In accusing former President Barack Obama of ordering Trump Tower wiretapped before last year's presidential election, President Donald Trump compared the alleged behavior to "Nixon/Watergate."

But John Dean, a former White House counsel under former President Richard Nixon who was charged with obstruction of justice for his role in Watergate, said it's Trump – not Obama – whose behavior reminds him of the scandal that forced Nixon from office.

Dean pleaded guilty to a single felony count in exchange for cooperating with prosecutors in the Watergate trial. In an appearance on MSNBC Monday , he said the White House is "in a cover-up mode" amid renewed questions about alleged connections between members of Trump's campaign team and Russian operatives.

"I was more stunned by the reaction of the White House and their handling of it, which seemed to me over-the-top," Dean said of the Trump administration's response to Monday's House intelligence committee hearing on the subject.

"In fact they are in a cover-up mode. There's just never been any question in my mind about that," Dean said. "I've been inside a cover-up. I know how they look and feel. And every signal they're sending is 'we're covering this up.'"

"This White House is not showing their innocence," he said. "They're showing how damn guilty they are, is what we're seeing."

In particular, Dean homed in on the White House distancing itself from aides and staffers who have begun to draw scrutiny from the FBI and lawmakers, such as Trump's former presidential campaign chairman Paul Manafort , whose influence press secretary Sean Spicer on Monday said had been a "very limited."

And Tuesday, senior counselor Kellyanne Conway similarly downplayed Trump's relationships with J.D. Gordon, a national security adviser for the campaign, and Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser on the campaign.

"In the case of Mr. Page and Mr. Gordon and some others, they really have very attenuated contacts to the campaign that I managed for the last three months," Conway said on Fox News Tuesday morning. "I've spoken directly with the president and other senior officials about this. He doesn't know these gentlemen, he didn't work with them."

Dean said that behavior was a red flag.

"Let me tell you how predictable this is and how cover up-ish it is, because this is exactly what happened during Watergate," he said. "For example, when I had broken rank and became a public person out there, suddenly Nixon had never had any meetings with me at all, and then he'd had one or two meetings with me. Well, we had 37 meetings about Watergate, and he knew damn well we'd been deep in the thicket of it, but suddenly they distanced themselves from it, and that's exactly what they're doing here."

While Dean said the investigation into Trump's potential ties to Russia or his campaign's possible collusion with the Kremlin's efforts to interfere in last year's presidential election was in its early days, he noted that they were demonstrating "a very bad mentality that's going to get them in a lot of trouble."