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It was last September in Pittsburgh, when about 20 journalists were attending an off-the-record dinner with Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel during the G-20 summit. Also in attendance: New York Times Chief Washington Correspondent David Sanger, a White House favorite.

As one White House reporter tells it, “Jim Jones and Denis McDonough and Gary Samore were lurking in this very dark, nice dining room that we were in. And we were all kind of wondering why they were there. Then, at one point at the dinner, McDonough tapped on Sanger’s shoulder and whispered something in his ear. Sanger got up and walked towards this clutch of NSC people, including Jones, and they walked off.”

“We were all flummoxed and floored by this whole thing,” said the reporter. “A few reporters cornered McDonough and said, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t do that in front of other reporters.’ He said, ‘Oh, you guys, you’re barking up the wrong tree! We didn’t give anything. You’ve got nothing to worry about.’”

But later that night, Sanger posted a blockbuster scoop: As Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy would announce the next morning, the Iranians had a secret nuclear site but kept it hidden for years from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The other reporters — Sanger’s dinner companions earlier — were sent scrambling at around midnight to match the Times’s account.