Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” long-time reporter Carl Bernstein, known for his Watergate exploits, said President Donald Trump was attempting to “undermine a free press” because journalists were “reporting the truth.”

Bernstein said, “We have the story going on about this investigation closing in and how psychologically Trump is reacting. Telling the country that he is a stable genius while those in the White House are saying, well, he doesn’t look very stable right now to us and he didn’t look very much like a genius to us right now except where he obviously is ingenious, and that is in his political skills and mobilizing his base, which is his big offensive to keep the facts from emerging in this story.”

He continued, “The base and keeping them energized against the press is absolutely essential to Donald Trump fighting and furthering the cover-up. Look, there is a cover-up by the president of the United States. But we don’t know what the cover-up is about yet. We don’t know the facts yet. Why he has, from the beginning in this investigation—and the Trump Tower meeting is the best evidence of it—the cover-up is demonstrable because he helped create the cover story on the airplane, which has since been disproven about what occurred at that meeting.”

He added, “We have a lot to learn, and we need to keep doing our reporting, and that includes this dynamic that is going on of the attempts by the president to undermine a free press because he wants our credibility destroyed because we are reporting the truth.”

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