Inside GB News’s Great British bash

Cockburn spent Wednesday night at the ultra-exclusive Ned’s Club near the White House for a shindig celebrating the launch of GB News’s DC bureau. The network, which launched in 2021, will be airing a US politics show from 7-9 p.m. ET (that’s midnight to 2 a.m. UK time), anchored by Bev Turner.

Nigel Farage, who hosts a primetime show on the network, held court by the central bar. Cockburn spotted him chatting to Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee which Farage had addressed on free speech in Britain earlier in the day.

Attendees were treated to remarks from Farage, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other GB News top brass, including co-owner Sir Paul Marshall (also the proprietor of this magazine). Referring to the “Britain has fallen” meme, Marshall said, “I wouldn’t say we’ve fallen; we’re falling.” He also lambasted the BBC, which he branded the “Biased Broadcasting Corporation.” Farage, Turner, Marshall and co-owner Christopher Chandler had been for an Oval Office meeting with the President earlier in the day. The speakers were introduced by Jason Miller, who Cockburn hears has been put on a hefty retainer to help steer the GB News launch.

During the speeches, journalist Michael Tracey was pestering a visibly annoyed Steven Cheung, the White House comms director. Guests could also see event host Steve Clemons and Tammy Haddad, two of Washington’s permaclass, ingratiating themselves in the new Trumpian establishment. They are masters of reinvention, truly DC’s answer to Prince and Madonna.

Cockburn was amused to see Politico Playbook managing editor Jack Blanchard in attendance. On the morning of the party, Blanchard described GB News as a “conservative U.K. media outlet”; slightly revising the language he used about the network on June 30, when he branded it an “upstart alt-right British TV channel.” (In a previous life, Blanchard had a show on rival network Sky News, which has dwindled into obscurity since GB launched.) “Attacks like this only serve to strengthen our resolve to deliver the bold and fearless journalism that’s making us number one,” a GB News insider told Cockburn.

Appropriately for a British affair, things turned rather rowdy toward the end. One bartender had to recuse himself to get some air for a few minutes after having to clear up someone’s sick. Gulp.

Spotted: SBA administrator Kelly Loeffler; UN Ambassador nominee Mike Waltz; Kari Lake of the US Agency for Global Media; Will Scharf, Alex Pfeiffer, Olivia Wales, Allison Schuster and Kush Desai from the White House; senior director for counterterrorism Dr. Sebastian Gorka (peace be upon him); Treasury senior counselor Alexandra Preate; Kellyanne Conway; Adele Malpass; Caroline Wren; Human Events’s Jack Posobiec; Grover Norquist; Sam Brown; Sean Spicer; Winston Marshall and Melissa Chen; Alan McCormick, Christopher Hope, Steven Edginton and Michael Booker of GB News; the Washington Examiner’s Byron York; the New York Times’s Shawn McCreesh; NBC News’s Katherine Doyle and her husband Alex deGrasse; Politico’s Rachael Bade; Semafor’s Shelby Talcott and Dave Weigel; Jacob Heilbrunn of the National Interest; Richard Hanania, and Ben Domenech of Fox News and The Spectator.

At the Cole face

Perhaps the only British journalist in DC not in attendance at the GB News bash: Harry Cole, the Sun’s new US editor-at-large. Cole was the subject of a vigorous contest between his newspaper and GB News earlier this year – with the journalist ultimately deciding to stick with his current employer after they promised to dispatch him to DC with a new title, a Fox News contributorship and a new multi-platform show.

Your ever-dogged correspondent got his hands on the brief being circulated to prospective guests. The program will be called Harry Cole Saves the West and is being billed as “a high impact, hard-hitting and unapologetically pro-West TV show and podcast.”

“The show’s core credo is about defending timeless Western traditions and treasured truths – faith, family, freedom and fortified frontiers,” the brief reads. Cockburn will be keeping an eye out for Cole in the pews come Sunday morning.

On our radar

NEVER POST CNN’s KFile has unearthed BLS pick E.J. Antoni’s old Twitter account, upon which he made a series of disparaging remarks about women’s appearances and accused prominent liberals of being pedophiles. Their story follows Cockburn’s reporting on Antoni’s comments on gender and IQ last Friday.

NO MORE SUMMER FRIDAYS The President is currently credentialing ambassadors in the Oval Office for 10 countries including Germany and Italy. Later today he will sign executive orders (2 p.m. ET), make an announcement (4 p.m.) and host a dinner in the Rose Garden (7 p.m.).

NEW BALLS, PLEASE President Trump will then head to his home neighborhood of Queens for Sunday’s US Open men’s tennis singles final. He will watch Novak Djokovic 🇷🇸 or Carlos Alcaraz 🇪🇸 face Jannik Sinner 🇮🇹 or Felix Auger Aliassime 🇨🇦.

Is your date Suspiciously Attractive for Washington?

If you’re a middle-aged bureaucrat at the Department of Justice and you draw the interest of a sexy young Georgetown au pair named Skylar on Hinge, then chances are you’ve fallen into some sort of honey trap. In the case of Joseph Schnitt, deputy chief of the Special Operations Unit of the Department of Justice’s Office of Enforcement Operations, the honey was set by James O’Keefe of Project Veritas, who hasn’t changed his sneaky ways now that Trump is back in charge.

“Skylar” managed to get Schnitt on record in August as saying that the DoJ would edit any Republicans out of the Epstein Files. Whoopsie! Then, in a move that would make J. Edgar Hoover cringe, the DoJ tweeted out its face-saving response as a screenshot of an email from Schnitt to his boss, typed from an iPhone in AirPlane mode. “The comments I made were my own personal comments on what I’ve learned in the media and not from anything I’ve done or learned at work,” Schnitt wrote, presumably with a face redder than a Thai chili.

Cockburn hopes that Skylar, who no longer exists, was worth it, Mr. Schnitt. She offers a crash course in potential partners who are “SAW” (Suspiciously Attractive for Washington). Remember: if your date is significantly better looking than you, it’s not because you have a great personality – this is DC. It’s because she’s honey-trapping for an American adversary, she’s a Project Veritas operative or she expects to be paid. Stay alert, schlubs. Your job may Hinge on it.

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