Former GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, responding to multiple reports that President Trump asked former FBI Director James Comey to halt the bureau’s investigation into Michael Flynn, said Tuesday evening that Trump’s various scandals had reached a “Watergate size and scale.

“I think we’ve seen this movie before. I think it appears at a point where it’s of Watergate size and scale… the shoes continue to drop, and every couple days there’s a new aspect,” McCain told Bob Schieffer, the retired former host of CBS’ Face the Nation, at a dinner where McCain was receiving the International Republican Institute’s Freedom Award.

The senator told Schieffer that the advice he would give to Trump is “the same thing that you advised Richard Nixon, which he didn’t do… get it all out… it’s not going to be over until every aspect of it is thoroughly examined and the American people make a judgment. And the longer you delay, the longer it’s going to last.”

McCain also savaged the Trump administration for inviting emissaries of the Russian government into the Oval Office. The senator has been a frequent critic of the Kremlin.

“I’ve known this guy [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov for 30 years. He’s an old KGB apparatchik stooge, and Putin is a murderer and a thug,” McCain said. “And to have Lavrov in the Oval Office and be friendly with the guy whose boss… sent aircraft with precision weapons to attack hospitals in Aleppo, I just think it’s unacceptable.”

—Tim Mak