Wednesday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” former Secretary of State John Kerry said The New York Times op-ed critical of President Donald Trump and attributed to a senior White House official meant the United States had entered into “a genuine constitutional crisis.”
Kerry said, “It’s absolutely extraordinary. I think obviously it’s going to create an enormous fight over the credibility and the propriety, et cetera. But when you separate it, when you really look at this memo, when you recognize that “The New York Times” does know who it is, and they have very carefully approached this, and you add this to what is in Bob Woodward’s book, which everybody knows he tapes people that he talks to. He’s probably the single most credible investigative reporter in the country, if not the world, and he knows his methodology, and his publisher knows the methodology. And lawyers who support both of those, him and the publisher know the methodology. So the credibility level against a president who is now been found clearly to lie on a daily basis and has a serious problem with the truth, that’s the balance here.”
He continued, “We have a presidency which is off the rails. We have a presidency in which the president is clearly now, according to this op-ed — which “The New York Times” knows who the author is —we have a president who is not capable of doing the job, who clearly has these temper tantrums, doesn’t know enough to be making many of the decisions he makes.”
He added, “We see the evidence of people stealing a presidential document off his desk. We see a general, the secretary of defense, ordered to kill another leader of another country who turns to everybody after the phone is hung up and said I’m not going to do that. We’re not going to do that. This is unbelievable. This is a presidency. This is a genuine constitutional crisis. And the crisis is heightened by the fact that my former colleagues in the United States Senate on the Republican side who have taken an oath of office to defend the Constitution and the institutions of our country as a whole, which are embraced in that oath, are defending instead not the Constitution, not the institution in the Senate. They’re defending party and the president who simply doesn’t know what he is doing.”
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