Clinton campaign manager on Trump: ‘Parallels to Watergate here are eerie’

Reports that President Trump campaign aides communicated with Russian intelligence officials show remarkable parallels to the Watergate scandal, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager, Robby Mook, said Wednesday.

“It is extremely strange to me that a member of any American presidential campaign would be speaking to Russian intelligence officials,” Mook said on CNN.

“And it’s particularly bizarre, given the fact that we know that Russian intelligence officials broke into the [Democratic National Committee], stole documents and handed them to WikiLeaks for the purpose of hurting Hillary Clinton and helping Donald Trump.”

{mosads}“The parallels to Watergate here are eerie, I have to say,” he said.

The Watergate scandal began with a break-in at DNC offices and snowballed into a nationwide cover-up scandal, ultimately bringing down President Nixon. 

Mook also argued that each new development in the Trump saga gets “closer and closer” to the president himself.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that members of President Trump’s campaign repeatedly communicated with Russian intelligence officials in the year before the presidential election.

The story came a day after former national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned from his post amid reports that he discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with the country’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak.

Flynn previously denied talking about sanctions with Kislyak. But the Justice Department reportedly sent a warning to the White House late last month expressing concerns that Flynn was not honest with White House officials about his conversations with Kislyak and that he could be vulnerable to Russian blackmail.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said at his daily briefing on Tuesday that Trump had known for “weeks” that Flynn was misleading administration officials, including Vice President Pence, about the Russia conversations.