The Jeff Gannon Story
It was bloggers on the right that exposed the fake Bush National Guard memos cited on 60 Minutes. Now it’s the bloggers on the left who’ve uncovered all kinds of wacky stuff about Jeff Gannon. Rep. Slaughter summarized the situation in a letter she sent to President Bush earlier today:
According to several credible reports, “Mr. Gannon” has been repeatedly credentialed as a member of the White House press corps by your office and has been regularly called upon in White House press briefings by your Press Secretary Scott McClellan, despite the fact evidence shows that “Mr. Gannon” is a Republican political operative, uses a false name, has phony or questionable journalistic credentials, is known for plagiarizing much of the “news” he reports, and according to several web reports, may have ties to the promotion of the prostitution of military personnel.
It was the revelations of plagiarism a few weeks ago that started the focus of attention on Gannon (he was copying entire paragraphs from GOP press releases directly into his news stories). It looks like a lot of the footwork since then has happened at AMERICAblog. I’ve only scrolled through some of the entries, but it appears the dual identity aspect of the story started when when one of Jim Guckert’s old college fraternity brothers noticed him in the White House press room. Further investigation by bloggers confirmed that family-values maven Jeff Gannon was really Jim Guckert (and you can go to AMERICAblog to see the underwear-only photo Jim Guckert chose to use for his public AOL profile). The records revealed that the company owning JeffGannon.com also owns sites such as HotMilitaryStud.com and MilitaryEscorts.com (apparently it’s not been established yet that the owner in question is actually Jim Guckert, but his address and the company’s address are the same).
This story is of particular interest to me because it’s starting to look like he was the one who outed CIA agent Valerie Plame (I wrote about this previously, here and here). As summarized at Daily Kos:
White House-credentialed fake news reporter “Jeff Gannon” from fake news agency “Talon News” was cited by the Washington Post as having the only access to an internal CIA memo that named Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA agent. Gannon, in a question posed to Wilson in an October 2003 interview, referred to the memo (to which no other news outlet had access, according to the Post). Gannon subsequently has been subpoenaed by the federal grand jury looking into the Plame outing.
Why would a guy like this be given access to internal CIA memos? If the history of the press’ relationship with Bush is any guide, this story won’t get a huge amount of mainstream media attention. We’ll see. AMERICABlog put it best:
Just imagine if some guy with alleged ties to male prostitution were given unprecedented access to the White House, and given a White House press pass that didn’t even have his real name on it, in order to throw fake softball questions at the press briefings to help make the president look good. Now imagine that president were named Bill Clinton. Now imagine what would happen next?
