"Jeff Gannon's" Secret Life
By Eric Boehlert
The second story, brought to our attention by Buzzflash.com, suggests that Gannon's employer - conservative publicist Bobby Eberle and his GOPUSA website - also dabbled in old-fashioned anti-Semitism. - sw
Tuesday 15 February 2005
Revelations that the bogus reporter worked as a gay escort are the latest twist in the affair that has the White House squirming -- and Democrats demanding explanations.
Last week, Republican activist Bobby Eberle, the man behind the now infamous conservative Web site Talon News, insisted that before hiring "Jeff Gannon" as his White House correspondent, he never looked into Gannon's background. If true, Eberle probably wishes he had. And the same could be said for the White House officials who bent the rules to make way for Gannon in the press briefing room. There's new evidence that the Talon reporter, who lobbed softball questions at Bush during press conferences on behalf of a dubious news operation, recently worked as a male escort.
Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert, made headlines last week when he resigned from Talon after days of intensive scrutiny from bloggers. Online critics first raised questions about Guckert's questionable journalistic methods and his lack of experience (he often cut and pasted White House press releases into his "news" stories), as well as Talon's lack of independence from Eberle's purely partisan GOPUSA Web site. Then questions arose about why the Talon reporter was given access to the White House press room after being turned down for Capitol Hill press credentials. The final straw for Guckert came when bloggers revealed associations that Guckert and his Delaware-based company had with a handful of gay-themed male escort services.
Guckert insisted his only involvement with the sex sites was as a software consultant and, he added: "Those sites were never hosted. There's -- nothing ever went up on them," as he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Feb. 10. In an interview posted Feb. 11 with Editor & Publisher magazine, Guckert made the same claim: "They were done through a private company [Bedrock Corp.] I was involved with doing Web site development about five years ago. The sites were never hosted, and nothing was ever posted to the sites." On Monday, John Aravosis posted on his liberal site AmericaBlog.org detailed evidence indicating that not only was Guckert personally involved with the Web sites, but he was also offering his escort services for $200 an hour, or $1,200 a weekend.
Aravosis received on-the-record confirmation, complete with five invoices paid by Delaware's Bedrock Corp., from the person Guckert hired to build the gay Web site USMCPT.com, which features X-rated photos. The Web designer also forwarded to Aravosis dozens of unused photos that Guckert sent him when the site was being built. "Each photo looks remarkably like Jeff Gannon," Aravosis writes.
AmericaBlog also details scores of other gay escort sites featuring photos and personal profiles of Guckert, such as MaleCorps.com, WorkingBoys.net, and MeetLocalMen.com. Guckert's first site remained live until May 8, 2003, one month after he began covering the White House for Talon. According to Aravosis' research, Guckert's escort profile on WorkingBoys.net was still active as of Monday. Aravosis says he contacted Guckert for comment for the story but received none. Guckert appeared on Michelangelo Signorile's talk show on Sirius satellite radio Monday afternoon, during which time he was asked specifically about his gay escort past. "I'm just not going to address it," Guckert said.
Addressing the question of why Guckert's personal life matters, Aravosis wrote, "This is the Conservative Republican Bush White House we're talking about. It's looking increasingly like they made a decision to allow a hooker to ask the President of the United States questions. They made a decision to give a man with an alias and no journalistic experience access to the West Wing of the White House on a 'daily basis.'"
Revelations about Guckert's past certainly do not square with Talon's openly conservative approach. Talon has defended Bush on the issue of a gay-marriage ban and supported the notion of "ex-gays." In an article last year, Guckert, as Gannon, wrote that Democratic Sen. John Kerry "might someday be known as 'the first gay president.' The Massachusetts liberal has enjoyed a 100 percent rating from the homosexual advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), since 1995 in recognition of his support for the pro-gay agenda."
Guckert's brand of openly partisan journalism was often suspect. Last February he reported that a former Kerry intern had taped an interview with "one of the major television networks" to discuss her affair with the senator, an assertion that was completely false. The intern never appeared on television and never claimed to have had an affair with Kerry. (Since quitting, all of Gannon's stories have been scrubbed from the Talon site.) Describing its editorial mission, Eberle told the Dallas Morning News that if he, as editor, came across a story that was critical of Republicans, "you bet we'd be covering it." To date, there's no evidence Talon has come across any such story.
News of Guckert's past, or at least how he was able to land a coveted White House press pass without submitting himself to a full-scale FBI background check, will likely be addressed at Tuesday's meeting between leaders of the White House Correspondents Association and White House press secretary Scott McClellan. According to E&P, the two sides are getting together in the wake of the Guckert scandal to discuss ways of adjusting the criteria for White House press passes.
