A reporter for the New York Times revealed this week she had a scoop on Donald Trump first launching his presidential campaign in June 2015, but turned it down.

"Somebody close to [Trump] called me last May, it was like late May or early June, and they said, 'Trump is going to announce on June 16 and we want you to break it.' And I said, 'No.' They seemed confused," the Times' Maggie Haberman said in a podcast interview this week with former Obama advisers Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer.

"I said, 'You know, I went through this ... with Trump in 2011 when he talked about running and I'm not doing — and I treated it pretty seriously — and I'm not doing this again until the day he declares," she added.

Many reporters regarded rumors that Trump planned to run in 2016 with extreme skepticism because he flirted with the idea of running for president as far back 1999, but never followed through on it.

Last year, on June 16, 2015, he changed all of that.

"I don't think it was a mistake [to ignore the tip] because he had a history of sort of looking at this and then not doing it," Haberman continued. "The point at which I started thinking it was time to take him seriously was last September, when I saw the size of the crowds he was getting.

"The point at which I believed he could be the nominee was November, when he made mistake after mistake that would have crippled any other candidate and his numbers ... went up.

"And when it became clear that terrorist attacks that were going to be tied to [the Islamic State] in one way or another were going to be a key component, certainly in the primary race, especially after terrorists and San Bernardino, it struck me that it was likely that the things he was talking about would ... resonate well," she added.

Haberman was hired as a campaign correspondent for the Times in January 2015.