The White House has taken note of the Washington Post columnist’s out-of-line comments:
The best-selling author and Washington Post reporter is protesting White House pushback over his criticism of how Obama and aides are handling the sequester issue.
“It was said very clearly, you will regret doing this,” Woodward told CNN, citing an e-mail he received from “a senior person” at the White House.
“I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, you’re going to regret doing something that you believe in,” Woodward said.
In a statement, the White House said that “of course no threat was intended. As Mr. Woodward noted, the e-mail from the aide was sent to apologize for voices being raised in their previous conversation. The note suggested that Mr. Woodward would regret the observation he made regarding the sequester because that observation was inaccurate, nothing more. And Mr. Woodward responded to this aide’s e-mail in a friendly manner.”
All we can say is: We know more than a few reporters have received similar e-mails from White House officials. Yelling has also been known to happen.
Nice newspaper you’ve got here, Mister Woodward. It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it, yeah?
Update: Matt Welch rounds up the media reactions here.
It has been a special night on Twitter for those of us who take a perverse interest in the way that ideologically aligned journalists and politicos will pack-attack critics of a sitting American president. Seems that Washington Post investigative-journalism legend Bob Woodward crossed a bridge too far when, in talking about reaction to his narrative-debunking Feb. 22 piece pinning the origination of the sequester directly on a White House that had vociferously denied paternity, has now gone on to dish on a “senior White House official” (later identified as White House Economic Council Director Gene Sperling) who “yelled at me for about a half hour” about the op-ed, and warned that “I think you will regret staking out that claim.”
