Obama White House Threatens Veteran Journalist Bob Woodward Over Sequester Reporting

A senior White House official has warned veteran journalist Bob Woodward that he would ”regret” his reporting on the looming budget cuts known as sequester.

The threat, reported by Woodward on CNN and read on Politico, came after Woodward published a piece in the Washington Post that questioned the president over the sequester negotiations as well as after he made some startling comments about the Presidents ability to govern.

Politico reported:

The aide “yelled at me for about a half hour.”

“You’re focusing on a few specific trees that give a very wrong impression of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. … I think you will regret staking out that claim.”

An article published by BuzzFeed claims they have uncovered the White House official who actually made the threat:

The White House official who Bob Woodward charged had crossed a line by saying he would “regret” printing his version of a set of Washington negotiations was Gene Sperling, the director of the White House Economic Council, a source familiar with the exchange told BuzzFeed Wednesday.

The email from Sperling to Woodward, which Woodward read to Politico on Wednesday, has transfixed Washington, with Republicans and some in the press charging that it embodies a White House lording it over a cowed press corps.

Woodward, Politico reported, called the top official — identified to BuzzFeed as Sperling — to tell him that he would question Obama’s account of negotiations leading to the “sequester” — automatic cuts set to take effect next month.

A report from Business Insider summed up comments made by Woodward on MSNBC:

The Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward ripped into President Barack Obama on “Morning Joe” today, saying he’s exhibiting a “kind of madness I haven’t seen in a long time” for a decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf because of budget concerns.

“Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I can’t do this because of some budget document?’” Woodward said.

“Or George W. Bush saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to invade Iraq because I can’t get the aircraft carriers I need?’” Or even Bill Clinton saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to attack Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters,’ … because of some budget document?

In the last 5 years the President and his entire cabinet have rarely been questioned by the corporate controlled media.

Numerous studies and articles have confirmed the fact that the media has done very little real journalism when it comes to anything Barack Obama. When you consider that fact the threat made by a top White House official to a noted journalist who finally did question him makes sense.

We now find ourselves in a country where 99% of the corporate media will not even question the president and when that tiny 1% actually does they are openly threatened with some sort of unknown retaliation.