Keith Urbahn, chief of staff for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is being credited with first reporting, via Twitter Sunday night, that a source was claiming that Osama bin Laden had been killed.

"So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn, Urbahn wrote at 10:25 p.m. 

He was quick to add that he wasn't sure if it were true, but he was the first to make the switch from wild guesses about bin Laden's death to an actual report.

"Don't know if its true, but let's pray it is," he added soon thereafter. "Ladies, gents, let's wait to see what the President says. Could be misinformation or pure rumor."

When the news was confirmed, outlets from the New York Times to The Guardian cited Urbahn's initial tweet as being first to plant a flag on the story.

"I was sitting down to do some work in bed, actually, and I got a phone call and someone let me know that there was a possibility that U.S. forces had killed bin Laden," Urbahn told POLITICO. "He was not sure. He was interested in having Mr. Rumsfeld come on the air to talk about it, so I said, 'We'll see what happens, we'll see what shakes out.'

"I turned to my wife and said, 'That was an interesting call. Someone just suggested that UBL was killed. And there have been reports like this before, and we didn't take much stock in it. But I thought, why not put it on Twitter? That'd be interesting. And certainly Twitter would be ablaze with others who hear the same thing. No way I would be the first."

But he was.

"Within minutes, the thing had just gone viral," Urbahn said, and his Twitter account grew from around 300 followers to more than 5,000 within 12 hours.

"The bar for checking sources is much lower in Twitter, and I'm not a journalist. It's just a different standard,” he said. “... I don't credit myself with the story. I credit Twitter. It is one of the great democratizers in the world today."

But Urbahn also wants to make sure that Twitter doesn't get all the credit.

"The story is about the men and women who tracked this guy down and gave him what he's had coming for nine-plus years."