Bob Woodward, who helped break the Watergate scandal as a Washington Post reporter in the early 1970s, sees a similarity between those events and the Benghazi scandal now embroiling the Obama administration.
He pointed to White House laundering of its talking points after last year's attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
"I have to go back 40 years to Watergate, when Nixon put out his edited transcripts of the conversations, and he personally went through them and said, Let's not tell this, let's not show this,'" the political author told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program.
"I would not dismiss Benghazi. It's a very serious issue. As people keep saying, four people were killed."
In the future, Woodward said, the government should forego talking points.
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"Talking points, as we know, are like legal briefs. They're an argument on one side. We need to get rid of talking points and they need to put out statements or papers that are truth documents."
Meanwhile, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, while a serious issue, but doesn't yet rise to the level of Watergate, Woodward says.
"It’s a big mess, obviously. I know there have been these comparisons to Watergate. I would say not yet."
Earlier this week, Carl Bernstein, Woodward's reporting partner on the scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, called the third scandal currently surrounding the Obama administration — the seizing of Associated Press reporters' phone records —"outrageous."
Even if President Barack Obama did not know about the details, he knew of the policy, Woodward said.
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