'Just like Watergate': Bob Woodward reveals 'seven conspiratorial actions by Trump and Bannon' to destroy democracy

Veteran journalist Bob Woodward pointed out seven conspiratorial actions taken by Donald Trump and Steve Bannon to conduct a "Watergate-style" subversion of the election process, which he said should fall under investigation by a special counsel.

Woodward said he and Washington Post colleague Robert Costa uncovered those actions while reporting on their book, "Peril," but he told CNN's "New Day" that he only recently understood how those potential crimes set in motion the violent attempt to overturn Trump's election loss on Jan. 6.

"I just looked back at what we have in the book, and quite directly have we have the dots [but] we didn't connect them, though they're there," Woodward said, "and they're seven conspiratorial actions by Trump and Bannon, essentially, to subvert and destroy the process of certifying who the next president is going to be, and when you think about it, it's just like Watergate. It's a destruction of the process that we want to trust, and the -- I'm sorry, my memory is not great on this -- can I go through some of those conspiratorial actions?"

"First of all, on Dec. 30, Bannon talks to Trump and says, 'You've got to make a dramatic return to Washington,'" Woodward continued. "Trump is in Mar-A-Lago, he's going to have the New Year's Eve party down there, but he comes back, and Bannon says to Trump, 'You've got to call Vice President Pence off the ski slopes where they, Pence's staff and advisers, have stashed him away because they know in a week he's going to have to certify or decide what he's going to do about who the next president is, and then Bannon says to Trump, Jan. 6 is the moment of reckoning here, and if we can challenge the legitimacy of Biden, it casts a shadow over the Biden presidency, and then he says, 'We are going to kill the Biden presidency in the crib.' The violent language, of course, it was manifest, the violence itself, on Jan. 6."

"Then on Jan. 5, as Liz Cheney was pointing out, Bannon meets with others, including Rudy Giuliani and their phony Republicans, to block the certification of Biden, and then you put all this in and Trump put out a phony statement at the time -- this is on the public record -- saying he and Pence agreed that Pence has the power to walk away and essentially get Trump certified as president," Woodward added. "But that's totally untrue. So, anyway, we have a very clear-cut case, I would suspect it is quite possible that Attorney General Merrick Garland will appoint a special counsel to look at this, because the evidence is so clear for a massive Watergate-style attempt to destroy the process of electing a president."