Former White House adviser David Gergen on Wednesday said that reports that special counsel Robert Mueller was investigating President Donald Trump for possible obstruction of justice was "dangerous for the president."
"What we have been talking about forever has just come true," Gergen told Anderson Cooper on CNN. "I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous I think this is for the president."
Gergen has served former Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton.
Citing five unidentified sources, The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Mueller had expanded his probe beyond possible Russian meddling in the election to include whether Trump obstructed justice.
In a private Oval Office meeting in February, the president pressured former FBI Director James Comey to end the agency's inquiry into ex-National Security Director Michael Flynn on his alleged Moscow ties.
A spokesman for President Trump's personal attorney Marc Kasowitz, slammed the Post report: "The FBI leak of information regarding the president is outrageous, inexcusable and illegal."
Gergen likened the development to Nixon's eventual resignation in 1974 because of the Watergate cover-up – not the actual burglary of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in the hotel complex two years earlier.
"In every case where there's been a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, it is because the person being investigated brought it upon himself," he told Cooper.
Gergen then referenced Nixon's 1977 television interviews with David Frost, in which the former Republican president said that "I gave my enemies a sword, and they ran me through.
"Trump may have done the same thing."
He cautioned, however, that "there's been no findings of guilt on any of these things, but this is a major turning point in what Mueller and the special counsel is doing."
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