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Playing the ’Nixon’ Card: Bob Woodward Says the Obama White House Threatened Him — Other Journalists Speak Up
1 March 2013
(LPAC) — As we reported in Monday’s morning briefing, Bob Woodward wrote in a Washington Post op-ed published online on Friday and in Sunday’s print edition, that the Obama White House was the author, in 2011, of the plan for automatic spending cuts, now known as "the sequestration." Woodward posed that fact as contrary to what the 2012 Obama presidential campaign had repeatedly said, i.e., that the plan was created by the mean old Republicans. Yesterday, Woodward upped the ante on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where he (as reported by Reuters yesterday), "attacked Obama for drawing national security into the budget debate. ’So we now have the president going out [saying], "Because of this piece of paper and this agreement, I can’t do what I need to do to protect the country." That’s a kind of madness that I haven’t seen in a long time.’" Then, the same day, in interviews with Politico and CNN, Woodward said that when he had notified the White House of his intention to publish the op-ed, a "White House aide" (subsequently identified as Gene Sperling, head of the National Economic Council") yelled at him for half an hour, then sent a conciliatory email which nevertheless cautioned, that he would "regret" it if he published his assertions. Speaking of that, Woodward said that he saw the statement as a veiled threat. MSN.com’s report quoted Woodward, that "I’ve tangled with lots of these people," and then helpfully added, that Woodward "established his reputation by breaking the story of the Watergate break-in under President Richard Nixon and has written a series of best-selling books about Washington politics." Woodward was then quoted, "But suppose there’s a young reporter who’s only had a couple of years’ — or 10 years’ — experience and the White House is sending him an email saying, ’You’re going to regret this.’ You know, tremble, tremble. I don’t think it’s the way to operate." During the course of Thursday, at least two other writers surfaced, and said they’d received similar treatment from the Obama White House. This morning, Lanny Davis — former counsel to President Bill Clinton, and an avowed Obama supporter — told Washington talk-radio station WMAL, that he had received similar threats for newspaper columns he had written about Obama in the conservative Washington Times. Davis said that his editor, John Solomon, "received a phone call from a senior Obama White House official who didn’t like some of my columns, even though I’m a supporter of Obama. I couldn’t imagine why this call was made." Davis said the Obama aide had told Solomon, "that if he continued to run my columns, he would lose, or his reporters would lose their White House credentials." Though Solomon thought it was bluster, Davis apparently took it more seriously. He told WMAL, "I called three senior people at the White House, and I said, ’I want this person to be told this can never happen again, and it’s inappropriate.’ I got a call back from someone who was in the White House saying it will never happen again." Then in early afternoon, National Journal writer (and former editor-in-chief) Ron Fournier reported that it happened to him, too, when he wrote a sardonic "tweet" about the report that the White House had threatened Woodward. In the course of his After a brief discursion to explain the workings of journalistic sources, Fournier continued, that one of his White House sources, "angered by my Woodward tweet sent me an indignant e-mail. ’What’s next, a Nazi analogy?’ the official wrote, chastising me for spreading ’bull**** like that.’ I was not offended by the note, mild in comparison to past exchanges with this official. But it was the last straw in a relationship that had deteriorated." Fournier elaborated on the history of his abusive relationship with this White House figure: "As editor-in-chief of National Journal, I received several e-mails and telephone calls from this White House official filled with vulgarity, abusive language, and virtually the same phrase that Politico characterized as a veiled threat [to Woodward]. .... Once I moved back to daily reporting this year, the badgering intensified. I wrote Saturday night, asking the official to stop e-mailing me. The official wrote, challenging Woodward and my tweet. ’Get off your high horse and assess the facts, Ron,’ the official wrote." As of 6:30 this evening, no new victims had surfaced. Stay tuned. [GRC] |