Three days after a town hall event in which a questioner asked him "who's going to shoot President Obama," Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., has issued a statement condemning the remark as "abhorrent. "
But in an interview with Salon, Broun's spokesman is also disputing a local news account that reported Broun responded to the questioner by saying, " I know there’s a lot of frustration with this president."
Here's the key line in Broun's new statement:
"I was stunned by the question and chose not to dignify it with a response; therefore, at that moment I moved on to the next person with a question."
But that contradicts an account by the Athens Banner-Herald, the local newspaper that first reported the exchange. Banner-Herald reporter Blake Aued reported Wednesday that Broun had responded to the "shoot Obama" question by saying, "The thing is, I know there’s a lot of frustration with this president. We’re going to have an election next year." This account was written after Aued checked with Broun's spokeswoman, according to his story.
I asked Broun press secretary Austin Carson about the discrepancy today. Carson said:
"Blake misquoted it slightly. Broun moved to the next question, and then someone asked a question somehow related to that -- about, what's going on with President Obama or something like that. The congressman actually did not respond to the gentleman who asked [the original] question."
Blake Aued told me in an e-mail that he has not heard from Broun's people asking for a correction. (And it's also worth noting that that story has been online for three days.) So at this point, we have two different accounts of what happened.
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