I ran into something today that I had not been aware of.
Apparently an individual, “Jeff Gannon,” using a fake name and working for a fake new agency was able to obtain daily press passes from the White House for over a year. This might not be that bad except that he was also known for giving softball questions to the White House spokespeople when the other reporters had backed them into the corner. On top of that he has ties the Texas GOP.
This fake reporter was even able to obtain classified documents revealing that the wife of a critic of the President was a deep-cover CIA agent. This fake reporter also appears to have boasted about involvement in the revelations about CBS’s story on the President’s service in the National Guard. And ensuring that this is totally messed up, the fake reporter even has ties to gay military “escort” websites.
Given recent revelations that the Bush administration paid conservative reporters to promote their policies, it is probably not unwarranted to conclude that someone in the administration planted “Jeff Gannon” in the White House press corps to help spread the administration’s propaganda.
This also brings up the old issue of whether the CBS story on Dubya’s guard service and its subsequent refutation were organized by the White House to discredit already well founded accusations against the President. Although the memos used by CBS were faked, a secretary connected with Dubya’s Air National Guard service confirmed that the memos represented actual documents that existed at one point. It is possible that the forgeries were based on originals or knowledge of originals. On top of this the first exposure of CBS’s story came only hours after the story first aired and relied on technical typographical arguments. However, the person making the exposure was not a typographical expert, but was highly connected to the GOP. Based on these things, some have wondered if the White House faked the memos by retyping originals and then set out to expose their own fakes. It’s an interesting thought, but one that will probably never have any meat behind it.
If a fake reporter, who has now been exposed as a White House plant, was connected with the exposure of the CBS memos, should we reconsider the possibility that the administration had some role in the memo controversy?
