What Is Watergate? Trump Scandal Compared To Nixon Presidency

Amid a flurry of controversies and calls for investigations, Donald Trump's presidency has increasingly led folks to bring up Watergate, the scandal that brought down former President Richard Nixon.

Veteran journalist Dan Rather said Tuesday the scandal surrounding Michael Flynn — who resigned as national security adviser Monday night after it was revealed he lied about speaking to a Russian ambassador about U.S. sanctions in December — could be worse than Watergate. His remarks came as the intelligence community was assessing whether the Kremlin worked to get Trump elected and as new reports this week indicated the Republican's campaign had been in regular contact with Russian officials.

"Watergate is the biggest political scandal of my lifetime, until maybe now," Rather wrote in a Facebook post. "It was the closest we came to a debilitating Constitutional crisis, until maybe now. On a 10 scale of armageddon for our form of government, I would put Watergate at a 9. This Russia scandal is currently somewhere around a 5 or 6, in my opinion, but it is cascading in intensity seemingly by the hour. And we may look back and see, in the end, that it is at least as big as Watergate."

Watergate refers to the scandal in which aides to Nixon broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. The apparent goal was to steal information and bug phones. The burglary took place in June 1972. That October, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post published a groundbreaking report revealing Nixon's aides were behind the break-in.

It remains unclear if Nixon ordered the break-in, but he did attempt to orchestrate a cover-up afterwards. There were months of legal wrangling, with Nixon declining to turn over recordings of conversations he secretly taped and even ordering the special prosecutor in the case be fired. Eventually the tapes did get released in full. One conversation revealed that the president at least knew about the cover-up, lying to the FBI to attempt to stop an investigation and getting involved in paying people hush money. Nixon resigned in August 1974. He was pardoned by his former vice president, President Gerald Ford, about one month later.