Posted on 02/21/2005 8:57:57 AM PST by Pikamax
Web Site Owner Says He Knew of Reporter's 2 Identities By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
OUSTON, Feb. 19 - 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.
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. 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.
"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. 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.
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.
"Jeff did his thing, I did my thing," Mr. Eberle said. He also said that while he saw some of Mr. Guckert's writing samples before engaging him, "I don't know if I actually asked about his background and training."
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 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.
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.
Mr. Guckert resigned soon after a news conference when he asked Mr. Bush: "How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?" referring to Senate Democrats.
Mr. Eberle said it was not his idea of a proper question. "I would have phrased it differently," he said. Still, he said, the backlash surprised him. "I had no reason to think he was not adhering to professional news standards." The White House generally reserves slots for professional reporters, not political activists.
Mr. Guckert said he had never worked on political campaigns, or for the Republican Party, but admitted asking "pointed" questions at regular White House briefings from the point of a conservative. "Did my writing have a slant? Absolutely," he said. He said he has hired lawyers to examine whether he can take legal action over some of the information posted about him on the Internet, including the public posting of his Social Security number.
Mr. Eberle also said he had no inkling that Mr. Guckert had created pornographic Web sites or offered himself as a gay escort. Those revelations came in recent accounts in The Washington Post. If he had known, Mr. Eberle said, "I don't think I would have brought him on."
Mr. Guckert would not address the salacious details of his personal life - including sexually explicit photographs of him online but said "all of these personal things" have nothing to do with the administration or 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.
Mr. Eberle, who once worked for Lockheed Martin and says he prefers to keep his current employer unidentified, said that he was not bankrolled by any backers and that he and his wife had made few Republican contributions. Texas Republicans said he was not well known in the party.
Before engaging Mr. Guckert on "a volunteer basis," Mr. Eberle said he himself got temporary press credentials to attend a White House briefing. "I think I asked a question about a U.N. resolution on Iraq," Mr. Eberle said.
Mr. Guckert, having disclosed his real name, which he needed to use for even the cursory White House checks for a nonpermanent accreditation, then began attending briefings, Mr. Eberle said. "He would go as often as he could; he would try to go every day," he said. Mr. Guckert did not travel with the president.
The question, Mr. Eberle said, was, "Can this person take information and put a news product together?" Mr. Eberle said the answer was yes. Mr. Guckert's stories have since been removed from the Web site.
As for Mr. Guckert's reporting, Mr. Eberle said, "I've gone on record against softball questions on any side," but said that he did not monitor correspondents' performance. "I thought he was doing a good job. He did a good job, until that question."
Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
So what, Ralph?
The FBI and SS knew too.
Gotta love those libs...
/sarcasm
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.
I am sick to death of the media phrasing on the memo issue.
Here is Gannon's question to Wilson
October 28, 2003
(TN = Talon News):
TN: 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?
Wilson: I don't know anything about a meeting, I can only tell you about the meeting I was at where I was asked if I would prepare to go, and there was nobody at that meeting that I know. Now that fact that my wife knows that I know a lot about the uranium business and that I know a lot about Niger and that she happens to be involved in weapons of mass destruction, it should come as no surprise to anyone that we know of each others activities.
~snip~
Here is the WSJ Article from over a week earlier, October 17, 2003
(I have lost my registration info with the WSJ, but I posted at #12):
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. Soon after, midlevel CIA officials decided to send him, say intelligence officials.
~snip~
It is patently obvious that Gannon based his question on the WSJ article. And contrary to the New York Times' assertion, Gannon does not imply he's seen the memo.
I do believe the Plame investigation is thorough and I was pleased but not surprised to learn the FBI had interviewed him. He had been on a LONG list of reporters the grand jury might call. Newsday had published the list.
The lefties like to make a big deal when a figure like Gannon is on the list or interviews with the FBI, but I'm interested to know why their own reporter, Judith Miller, is so wanted to be heard from by that very grand jury that the courts have found her in contempt. I'm very interested to know why they want Matt Cooper back again and he, too, has been held in contempt. I'm much more inclinded to think that reporters like that are more involved in the Plame game than little old Jeff Gannon.
Wolf Blizter is his real name.
I am sure this nonstory is going nowhere. But I do hope that Gannon is okay and will soon get his life back together. He seem to be a survivor.
Notice that this article is long, dull, and boring. That's because they wanted to keep the propaganda war against Gannon alive, but couldn't find anything to say.
So they keep it alive (barely). But few people will be able to get through this article, it's so dull. And nobody will be inflamed by it or understand what the fuss is all about.
I call him Gannon, because that's the professional name he has chosen to use. When talking about his conduct as a reporter, the New York Times should also have had the basic decency and professional courtesy to use his preferred name, as they would in reporting about anyone else whom they didn't hate with kneejerk leftist reflexes.
They are indeed hysterically panic stricken.
They really have no confidence in themselves. And, their ideology must override anything else as well to create this sort of obsessive response to the idea that maybe a reporter was not against Bush and asked a question that actually made fun of democrats.
Which doesn't mean a thing, really, I just think it's funny.
Wasn't "Effie" Ann Landers first name?
I think Ann Landers was Eppie, and Dear Abby was PoPo.
That was it...Eppie.
Rodger Hedgecock is in for Rush (I'm only listening because I want to hear Rush if he calls in from Afghanistan, but Rodger's been pretty good today). Anyway, right after I read your post about Campbell Brown, Rodger is talking about the media always being so negative about this administration and he quotes Campbell Brown saying on election eve in Iraq something about how you could just feel it in the air...something was about to happen...something very ugly.
LOL
Then Rodger went on citing other media hyper-negativity (including Chrissy the day after the election).
Did the NYT ever demand that John Kerry use his real name- John Kohn ?
Or admit that he was not really Irish, but, of Jewish Austrian and English heritage ?
Naah.
If he wasn't a "gay escort" nothing would've come of this.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.