egregious than we publicly saw Nixon’s conduct certainly up to the time that he fired the special prosecutor in the Saturday Night Massacre,” Bernstein said.

Watch the segment below.