A reporter for an ultra-conservative Website, whose loaded question at a recent televised White House press briefing created an outroar, resigned earlier this week after bloggers and journalists uncovered several embarrassing details about his life, including his association with three domain names with a gay military theme.
James D. Guckert, who wrote under the name Jeff Gannon, resigned his position as Washington bureau chief and White House correspondent for Talon News, a news outlet owned by GOPUSA, after several bloggers scoured the Internet for information on him and uncovered a number of embarrassing details, including his association with three domain names that could be used for gay adult entertainment.
Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (NY-D) and Rep. John Conyers (MI-D) have already called for an investigation into Guckert’s presence in the press galleries, a troubling development for a Bush administration that has had to deal with several propaganda charges this year, starting with the discovery that columnist Armstrong Williams had been paid to promote administration policies.
"This matter is growing more serious by the day. We now know that 'Jeff Gannon' had access to classified CIA documents that contained the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. This is more than an issue of media manipulation by the White House... this is now an issue of national security," said Rep. Slaughter.
Slaughter was referring to the fact that Guckert has been tied to the outing of Valerie Plame as an undecover CIA agent, an act that launched a scandal as to who in the government may have leaked the information. Robert Novak was the first major journalist to utilize the information, the disclosure of which is currently under investigation.
GOPUSA is a Republican activist organization, based in Texas, that is tied to the republican party at both the state and national levels.
GOPUSA and Talon News have both ignored interview requests by AVN.com. Both Websites have removed information regarding Gannon, including nearly all of his work for the last two years.
Talon News now directs interview requests to Jennifer Ohman, the Director of Public Affairs for Oliver North’s Freedom Alliance.
It is not known if the three domains tied to Gannon, HotMilitaryStud.com, MilitaryEscorts.com, and MilitaryEscortsm4m.com, were ever operational, as the sites are currently down and nothing has turned up even in caches – backup images of the Web captured by search engines – as yet.
Guckert today told Editor & Publisher that the domain names were not his, but his clients, whom he declined to identify. "The sites were never hosted, and nothing was ever posted to the sites," Guckert said.
Guckert was asked by Editor & Publisher to justify working on sites that appeared to be male escort services. "I don’t know that to be true,” he said. “If they had wanted to go forward with it, it would have been a consideration to determine if it was legal or illegal. That would have been looked into."
Bedrock Corporation, the company listed as the administrative contact for the Websites in question “did not discriminate on content," admitted Guckert.
However, a photo of what is believed to be a young shirtless Guckert wearing dog tags suggests that Guckert’s relationship to gay military themed Websites was more than professional. The photo was discovered on an AOL homepage with his initials and links to his college fraternity.
Guckert has also claimed to have a military background, and the photo, though captioned “still sexy after all of these years,” does appear to be of a service member wearing a hairstyle most typical of the Marines. The image itself is labeled “usmc_07.jpg” possibly indicating that his service was in the United States Marine Corp.
Bloggers from Daily Kos, Atrios, and AmericaBLOG, discovered much of the information that led Guckert to resign his position on Wednesday. “Because of the attention being paid to me I find it is no longer possible to effectively be a reporter for Talon News. In consideration of the welfare of me and my family I have decided to return to private life,” Guckert wrote on JeffGannon.com.
Even after his resignation, Guckert continued his attempts to mask his true identity, and denying any wrongdoing. In a phone interview for National Public Radio on Wednesday, Guckert attempted to prevent NPR’s David Folkenflik from saying his real name, cutting him off during an interview. In the same interview, Guckert stated that he was not admitting that Gannon was a pseudonym.
On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan confirmed that Gannon had applied for a press pass under the name Guckert.
Guckert had attended White House press briefings over the last two years, often asking questions that were deemed by his peers to represent a conservative agenda. At a televised news conference January 26, Guckert caused an outcry amongst journalists and political bloggers when he was called on to ask a question of a beleaguered Bush, and threw him what a number of media pundits have described as a “softball.”
Bush had just fielded a number of difficult questions on Iraq and Social Security when he called on Guckert to ask a question. Guckert stated that Senate Democratic leaders had painted a “very bleak picture” of the United States economy, then misattributed a statement about the presence of “soup lines” to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid that later was discovered to have been invented by talk show radio host Rush Limbaugh. Guckert then asked Bush, “how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”
Talon News and GOPUSA both claimed that Jeff Gannon was a graduate of the “Pennsylvania State University System.” Guckert attended West Chester University, which is a member of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education.
While Guckert and Talon News publisher Bobby Eberle, who also owns GOPUSA.com, both disavow any connection between Guckert and GOPUSA, AVN.com discovered a cached version of Gannon’s bio on GOPUSA.com’s “Directors and Officers” page.
Guckert’s connection to GOPUSA should have disqualified him from being issued a press pass to the White House press galleries, and in fact, Guckert was denied a “hard pass,” a permanent pass to the Congressional galleries because he could not prove that Talon News was associated with GOPUSA.
Standards are much lower for a “day pass,” which must be renewed daily, yet direct approval by the White House administration is suspected, especially since Guckert’s day pass was issued under his pseudonym – something that isn’t supposed to happen.
Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan admitted that he was aware that Guckert was using a pseudonym, but did not elaborate.
“He, like anyone else, showed that he was representing a news organization that published regularly, and so he was cleared two years ago to receive daily passes, just like many others are,” McClellan said at yesterday’s briefing.
McClellan stated that had been unaware of Guckert’s connection to various domain names until it had been reported in the press.
While Guckert has claimed that Talon News has a subscription base of 750,000, that figure is considered highly unlikely. A recent Alexa ranking snapshot of TalonNews.com shows that until people began investigating Gluckert, the site had virtually no traffic.
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