Daniel Halper

White House spokesman Jay Carney says it's "been a good week." He made the comment to the New York Times.

“Honestly, I find it enjoyable,” Carney says of coming under fire this week . “I find it challenging. It’s hard, but it’s better than 45 to 60 minutes of calling on reporters who are kind of sleepy and disinterested. For me personally, it has been a good week.”

The pressures began two weeks ago with the growing controversy over the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi, in which four Americans were killed.

Mr. Carney is far from the center of that controversy. But Republicans turned their focus on his November assertion that the administration’s original talking points on the episode, “originated from the intelligence community,” further insisting that the White House edited only a couple of words in the memo.

Recently revealed e-mails demonstrate a more coordinated process in which the White House and State Department were intimately involved. While Mr. Carney “appreciated” the questions about the inconsistencies, he did little to clear them up.

“The downside for Jay on this is his own, repeated statements are cast under a considerable cloud,” said Ann Compton of ABC News Radio, who has covered the White House since 1974. “The flip side is he does not appear to be a policy voice arguing on behalf of fuzzing up the facts.”

The tensions continued with Mr. Carney’s defense of the White House in the investigation over whether the I.R.S. inappropriately targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny and his push back on questions relating to the the seizure of telephone records of Associated Press journalists, over which the press relentlessly grilled him.

Carney told the paper he doesn't "take it personally."