The reporter’s e-mail was insistent, his questions obviously skeptical. The State Department official’s response was defensive, his mood obviously annoyed.

Then the missiles started flying.

“Why do you bother to ask questions you already know the answer to,” Philippe Reines, a communications adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asked the reporter.

“Why don’t you give answers that aren’t bullshit for a change?” responded Michael Hastings, a reporter for the BuzzFeed website.

Reines then called Hastings an “unmitigated asshole” and suggested that he “[expletive] off.” Hastings responded with a sneering remark about Reines’s personal life. Reines closed by telling Hastings that he was now designated as “junk mail” on his computer and telling him to “have a good life.”