When last we met, the subject was Jim/Jeff Guckert/Gannon and the depth of his involvement with Plamegate. You will recall that he interviewed Joe Wilson in the latter part of 2003 -- the exact date remains in dispute -- and that during this interview the he-ho mentioned a (kinda bogus) document rigged up by the State Department's intelligence service.
At first, Gannon acted as though he had seen the doc with his own eyeballs -- even though the thing was still classified. The natural question arose: Who gave it to him? The natural answer: Rove. Gannon, the pseudo-reporter from nowheresville, had somehow managed to snag a confab with Turblossom -- a privilege granted to very, very few real journalists.
Gannon then insisted that he never saw the actual document -- that he had merely read about in the Wall Street Journal, which had obtained a leaked copy.
Now, when last we discussed this story, we referred to a Left Coaster post, which found a Gannon quote indicating that he had interviewed Wilson in September of 2003. (Wilson himself cannot recall the exact date.) The WSJ piece in question appeared on October 17.
And that crhonology would seem to wrap up this mystery.
But the wrapping, alas, is not so secure as I once thought.
Ron Brynaert has a rebuttal to the Left Coaster's argument which deserves attention:
But, as MKT notes in a comment left on that diary, a month later, Jeff Gannon left this response to a reader on his comments thread:Moreover, Brynaert notes textual similarity between the wording of the WSJ piece and the phrases chosen by Gannon in his interview.
"Actually, I first began speaking with Ambassador Wison [sic] in September 2003. A formal interview was conducted in October 2003."
Gannon said: "An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details 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. Do you dispute that?"
The WSJ printed: "The memo, prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where CIA officer Valerie Plame...a member of the agency's clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested at the meeting that her husband...could be sent to Niger to investigate the reports."
To Brynaert, this is clear evidence that the he-ho "plagiarized." I'm not sure "plagiarized" is the right word under these circumstances, and I'm still not convinced that he wasn't granted an independent glance at the paper in question.
The forces which leaked to the WSJ might well have leaked to Gannon as well. If he was not allowed to leave the White House with his own copy (frankly, that would have been a very stupid move), he would then have to rely on the WSJ to refresh his memory as to what the document said.
My reconstruction of events can't be proven, of course. Which, arguably, lets Gannon off the hook.
(Goodness. Have I actually completed an entire post about Gannon without allowing a single off-color pun? I suppose a cleverer writer would have found a way to slip one through the backdoor.)
4 comments:
" I suppose a cleverer writer would have found a way to slip one through the backdoor".
And perhaps you're more clever than you think.
I think Mr. Cannon's one of the cleverest of the clever...though I stand wholeheartedly by my use of the word "plagiarism" to describe Mr. Gannon's actions. Jeff's question is far more than texturely similiar.
FWIW - in the full interview, Guckert clearly refers to a Nick Kristof column that was published Oct. 11.
Tom Maguire
Oh, when the Times finally talked to Guckert, they got this:
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.
They had front-paged the allegation that he had seen the memo, so this was their idea of a correction, many days later and back in the want ads.
Tom Maguire
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