Veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has become an unlikely hero for Republicans by publicly berating US president Barack Obama and laying the blame for the so-called “sequester” of automatic, across-the-board spending cuts due to come into effect today at the White House door.
The reporter appeared on a prime-time CNN evening television news show on Wednesday evening saying that a “very senior person” at the White House warned him that he would “regret” pinning responsibility for the $85 billion (€65 billion) of indiscriminate spending cuts on Mr Obama.
“It makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters ‘you’re going to regret doing something that you believe in’,” Woodward told CNN host Wolf Blitzer on his show The Situation Room.
The official who threatened Woodward was identified as Gene Sperling, director of the White House Economic Council, by news website Buzzfeed.
As the March 1st sequester deadline approached, conservatives clung to an opinion article Woodward wrote in the Post last weekend that said the sequester was pushed through by the White House and conceived by Obama’s former chief-of-staff Jack Lew, who was confirmed on Wednesday as the president’s new treasury secretary, and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors.
Latest battleground
The sequester, which will lead to $1.2 trillion of spending cuts over a decade, is the latest battleground between Democrats and Republicans as each side blames the other for the by-product of a last-minute agreement between the parties in 2011 to raise the government’s borrowing limit.
Woodward has accused the White House of inventing the sequester and then of “moving the goal posts” by saying that any deal to avert it had to include a mix of cuts and tax rises, which Republicans oppose.
Woodward, along with Carl Bernstein, cracked the Watergate story that led to Richard Nixon’s downfall.
