Barack Obama got personal Friday, saying Hillary Clinton's former chief strategist Mark Penn, who was demoted earlier this week, deserved what he got.

In Indianapolis, reporters asked Obama about Penn, who left his campaign post Sunday after being harshly criticized for meeting with Colombian officials to discuss advocating a free-trade deal that Clinton vehemently opposes. Penn is the CEO of a public relations firm that represents Colombia on this issue.

"I think it was surprising to me that a high-ranking, if not the highest-ranking, member of Senator Clinton's team would be engaged in business activities and lobbying that was directly contrary to the position Senator Clinton had taken," Obama said Friday.

"Let me put it this way: I'm not surprised that Senator Clinton found herself in an uncomfortable position as a consequence. And I know that if staff of mine were putting me in that kind of position, I would get rid of them."

The Clinton campaign, reeling from recent staff shakeups, took that remark as a low blow and fired back.

Clinton spokesman Jay Carson, in a statement, asked why Obama would say he would "get rid of" a staff member who contradicted his candidate in a meeting with a foreign government, when Obama has retained his chief economic adviser Austan Goolsbee.

Canadian television network CTV reported more than a month ago that Goolsbee met with Canadian officials to assure them that Obama's tough talk on the North American Free Trade Agreement was just posturing.

"When Sen. Obama's top economic adviser told the Canadian government not to take his anti-NAFTA rhetoric seriously, he and his staff misleadingly denied that the meeting ever occurred, and then took absolutely no action," Carson said in his statement.

"It's good to know he has a higher standard for our campaign than his own."

An Obama aide called the Penn-Goolsbee comparison "apples and oranges," pointing out that Goolsbee was never on Obama's staff and that both the campaign and the Canadian government denied the original account by the low-level government official who spoke to CTV.

FOX News' Aaron Bruns contributed to this report.