CORRECTION: We had earlier reported in this story that Dan Froomkin of the Wash Post reported that Gannon had been subpoenaed. In fact, Froomkin reported that White House records about Gannon were subpoenaed, NOT that Gannon himself was subpoenaed. Apologies to Dan Froomkin for that error.
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Ok, another interview with Jeff/Jim. My question for reporters who are interviewing him is: how do you know if he is telling the truth? He has different stories for different reporters. But on some level, that's okay. It keeps the story churning. And, have you noticed, the MSM really does seem to becoming more engaged. Could it be they smell a story?
That aside, Sunday'sNY Times article includes interviews with Gannon/Guckert and Bob Eberle from GOPUSA.
Eberle knew Jeff/Jim had two names, and thought, that despite his complete lack of journalistic experience, he did a fine job:
The operator of an activist Republican Web site and news service said Friday night that he had known for two years that his White House correspondent went by two identities.Okay, before you read this next passage, ask yourself this: if you owned a website, and had a reporter working in the White House, would you pay attention once in a while to what said reporter was up to?:
But the operator, Robert R. Eberle, denied in an interview that the correspondent, Jeff Gannon, whose real name is James D. Guckert, was an administration plant or was given preferential treatment as a Republican partisan to ask soft questions at briefings.
Mr. Eberle, breaking his silence about details of the events, which have been portrayed by Democrats as a Republican effort to manipulate news, said it took him by surprise in early 2003 when the freelancer he had taken on as Jeff Gannon said he was gaining White House accreditation under the name James D. Guckert. "He said Gannon was his professional name; he didn't like the sound of his other name," Mr. Eberle recounted.Jeff/Jim weighs in again. I repeat my question from above. Do these reporters have any sense as to whether what he is saying is accurate? There have been some huge, let's call them "discrepancies," in Jeff/Jim's story to date. And this passage should convey to the White House Press Corps just what a joke is was that he sat among them:
Mr. Eberle, 36, an aerospace engineer with a penchant for conservative politics, said the disclosure raised no red flags about Mr. Guckert's journalistic credentials or professionalism.
Mr. Eberle said that in the two years that Mr. Guckert worked for him, he had not kept track of his volunteer reporter.
Mr. Guckert, who wrote for the Gopusa.com Web site and its offshoot Talon News, agreed. In an interview on Saturday, he said had never even made phone calls to administration officials, not even to ask routine questions or clarify basic facts.Jeff/Jim defends his journalistic technique:
"My relationship with the White House and with Talon News was on the basis of a reporter and a reporter only. And all that, all of this other stuff out there that I was given favorable treatment, access to things - is absolutely, categorically untrue," Mr. Guckert said.
Mr. Guckert said Saturday that he had no journalism experience before arriving at Gopusa, apart from working for his high school and college newspapers. Asked why he did not, in his function as a White House reporter, even try to interview White House officials, he said, "I thought there was a lot of meat that came out of the press briefings."You might say that....among other things. Yet, this man with no journalistic talents or ambition somehow came up with a clever technique to interview Joseph Wilson. He denies seeing the Plame memo. He was just being a clever journalist, for a change:
"You may say that lacks some kind of journalistic ambition," he added.
Mr. Guckert denied seeing a Central Intelligence Agency memorandum disclosing the identity of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. operative, even though he had strongly insinuated as much in an interview with her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, the transcript of which he posted on the Internet.Funny thing is that Dan Froomkin reported in his "White House Briefing" Blog for the Washington Post on March 10, 2004 that records about Gannon had been subpeonaed, based on a report from Newsday:
Mr. Guckert's phrasing in that interview so strongly suggested he had seen the classified memorandum that it brought F.B.I. officials to his house as part of the Plame leak investigation, he said. But he said referring to the memorandum as though he had seen it was merely an interview technique. "What I said was no more than what was reported in The Wall Street Journal a week before," he said.
Which of These Is Not Like the Other?Back in the NY Times piece, there is another interesting tidbit in the article that confirms a connection exposed by RawStory.com earlier today:
As Tom Brune reported last week in Newsday, the federal grand jury investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative has subpoenaed White House records on contacts with 25 journalists.
The list (low on the page) is full of familiar names: Columnist Robert Novak, of course, and MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Time's James Carney, The Post's Mike Allen, Newsweek's Evan Thomas.
And then there's Jeff Gannon of Talon News.
Mr. Eberle said that he and some friends founded Gopusa out of his Houston home about five years ago and later created Talon News. They expanded by buying another conservative site called MillionsofAmericans.com.That link,as Raw Story explains, connects Eberle right to the heart of the GOP. Every article about this story gives a few answers, but creates many, many more questions.
