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Obama to House Dems: Don't read Huffington Post

President Barack Obama warned House Democrats on Thursday not to read The Huffington Post if they want to be informed on trade issues.

“Get informed, not by reading The Huffington Post,” Obama said at the House Democratic retreat in Philadelphia, according to a source in the room.

Obama was responding to a question from Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.) about his State of the Union request for the ability to fast-track trade deals.

It’s not clear whether Obama was referring to a specific piece, though the online news aggregator has published several opinion pieces that are both for and against the trade reforms.

Ironically on the same day of his remarks about the site, Obama published an op-ed on Huffington Post about a “blueprint for middle-class economics.”

It’s not the first time the president has taken a swipe at the website. As Huffington Post Political Editor Sam Stein noted on Twitter, the president told a group of students in 2011 that “if you read the Huffington Post…you’d think I was some right-wing tool of Wall Street.” He also imagined how the site would cover Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation, only freeing the slaves in non-Union states.

“Can you imagine how The Huffington Post would have reported on that? It would have been blistering. Think about it, `Lincoln sells out slaves,’” Obama said at the time.

Hadas Gold is a reporter at Politico.