Move over, Bernard Kerik

According to his own accounts, the disgraced White House reporter writing under the pseudonym Jeff Gannon bragged about feeding an exclusive story discrediting President Bush’s opponents to a major news outlet, RAW STORY has learned.

In addition, a producer at one of the major U.S. television networks told AmericaBLOG’s John Aravosis that they had also received notice of the story, and another story as well–the exact time for the beginning of the U.S.-led “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq–four hours before President Bush announced it to the nation.
  Raw Story article

From....guess who.....

You got it. Jeff Gannon.

On none of the stories–Plame, Mapes and the start of the Iraq war– did Gannon actually break the story. This allows for the possibility that Gannon pretended he had information he did not have.

The producer’s account, however, suggests Gannon was used to plant stories in the mainstream press, stories that the White House could not have placed themselves without taking damage politically.

[...]

Gannon bragged about passing a scoop on who obtained the troubled Bush National Guard memos to Fox News’ Sean Hannity on the conservative forum Free Republic.

[...]

“I got the scoop and passed it to Hannity,” Gannon added. “Look for my detailed story on Monday at Talon News. There is much more to this story. Mary Mapes is just the beginning.”[The] story–that CBS producer Mary Mapes was the source of the troubled Bush Guard documents–shredded the credibility of anchor Dan Rather and killed any chance the facts that Bush had failed to adequately perform his duties as a member of the Texas Air National Guard would be taken seriously.

And I'll give you odds that the documents were arranged to be passed to Mapes by the WH, knowing they were fake and would discredit Rather and all the Bush AWOL stories. How else did the rightblogs pick up instantly on the typeface issue? Perhaps Gannon didn't just get the scoop - maybe he was part of setting it up.

Eric Boehlert in Salon writes: "Thanks to the continued digging by online sleuths, there's now documented evidence that Guckert attended White House briefings as early as February 2003. Guckert, using his alias 'Jeff Gannon,' once boasted online about asking then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer a question at the Feb. 28, 2003, briefing. The date is significant because in order to receive a White House press pass, Guckert would have needed to prove that he worked for a news organization that, in the words of White House press secretary Scott McClellan, 'published regularly,' in itself an extraordinarily low threshold. Critics have charged that while Talon News may publish regularly, it boasts a nearly all-volunteer news team that includes not a single person with actual journalism experience. (The team does, though, have quite a bit of experience working on Republican campaigns.) In other words, the outfit is not legitimate or independent, two criteria often used in Washington to receive press credentials.

"But what's significant about the February 2003 date is that Talon did not even exist then."
  WaPo article

It has been a mindboggling Orwellian week when a Capitol Hill/White House Press Corps that couldn't stop salivating 24/7 over a blow job dismisses a non-journalist getting access to CIA documents and questioning the President of the United States, while he moonlights as a gay military hooker, dismisses the story as nothing, even as untold numbers of questions are raised about the White House credentialing process, with enormous implications for potential lapses in national security.

Hey, Scott McClellan admitted that he knew Gannon was operating under a pseudonym, but that didn't seem to disturb him, until he later qualified his story. In fact, there is so much damage control going on at the White House now, you would think that the White House Press Corps would be popping out with revelations of improprieties; that is, if they were doing their jobs. But that would be too much to ask. No one wants to rock the boat there, even when a mega-scandal is sitting right next to them.
  Buzzflash article

Background posts:

Ari Fleischer comments on Jeff Gannon
Poor Jeff Gannon
Here's a great idea
Update: Jeffie the Journalist has resigned!
A fine partnership: media watchdogs and bloggers
Plamegate update

Update 2/19/05 10:01am:

NEW YORK Former Talon News reporter James Guckert obtained his first White House press credentials as a representative of the pro-Republican Web site, GOPUSA, not as a Talon News reporter, as previously believed, Press Secretary Scott McClellan told E&P today.

[...]

He also said that Maurren Dowd's column in The New York Times did not tell the whole story about her credentialing woes, pointing that she was refering to a "hard" pass while Gannon only received day passes. He said he has now asked his staff to get the process going for her again to get a hard pass.
  Yahoo News article