MS NOW contributor Sam Stein said on Friday that Vice President JD Vance “has a point,” referring to his Thursday comments that Watergate “would be like a 12-hour news story” if it happened today.

Appearing at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library on Thursday, Vance drew comparisons between President Donald Trump and former President Richard Nixon, saying, “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

“And by the way,” the vice president added, “if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump.”

“Honestly, I think he’s right,” said Stein, also managing editor at The Bulwark, on Friday’s edition of All In with Chris Hayes. “I do think there’s actually some validity to what JD Vance was saying, which is that we’ve become so calloused to a whole new breed of scandal from this administration that, frankly, we would probably move on.”

He continued:

And that doesn’t give me great, you know, joy to say that, but my mind sort of drifted immediately to a scene that was in this new book from Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, in which the Justice Department’s top officials, as well as top cabinet officials and presidential aides, were in the Situation Room scheming on how to not get the [Jeffrey] Epstein files out into the public. It’s the type of situation you could easily put into the Watergate era and say, “Wow, that is incredibly corrupt.” And it was presented to us in a book. There it is — the deputy attorney general scheming, essentially, to do a cover-up for the president. And that was a 10-hour story.

And so, some of this stuff is shocking. It’s shocking that JD Vance thinks this is sort of a politically advantageous thing to say out loud, but I do have to say I think there is some validity to the idea that we’ve become so calloused by this stuff. And I’ll just say one last thing, and then I’ll stop talking, which is obviously, the key to bringing down Richard Nixon was not just the FBI — what JD Vance would call “the deep state” — but dogged reporting from The Washington Post, predominantly Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. And The Post does great work right now, and they have intrepid reporters, and I would like to think that they would be able to do something similar if the occasion arose. In fact, I know people there would do it.

And yet, you can’t remove the fact that the ownership of The Post right now is Jeff Bezos, who has gone out of his way to try to curry favor with Donald Trump. And so, there are differences that you have to say, “Yeah, maybe JD Vance has a point here.”

Watch the full clip above via MS NOW.

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