Gannon in White House Briefing Room Before Talon News Existed

Kudos to Intelligence Squad for finding this and Kossacks for getting the screen grab up so quickly, as well as nailing down all the verifiable points. The screen grab is from the C-SPAN Web site White House Daily Briefing from February 28, 2003 here (RealVideo clip). Fast forward to 32:05 and there he is.



Well well well. Look at that, it's "Jeff"!

So then, what an interesting question we have, huh? "Jeff Gannon" is sitting in the White House briefing room with absolutely no media organization affiliation. (But some live and active escort sites!) Just how does that happen?

Not by accident, that's how.

On the Intelligence Squad post, "Gannon" posts with a link to GOPUSA. Is that a "news" outlet? Not by my definition it's not.

So Scott McClellan, answer me this -- what was "Jeff Gannon" doing in the White House briefing room before he worked for Talon? Why was he given access in the first place? And of course, how did he get the Valerie Plame information?

Lots of questions that should be asked at tomorrow's daily briefing. Any members of the traditional media feel like asking these questions yet or shall the blogs continue to do your job?

-- Rob in Baltimore

UPDATE: Now that I've had some time to go through the video more closely, I highly encourage everyone to look at it. I have my own take on how uncomfortable "Jeff" looks. He's looking to his left and right like he's doing something and he's about to get caught. But judge for yourself. View it here. Start at 31:45.

UPDATE 2: For due diligence, I decided to look up when talonnews.com was created.

Domain Name: TALONNEWS.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, LLC.
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
Referral URL: http://www.networksolutions.com
Name Server: NS1.DATAPIPE.NET
Name Server: NS2.DATAPIPE.NET
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Updated Date: 07-feb-2005
Creation Date: 29-mar-2003
Expiration Date: 29-mar-2006

The C-SPAN link above is from February 28, 2003. Twenty nine days later talonnews.com was created.