President Obama Makes Surprise Appearance At White House Daily Briefing

Fishbowl DC has video of President Obama‘s unscheduled appearance in the White House briefing room this afternoon.

The President appeared at the start of today’s daily briefing — apparently catching many reporters by surprise — to make a statement following his comments at Wednesday’s prime time press conference about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.

> More: Just after the briefing, CNN White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux reported on-air that White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told the press corps this morning — in an off-camera, on-the-record gaggle — that, in Malveaux’s paraphrasing, the Gates “matter was essentially closed.”

But right before this afternoon’s daily briefing, “we had a two-minute warning”, Malveaux recalled on-air. “I heard an anxiousness, a nervousness from one of the White House press folks saying, ‘Two-minute warning, two-minute warning.’ I thought, maybe something is going on. I thought, where is the president right now? Where is he? Sure enough, he walked out just minutes later to address this more fully.”

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