Most White House reporters obtain a permanent, or "hard," press pass only after passing an FBI background check, and only after first securing Capitol Hill credentials. Guckert was denied Hill credentials when the committee in charge of issuing them could not confirm Talon was a legitimate, independent news organization. Instead, Guckert, with the help of someone inside the White House press office, used a daily pass for nearly two years. Daily passes require only instant background checks, compared to the ones the FBI conducts for hard-pass applicants, which can take several months to complete.
According to Eberle, Guckert provided White House officials with his real name, which means they knew he was writing under a false one. White House officials refuse to discuss why they let Guckert in or what, if any, criteria they used to determine his qualifications. "We're trying to get more details about how this was done," says Mark Smith, vice president of the White House Correspondents Association.
Last week, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., requested from McClellan all documents related to Guckert's press passes. "As you may know, Mr. Guckert/Gannon was denied a Congressional press pass because he could not show that he wrote for a valid news organization. Given the fact that he was denied Congressional credentials, I seek your explanation of how Mr. Guckert/Gannon passed muster for White House press credentials," Lautenberg wrote. On Monday, House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer noted, "This issue is important from an ethical as well as from a national security standpoint. It is hard to understand why a man with little real journalism experience was given a White House press corps credential."
The gay escort angle may also force Guckert's conservative defenders to rethink their position. Writing last week for Men's News Daily, a conservative site often aligned with Talon, columnist Sher Zieve insisted, "My, most reliable, source advises that ... before coming to Washington D.C., Jeff was in software. The site domain names were registered, by Jeff, for a client or clients. The same source advises that these sites were never brought on-line, for said clients."
Writing for the right-wing media advocacy group, Accuracy in Media, Cliff Kincaid dismissed the controversy as "laughable," insisting Guckert's only "crimes" were "that he was too pro-Republican, attended White House briefings, and asked questions unfair to Democrats." And at Power Line, the conservative outpost that wrote relentlessly about CBS's troubles with its Bush National Guard story last year, the site has confessed bewilderment about the Guckert controversy. "I can't figure out what the story is," wrote one of Power Line's contributors.
Whether news that Guckert was able to go from posting his gay male escort services online to being ushered into the White House under a phony name on behalf of a fake news organization -- and was never asked to pass an FBI background check -- constitutes a real "story" among the Republican Party faithful, or the mainstream press corps, remains to be seen.
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Republican Web Site Airs Vile Anti-Semitism
National Jewish Democratic Council
Thursday 20 November 2003
"GOPUSA" Internet site suddenly deletes column calling George Soros "descendant of Shylock."
An opinion column displayed earlier this week on the Internet site of GOPUSA engaged in virulent anti-Semitism while condemning international philanthropist and financier George Soros. The editorial was written under the byline of "Sartre," the pen name of James Hall - a self-described "former political operative." Under the headline "Satan Lives in George Soros," Hall writes, "The fiction which is interdependency has a prolocutor in the congregation of Moloch. His name is George Soros. No other single person represents the symbol and the substance of Globalism more than this Hungarian-born descendant of Shylock. He is the embodiment of the Merchant from Venice. ...If Soros is correct when he says a "supremacist ideology" guides the White House, what would you call the practices of the archfiend of Free Enterprise? The Soros deception would make Shylock proud. ... [I]t's not about anti-Semitism! [Outgoing Malaysian Prime Minister] Mahathir Mohammad was just stating the truth...."
Hall's column appears weekly at the GOPUSA Internet site. Under the motto "Bringing the Conservative Message to America," GOPUSA.com regularly features leading conservative writers such as Linda Chavez, David Horowitz and Alan Keyes. According to the Internet site, a GOPUSA Washington conference earlier this month was scheduled to hear from confirmed speakers such as Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), Representatives Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and Steve King (R-IA), the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, the "eCampaign Manager" for Bush-Cheney '04, the Communications Director for House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and former Representative Bob Barr (R-GA), among others. Without explanation, GOPUSA - which itself is not formally linked to the GOP - suddenly removed the page featuring Hall's November 17th article sometime on November 18th, though the text remains at the author's Internet site.
"Suddenly deleting such vile anti-Semitism from this Republican site - with no explanation, and no apology - simply won't cut it. Virulent anti-Semitism causes very real damage, and GOPUSA must acknowledge this," said National Jewish Democratic Council Executive Director Ira N. Forman. "While nothing can make up for originally providing a forum for this screed, a first step must be for GOPUSA to issue an apology. GOPUSA must also explain how this could possibly happen in an organization that bills itself as the megaphone for the conservative Republican movement - and how this could happen in an organization that is supported by major GOP representatives and leaders at all levels, including the White House, the Bush-Cheney campaign, the Senate and the House. GOPUSA must - at an absolute minimum - sever its relationship with this obviously unacceptable author.
"We say it so often now that it has become utterly cliché, but in the face of the supposed all-out Republican effort to attract Jewish voters, I will say it once more: If this is the Republican idea of Jewish outreach, then I'd hate to see what antagonism looks like," Forman added.
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