Hello and welcome to the Punch Bull News Readback Podcast.

I'm your host, congressional reporter Max Cohen.

And this week I'm joined by Ben Brody, our tech reporter extraordinaire, who was called

to the White House for something that ended up being a major surprise in driving the Thursday

news cycle.

Ben, take it away. What happened on Thursday?

And why did it shock most of the reporters in the room? Yeah. So, spoiler alert, it wasn't tech,

but I thought that it was going to be. So just a peek behind the scenes, the White House doesn't

necessarily send all media alerts to all reporters. You know,

you and I are part of the, you know, core of reporters who cover the White House sometimes. But because

you and I don't do it every day, we don't necessarily get every media alert, et cetera. So I got a media

alert that the First Lady was going to be making a speech. And every time I've gotten one of these, it has been about AI or tech issues or something like that. And so I figured, great, I'll head to the White House and check this out. And I thought particularly that it was going to be, she has a big initiative around non-consensual deep fake nudes. That's a new law. There was a recent conviction under that law, a guilty plea. So it was like, great, she's going to take a victory lap. She's going to announce a new initiative to build on that. This totally makes sense. And I run over to the White House, which is, you know, the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue from where you and I spend our time. And we go into the

grand foyer and the first lady comes out of the blue room, walks up to a podium. And she says,

the lies about my connections to Jeffrey Epstein have to end today. There weren't audible gasps

amongst among the assembled press, but you could see reporters furiously texting editors about like, she just said this.

You could see like people looking around at each other.

Like, did you know this was coming?

I didn't know this was coming.

And, you know, frantically trying to tweet the news, trying to, trying to alert

newsrooms about this, trying to get out, push alerts and tweets and all of this kind of stuff,

while also, you know, getting the full statements and quotes that she was making. And so it was a

real scramble, something that I don't think any of us expected and definitely not about tech.

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