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BBC Journalist Reveals He Accidentally Hung Up on Donald Trump During Interview Call

Veteran reporter Gary O’Donoghue was ambushed by a call from the White House after falling asleep.

A BBC News journalist admitted to accidentally hanging up on Donald Trump for the U.K. broadcaster’s first exclusive interview with a U.S. president in over a decade. After a “few false starts” earlier in the day, BBC’s North American correspondent Gary O’Donoghue was resigned to the interview not taking place and went home in the evening, where he soon fell asleep. But the veteran reporter was soon jolted back to life shortly afterwards when he received a call from the White House, which resulted in him fumbling his phone and accidentally terminating the call. “The phone woke me up and one of his top aides said, ‘Hi Gary, the president’s on the line for you now,’ and I had to run into the living room, grab a digital recorder and do what I could,” O’Donoghue said. “When I woke up, I accidentally hung up the call to start with, which is not good is it when you hang up on the president. Anyway, they rang back.” He added: “I pressed go on a little recorder of mine, I prayed that I had pressed go, and I had pressed go, and we got the interview. I was trying to think at a million miles an hour. We were told we would have five minutes, but we ended up with 20.”