Someone had to pull strings for Guckert

It seems to me that Maureen Dowd’s column in yesterday’s New York Times offered one of the more intriguing angles of the James Guckert story in a while. In it, Dowd explained how odd it is that Guckert could get into the White House — while she couldn’t.

I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the “Barberini Faun” is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?

At first when I tried to complain about not getting my pass renewed, even though I’d been covering presidents and first ladies since 1986, no one called me back. Finally, when Mr. McClellan replaced Ari Fleischer, he said he’d renew the pass – after a new Secret Service background check that would last several months.

Dowd is a Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist for the nation’s most respected newspaper. She was rejected. Guckert was a male prostitute using a fake name with no background in journalism. He was accepted.

Someone at the White House was pulling strings for this guy, helping Guckert circumvent the usual process. Given what we now know, it’s not unreasonable to ask who.

Indeed, even the current White House spin — we cleared Guckert because he worked for an online news service — doesn’t quite work. Guckert was given access before Talon News even existed.

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. The organization was created in late March 2003, and began publishing online in early April 2003. Gannon, a jack of all trades who spent time in the military as well as working at an auto repair shop (not to mention escorting), has already stated publicly that Talon News was his first job in journalism. That means he wasn’t working for any other news outlet in February 2003 when he was spotted by C-Span cameras inside the White House briefing room. And that means Guckert was ushered into the White House press room in February 2003 for a briefing despite the fact he was not a journalist.

Salon’s Eric Boehlert summed this controversy up quite nicely: “The newest revelation raises the central question: Who broke the rules on Guckert’s behalf to give him access to the White House?” That’s the question that all of us need to keep asking until the White House is prepared to answer it. As long as it lingers, the controversy won’t — or at least, shouldn’t — go away.