Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein said Wednesday that if President Trump is found to have colluded with Russia to win the election, it is “worse than Watergate in many, many ways.”

The Chicago Tribune reported that in an on-stage interview with David Axelrod in Chicago, Bernstein compared Russia's interference in the 2016 election to former President Nixon’s undermining of democracy in the Watergate scandal.

“What Watergate was about at its most basic level was a vast campaign of political espionage and sabotage to undermine the democratic political process in this country,” said Bernstein, who rose to fame with his coverage of Watergate with Bob Woodward.

Bernstein added that if the allegations about Trump’s campaign colluding with Russia are found to be true, this situation would be worse than Watergate because “we have a president of the United States who lies about almost anything.”

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The first indictments in the Russia probe were announced Monday, with charges levied against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his associate Richard Gates, including one charge of conspiracy against the United States. Former campaign aide George Papadopoulos was also revealed to have pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian nationals during the campaign.

Bernstein added that in conversations with Republicans in Congress, he has been shocked by the assertions they make about Trump, in contrast with how Republicans spoke about Nixon.

“What’s so astonishing to me in the last few months is the number of Republicans on the Hill who have said to me privately ... ‘he’s unstable, the president of the United States,’ ” he said. “You would not have heard that about Richard Nixon.”