Today's JimJeff Wrap-Up
Well, JimJeff GuckertGannon came out of his self-imposed one-week exile to re-exploit his 15 minutes of fame some more.
But first, CBS News.com has a very interesting story by Dotty Lynch, Senior Political Editor for CBS News -- it seems to be the first mainstream media report to mention Karl Rove's name in connection with GannonGuckertGate:
Rove-Gannon Connection?
[...]
The architect of the Bush victories in 2000 and 2004 came through the ranks of college Republicans with the late Lee Atwater, and their admitted and alleged dirty tricks are the legends many young political operatives dream of pulling off. So when Jeff Gannon, White House "reporter" for Talon "News," was unmasked last week, the leap to a possible Rove connection was unavoidable.
[...]
But what Gannon was up to was not just writing opinion columns or using a different technique to get information. He was a player in Republican campaigns and his work in the South Dakota Senate race illustrates the role he played. It is also a classic example of how political operatives are using the brave new world of the Internet and the blogosphere. Gannon and Talon News appear to be mini-Drudge reports; a "news" source which partisans use to put out negative information, get the attention of the bloggers, talk radio and then the MSM in a way that mere press releases are unable to achieve.
[...]
Daschle aides told Roll Call, "This guy (Gannon) became the dumping ground for opposition research." The connections are so strong that there is an FEC challenge which could be a test case on the limits of the use of the Internet in federal campaigns.
Ms. Lynch is right about how JimJeff's influence went beyond the wingnut site GOPUSA. After his pieces appeared on Talon News, they were frequently copied on FreeRepublic and other message boards (often by JimJeff). Jeff appeared several times on Sean Hannity's radio program. Jeff eventually got his own radio show, through a venture with FreeRepublic. And, of course, by being allowed to speak in White House Press conferences, he was able to get messages spread on TV and by the mainstream meda. Was this just due to the collaberation of JimJeff and Bobby Eberle, or was somebody else pulling their strings? I suspect that the code of omerta will keep us from ever finding out.
Anyway, as they say, read the whole thing. (And also be sure to read Joe Conason's Salon piece about Gannon and the attack on Daschle.)
Now, on to Jeff's tearful but indignant interview with Howie Kurtz:
"I've made mistakes in my past," he said yesterday. "Does my past mean I can't have a future? Does it disqualify me from being a journalist?"
Well, America should be a country where even a guy who advertised his penis size in an effort to sell his sexual services should be able to be President, but since Jeff's chosen niche is the wingnutty Republican one, I kinda doubt he's going to find much work as pundit.
And as for being a journalist, well, since he hasn't been one yet, I'd guess that it's his lack of integrity and minimal talent that disqualify him, not his past.
Gannon chastised his critics, breaking a silence that began last week when liberal bloggers disclosed his real name, James Dale Guckert, and a Web page, which he paid for, featuring X-rated photos of himself. "Why would they be looking into a person's sexual history? Is that what we're going to do to reporters now? Is there some kind of litmus test for reporters? Is it right to hold someone's sexuality against them?"
JimJeff, when you advertise your sexuality on the internet, you can't complain later about people paying attention to it.
Gannon says he was questioned by the FBI in the Valerie Plame leak investigation after referring to a classified CIA document when he interviewed the outed CIA operative's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson.
But he said yesterday: "I didn't have the document. I never saw the document. It was written about in the Wall Street Journal a week before. I had no special access to classified information."
I was going to write a post saying as much, but now that JimJeff has admitted it, I guess there's no need.
But hey, I have the material, so let's review it.
So, here's JimJeff's question to Joe Wilson
An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?
And here's part of the Wall Street Journal piece from the previous week(emphesis added):
An internal government memo addresses some of the mysteries at the center of the White House leak investigation and could help investigators in the search for who disclosed the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, according to two people familiar with the memo.
The memo, prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where CIA officer Valerie Plame and other intelligence officials gathered to brainstorm about how to verify reports that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from Niger.
Ms. Plame, a member of the agency's clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested at the meeting that her husband, Africa expert and former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, could be sent to Niger to investigate the reports, according to current and former government officials familiar with the meeting at the CIA's Virginia headquarters. .
So, it seems obvious (in retrospect) that JimJeff just cut and pasted the WSJ info to come up with his question. What threw people off is his lack of qualifiers, like "alleged" or "reportedly" when discussing the document. Well, that and his crowing that, "For something that is supposed to be classified, it seems that this document is easily accessible" -- plus, his self-aggrandizing talk about having to protect his sources. (Yes, if only he hadn't pretended to be a big shot reporter, maybe nobody would have bothered to look up his naughty web photos.)
But anyway, it sounds like somebody told him he'd better knock off the posturing and confess that his only source (besides GOP and White House press releases) is the Wall Street Journal -- because otherswise, he could be sleeping with the fishes.
But back to JimJeff's heart-to-heart with Howie:
Despite the battering he has taken, Gannon hasn't abandoned plans to work in journalism and hopes to generate sympathy by speaking out.
"People criticize me for being a Christian and having some of these questionable things in my past," he said. "I believe in a God of forgiveness."
Translation: "Hey, if citing God's forgiveness allowed George Bush to enter the White House despite all the stuff HE did, why can't my fellow conservatives accept me back into the fold and give me a job at the Heritage Foundation? ... Oh, the gay thing."
