10:09 - 20 February, 2005
GOP Tries To Clean The Stains

"Why isn't every major network in the country investigating a security breach, forget anything else. How could the FBI, for 17 years I was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the ranking member. I've read more FBI reports than I ever wanted to know. How could that happen and no one had any idea who this guy was?... The Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate should be investigating it. The House Judiciary should be investigating it. And if it were the other party in charge, it would be investigated." - Senator Joe Biden (D-DE)

So, Mr. Biden, do the right thing and investigate...or are you worried that you may show up in Mr. Guckert/Gannon's little "Black Book" too?

Ok, this man,Robert R. Eberle will be the subject of my investigation as well.
Eberle knew Jeff/Jim had two names, and thought, that despite his complete lack of journalistic experience, he did a fine job:

The operator of an activist Republican Web site and news service said Friday night that he had known for two years that his White House correspondent went by two identities.

But the operator, Robert R. Eberle, denied in an interview that the correspondent, Jeff Gannon, whose real name is James D. Guckert, was an administration plant or was given preferential treatment as a Republican partisan to ask soft questions at briefings.

Bruce W. Eberle is founder of MillionsofAmericans.com conservative web site which was later folded into GOPUSA, a website and organization owned and operated Bobby Eberle (no relation). [1] president and CEO of both GOPUSA and Talon News. Bruce is CEO of Virginia-based Eberle Communications Group, a vast fundraising/direct mail/PR powerhouse, that boasts such clients as Ronald Reagan (well, when he was alive, I assume ... although his death was actually great PR too), Operation Rescue, Oliver North and Paula Jones, and which illegally sold fund-raising lists to John Ashcroft during his failed United States Senate run for the seat from Missouri.

Okay, before you read this next passage, ask yourself this: if you owned a website, and had a reporter working in the White House, would you pay attention once in a while to what said reporter was up to?:

Mr. Eberle, breaking his silence about details of the events, which have been portrayed by Democrats as a Republican effort to manipulate news, said it took him by surprise in early 2003 when the freelancer he had taken on as Jeff Gannon said he was gaining White House accreditation under the name James D. Guckert. "He said Gannon was his professional name; he didn't like the sound of his other name," Mr. Eberle recounted.

Mr. Eberle, 36, an aerospace engineer with a penchant for conservative politics, said the disclosure raised no red flags about Mr. Guckert's journalistic credentials or professionalism.

Mr. Eberle said that in the two years that Mr. Guckert worked for him, he had not kept track of his volunteer reporter.

Odd to say the least.

Now, we still can hear the illogic behind Mr. Guckert/Gannon's methods of so called journalism and it still just does NOT make any sense.

Mr. Guckert, who wrote for the Gopusa.com Web site and its offshoot Talon News, agreed. In an interview on Saturday, he said had never even made phone calls to administration officials, not even to ask routine questions or clarify basic facts.

"My relationship with the White House and with Talon News was on the basis of a reporter and a reporter only. And all that, all of this other stuff out there that I was given favorable treatment, access to things - is absolutely, categorically untrue," Mr. Guckert said.

Mr. Guckert said Saturday that he had no journalism experience before arriving at Gopusa, apart from working for his high school and college newspapers. Asked why he did not, in his function as a White House reporter, even try to interview White House officials, he said, "I thought there was a lot of meat that came out of the press briefings."

"You may say that lacks some kind of journalistic ambition," he added.

Mr. Guckert denied seeing a Central Intelligence Agency memorandum disclosing the identity of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. operative, even though he had strongly insinuated as much in an interview with her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, the transcript of which he posted on the Internet.

Mr. Guckert's phrasing in that interview so strongly suggested he had seen the classified memorandum that it brought F.B.I. officials to his house as part of the Plame leak investigation, he said. But he said referring to the memorandum as though he had seen it was merely an interview technique. "What I said was no more than what was reported in The Wall Street Journal a week before," he said.

I smell a rat that's getting bigger by the second folks......

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