Congresswoman Wants Explanation of White House Ties to Ex-Reporter

Cox News Service

By Scott Shepard

With the mystery of “Jeff Gannon” deepening, Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., on Thursday renewed her call for the White House to explain its relationship with a conservative ex-reporter linked to an online gay escort service.

Slaughter said the relationship between the White House press office and “Gannon,” whose real name is James Dale Guckert, was “anything but typical.” The White House should “stop the stonewalling and come clean,” she added, following up on her initial request a week ago.

Slaughter’s comments came in response to evidence that the White House allowed Gannon into presidential press briefings weeks before his Internet-based news organization was registered and online.

Presidential press secretary Scott McClellan insisted last week that Gannon, in order to get daily passes to the White House news briefing, was treated “like anyone else” and “showed that he was representing a news organization that published regularly.”

But on Thursday, the online magazine Salon cited C-SPAN television clips showing Gannon attending White House news briefings as early as Feb. 28, 2003, a month before his Internet news site, Talon News, was registered and online.

And McClellan’s predecessor, Ari Fleischer, told Editor and Publisher magazine that in early 2003, during his tenure as President Bush’s spokesman, he became so concerned about Gannon’s possible ties to the Republican Party that he would not call on him at press briefings.

Fleischer said he later determined, after meeting with Gannon and his employer, longtime Texas Republican activist Bobby Eberle, that Gannon was working for “a conservative news organization” rather than the GOP. They “assured me they they were not part of the Republican Party,” Fleischer told E&P magazine, which covers the newspaper industry.

But Slaughter and other White House critics suggest the access given to Gannon to cover presidential news briefings is further evidence of the Bush administration blurring the boundary between the news media and the government, akin to the payments the administration once made to conservative columnists to promote President Bush’s policies and its production of video news releases that mimic the style of television news.

The White House has denied any special relationship with Gannon. But it has not provided an explanation of its policies on providing credentials to reporters, either the temporary “day” passes for reporters not normally assigned to the White House or the so-called permanent “hard” passes that White House beat reporters get.

Nor has it explained how Gannon received almost daily passes to the press briefings for some two years, using a pseudonym and working for an organization that failed to meet the criteria for press credentials to cover Congress.

Gannon applied for congressional credentials in 2004, but the Standing Committee of Correspondents, made up of congressional beat reporters elected by their peers to rule on such applications, denied his request because Talon News did not meet the committee’s criteria as a news organization.

In addition, he applied as “Jeff Gannon,” rather than as James Dale Guckert. When the committee discovered his real name and inquired about it, he explained that he used a pseudonym because it was easier to market.

White House “hard” passes are difficult to obtain and are typically granted to reporters whose news organizations have been recognized by the Standing Committee of Correspondents on Capitol Hill.

Before his resignation from Talon News last week, Gannon typically asked partisan-edged questions about presidential critics and friendly questions about the president’s policies during White House press briefings.

He also is one of the reporters questioned by special prosecutors about the leak of a secret CIA memo disclosing the identity of Bush war critic Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA operative.

But it was a question Gannon posed to Bush himself at his first post-inauguration news conference that attracted the attention – and the ire – of media watchdog groups and liberal Internet bloggers: he asked how Bush could work with Democrats who are “divorced from reality.”

The ensuing investigations by Gannon’s critics cast doubts about his journalism credentials and linked him to Internet sites that featured nude photos of Gannon and advertised male escort services for $200 an hour.

AMERICAblog linked its readers to the photos and escort web sites after Gannon denied to CNN that the sites were ever active. AMERICAblog also posted copies of invoices of payments to a California web site designer to set up the web sites.

The web designer, Paul Leddy, told The Washington Post that it was Gannon who initially contacted him in 1999 to set up the sites and that Gannon’s postings to the site were later moved to another site where they remained active until March 2003, the month Talon News began operating.

Since resigning his position with Talon News, Gannon has declined numerous requests for comment and has told E&P magazine that he will not speak to the media again.

Jennifer Ohman, in an e-mail sent Thursday on behalf of Eberle, said, “We are not commenting on Jeff Gannon and have not since the beginning of all this.”

Eberle, who was a delegate to the 2000 Republican convention that nominated Bush for president, owns Talon News and GOPUSA.

TalonNews.com, was registered with NetworkSolutions on March 29, 2003. Until Gannon began drawing attention, the earliest articles on the site were dated April 1, 2003.

Some of Gannon’s articles have been removed from the site in recent weeks, most notably those critical of Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic nominee, and former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the GOP’s No. 1 political target in Senate races last year.

GOPUSA.com, which boasts of “bringing the conservative message to America,” has been operating since 2000, and in the past has reproduced some of the Gannon articles from Talon News. They, too, are no longer a part of the GOPUSA archives.

In her e-mail, Ohman emphasized that “contrary to what many have said and written they (GOPUSA and Talon) are not one in the same—owned by the same person but that’s it.”

The Talon News site provides a link to the GOPUSA site, but GOPUSA has no mention of Talon News on its site.