Online Nude Photos Are Latest Chapter In Jeff Gannon Saga
By Howard Kurtz
http://tinyurl.com/4mp82
The Jeff Gannon story is still bouncing around the Internet, and now
there are pictures.
The kind you shouldn't open up in the office.
The X-rated twist has made for a lot of clandestine clicking in a town
where Deep Throat conjures images not of a porn star but of a man in a
parking garage. But it has also deepened the debate over blogging and
the tactics used to drive a conservative reporter from his job as White
House correspondent for two Web sites owned by a Republican activist.
In most Beltway melodramas, the resignation ends the story. The problem
for Gannon, whose real name is James Dale Guckert, is that he told The
Washington Post and CNN's Wolf Blitzer last week that he never launched
the Web sites whose provocative names he had registered, such as
hotmilitarystud.com. But a Web designer in California said yesterday
that he had designed a gay escort site for Gannon and had posted naked
pictures of Gannon at the client's request.
The latest developments were first reported by John Aravosis, a liberal
political consultant and gay activist who has a Web site called
americablog.org. "What struck me initially was the hypocrisy angle,"
Aravosis said. He said he was offended by what he called Gannon's
"antigay" writing.
Gannon became a target of liberal bloggers after he asked President
Bush at a news conference last month a loaded and inaccurate question
about how he could deal with Senate Democrats "who seem to have
divorced themselves from reality." They pointed to articles such as one
last year in which Gannon wrote that John Kerry "might someday be known
as 'the first gay president' " because he "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." Saying his family was being harassed, the reporter quit last
week after online critics began digging into his background.
Gannon, who worked for Talon News and GOPUSA, denied any antigay
writing last week, but did not return calls for comment yesterday and
has told other journalists he will not comment on the racy Web sites.
The contretemps sparked questions about why the White House had
regularly cleared him for briefings, especially since he had been
denied a press pass on Capitol Hill, where reporters control the
credentialing process.
Ana Marie Cox, who has been joking about the Gannon photos on her
satirical site, wonkette.com, said they are creating a buzz because
"obviously pictures of naked people are titillating." But, she added,
"bloggers are wrong to bring that into the mix of things of why he
shouldn't be a White House correspondent. Aren't we bloggers in favor
of a lower bar of access, not a higher one?
"I'd like to be able to go to the White House briefing room, and I
haven't even posed naked -- just been asked."
Paul Leddy, the Web designer, said Gannon contacted him in an America
Online chat room in 1999 and wound up paying him $200, plus $50 in
monthly maintenance, into the following year to create a gay escort
site. He said the checks came from Bedrock Corp., which Gannon has
confirmed that he worked for at the time. Leddy, who has helped design
a variety of Web sites, including porn sites, provided Microsoft Word
files of several of his invoices to Bedrock, a Delaware-based company.
At first, Leddy said, Gannon sent him nude pictures with the heads
cropped out, or asked him not to post the faces. He said he had no
doubt, after seeing Gannon in the news recently, that the explicit
pictures were of the same man. Leddy said Gannon's postings later moved
to another gay escort site, which Aravosis says remained active until
March 2003, or shortly before Gannon began covering the White House.
In one of the Web sites found by Aravosis, a man who Leddy said is
Gannon was offering his escort services for $200 an hour, or $1,200 a
weekend. Another describes him as "military, muscular, masculine and
discrete [sic]" and provides an America Online e-mail address that
matches the initials on a logo used by Gannon on several of the sites,
including the one Leddy said he designed. Bedrock, Gannon's company, is
listed as the owner of JeffGannon.com, as well as three sites with such
names as hotmilitarystud.com. Aravosis posted the pictures with
strategically placed gray boxes, although he provided links to the
unexpurgated versions.
Gannon is also embroiled in the Valerie Plame story. In 2003 he
interviewed Plame's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, after
unnamed administration officials leaked her role as a CIA operative to
columnist Robert Novak. According to his Talon News story, Gannon asked
Wilson about "an internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence
personnel [detailing] 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."
House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) this week questioned how
Gannon got access to the documents and asked the special prosecutor
investigating the Plame leak to include Gannon in his probe.
To top things off, the Wilmington News-Journal, citing court records,
reported Saturday that Gannon -- or Guckert actually -- failed to pay
Delaware more than $20,700 in personal income tax from 1991 through
1994.
More than anything, though, it is Gannon's personal online activities
that has kept the story churning. Cliff Kincaid, editor of the Accuracy
in Media report, wrote on the conservative group's Web site: "The
Gannon 'scandal' would be laughable, were it not for the fact that
Gannon's personal privacy has been invaded and his mother, in her 70s,
had to endure harassing telephone calls from those on the political
left trying to dig up dirt. The campaign against Gannon demonstrates
the paranoid mentality and mean-spirited nature of the political left."
But Aravosis said: "If you were just looking at this as a matter of his
hypocrisy, the story's over now that he's gone. The larger issue is how
did someone like this get access to the White House."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan told the trade publication Editor
& Publisher that he didn't know Gannon was using a pseudonym until
recent weeks and that he was cleared into the White House on a daily
basis using his real name. "People use aliases all the time in life,
from journalists to actors," McClellan said. He said he has discussed
the Gannon matter only "briefly" with the president.
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