Raw Story: Gannon, The Phantom Reporter

John Byrne's The Raw Story is reporting the results of Reps. Slaughter and Conyers' FOIA request, which was submitted to the Secret Service over Gannon/Guckert's White House access. I followed this story closely for about a month and half after Media Matters made a big stink over "the question", way before Aravosis' infamous post, "A Man Called Jeff".

Some of the facts reported in the Raw Story article are surprising, even if you've ceased to be shocked over this story: (Emphasis mine throughout.)

Guckert made more than 200 appearances at the White House during his two-year tenure with the fledging conservative websites GOPUSA and Talon News, attending 155 of 196 White House press briefings. He had little to no previous journalism experience.

Well, this one isn't so bad, but it's nice to know what we're dealing with here.

On at least fourteen occasions, Secret Service records show either the entry or exit time missing. Generally, the existing entry or exit times correlate with press conferences; on most of these days, the records show that Guckert checked in but was never processed out.

In March, 2003, Guckert left the White House twice on days he had never checked in with the Secret Service. Over the next 22 months, Guckert failed to check out with the Service on thirteen days. On several of these visits, Guckert either entered or exited by a different entry/exit point than his usual one. On one of these days, no briefing was held.

Even if you're not familiar with the Propagannon phenomenon, read it and send it to all your friends.

Update: At the same link, John has some of the raw data up. He'll likely be posting pdfs of the originals in due time. You can find the primary sources here.

Update 2: Editor & Publisher, the one mainstream news outlet that gave the Gannon/Guckert saga any serious attention, has a brief rundown, including a comment on Sunday's Doonesbury.

Update 3: Rev. Mykeru.

---