Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein told Reliable Sources on Sunday that he has sources with knowledge of the administration who told him over the weekend that President Donald Trump may call the midterms “illegitimate” if Democrats squeeze out a win.

“I talked to people in touch with the White House on Friday who believe that, if the congressional midterms are very close and the Democrats were to win by five or seven seats, that Trump is already talking about how to throw legal challenges into the courts, sow confusion, declare a victory actually, and say that the election’s been illegitimate — that is really under discussion in the White House,” Bernistein said on CNN yesterday, where he is a political analyst.

He also noted that while “we have had presidents in the past who have lied,” Trump is actually using “lying and untruth as a basic method to promote his policies, his beliefs, and his way of approaching the American people and engaging with the world.”

Bernstein Trump’s recent untruthful rhetoric to his initial defense of Saudi Arabia in light of the disappearance of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who many believe was killed in Turkey this month by operatives of the gulf state:

“His default position is to use untruths to go toward his objectives. And the best example of it in this horrible week in which we are dealing with the Khashoggi murder is the body slamming incident where the president of the United States again repeating that the press is the enemy of the people, this horrible phrase with its echoes of totalitarianism, gets up and praises a congressional candidate for body slamming a reporter in the same time period in which a reporter has been murdered, perhaps dismembered, by an outlaw rogue state actor. so where does that put us on what side of the equation?”

Watch above, via CNN.

[image via screengrab]

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