( boldface by me)
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.
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................................
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...........................
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................
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.......................
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."




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