Next, let's take a brief look at some snippets from Editor and Publisher's transcript of JimJeff's interview by CNN's Anderson Cooper:
COOPER: Let me give you a chance just to respond to what you want to respond to. You had previously stated that you had registered a number of pornographic Web sites for a private client. That's what you had said publicly. You said the sites were never activated. A man now has talked to "The Washington Post," who said that you had essentially paid him to create some Web sites for an escort service, and you are yourself offering yourself as an escort.
GANNON: Well, like I said, there's a lot of things being said about me out there. A lot of things that have nothing to do with the reporting I have done for the last two years.
Translation: "Sure, I lied before, and then I got busted, but the story shouldn't be about my lack of veracity now, it should be about my lack of veracity over the last two years when I called myself a reporter."
Then Cooper does a good job of grilling Jeff about how come he was attending WH press conferences even before Talon News existed. (Remember when Jeff told E&P,"I write a news story, I post it, and anything having to do with GOPUSA, I don't know about"? Well, you'll be shocked, SHOCKED to know that he wasn't being exactly truthful, in that he actually got his first WH press passes by telling the press office that he was a reporter for the famed news organization GOPUSA):
COOPER: So I guess the questions that are being raised why were you at -- allowed to go to a White House briefing if you are working for GOPUSA, which is a clearly partisan organization?
GANNON: There are many, many organizations, many people that are allowed to attend the White House briefings. I don't know the criteria they use.
Translation: "If the White House wants to givea press pass to somebody from a website "news organization" on the same level as Young Conservatives Online or The Rant, that's their problem."
There's more good stuff there, but let's move on to Scottie McClellan telling E&P just why the White House would give a press pass to somebody from GOPUSA:
McClellan said White House Press Office staffers considered the openly partisan site to be a legitimate news organization when they gave Guckert, a.k.a. Jeff Gannon, the first of numerous day passes in February 2003.
"He faxed a letter in on his [GOPUSA] letterhead, they checked that it was a conservative news Web site he worked for," McClellan explained, referring to his staffers who handled such credentialing at the time. "There was a check to make sure it was a news organization and a news Web site. There was a determination made at that point [that it was legitimate]."
So, Scottie's staffers considered GOPUSA to be a legit news agency because (a) it was able to fax; (b) it had letterhead; (c) it existed on the web, just like JimJeff claimed; and (d) with a name like GOPUSA, it HAS to be good.
I'll be applying for my press pass first thing Monday.
McClellan, who was deputy press secretary under Ari Fleischer when the initial Guckert approvals were given, became press secretary in July 2003. He said he currently has a staff of 12, only one of whom handles the 20 to 25 daily press passes issued each day. He said he had spoken with the staffer who approved Guckert's initial credential, but would not identify the person or comment on how he or she could consider GOPUSA -- which is run by Texas Republican activist Bobby Eberle -- to be a legitimate news organization.
Sadly, that staffer who approved JimJeff's credentials died in a tragic accident tomorrow, and so can't answer any questions as to why JimJeff was admitted to the briefings. And Scottie, who was only the Deputy Press Secretary then, certainly can't be blamed for anything that occured back then, because after Ari believed Bobby when he said that the site was non-partisan, Scottie did too. And as for anything that happened since he became Secretary, well, the past is the past, and Scottie believes in a God of forgiveness.
"Our staff assistants do a good job," he said. "The staff assistant went to verify that the news organization existed."
Hey, The Onion: America's Finest News Source™ exists, and it's even America's finest news source (it wouldn't lie about something like that), so I'm sure Scottie's fine staff assistants have accredited all of its employees, who will be asking questions of the President any day now.
Oh, and while JimJeff confided to Howie that, "I have no friendships with anyone there [the White House]," Media Matters wants to know how JimJeff got invited to the 2003 and 2004 White House press Christmas parties, which are apparently exclusive events that not every Tom, Dick, and Guckert is asked to attend.
Oh, and you won't be too surprised to learn that, at least for the last party, it was the Press Secretary's office that came up with the guest list. Was JimJeff invited in appreciation for his great questions, or to be somebody's date? I guess we'll never know. But it does seem that his attendance at these events means that JimJeff wasn't just an obscure nut, like some would have you believe, but a member of Washington's power elite.
As for the significance of the Christmas party, Chicago Tribune columnist Michael Killian observed on December 31, 2003, that receiving an invitation is a sign that "one may consider oneself a member in good standing of the fabled Washington establishment."
But that was December. Now, nobody claims to knows JimJeff or Bobby Eberle. It's sad, really, except that they brought this on themselves by being willing to do somebody's (the GOP's? Karl Rove's? Satan's?) dirty work.
In any case, we wish JimJeff well, and look forward to his next media appearance, possibly as the star of the XXX updated version of The Story of G.I. Joe. (Hey, while JimJeff's wasn't a war correspondent -- at least, not yet -- he does know soldiers, and that's what counts:
Here's one of his questions to Scottie McClellan which I think could be used as the basis of the screenplay:
Q Scott, I frequently communicate with soldiers stationed in Iraq. And many of them ask me why only the bad news about Iraq is reported in the American media. More than one has told me how demoralizing it is to hear so much about the Abu Ghraib pictures, and so little about the murder and annihilation of American contractors and the beheading of Nicholas Berg. Can I get you to comment on the negative impact our reporting is having on morale of our troops?
I bet those soldiers in Iraq with whom JimJeff communicates will be REALLY demoralized when they learn of the traitorous media coverage of JimJeff's recent travails.
1:37:43 AM 
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