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OK, so this story just gets weirder and weirder. In a post yesterday I mentioned the growing curiosity over a conservative reporter named Jeff Gannon. Over the past year or so the guy has been a staple of the White House press corps, their go-to guy for a softball on the rare occasion the press decided to get tough.

Well, as I mentioned yesterday, a few days back the news broke that the guy was working using a pseudonym. That would have been a non-story, except for the fact that the White House has a policy that does not allow women to choose between their married and maiden names. And that the guy worked for something known as "Talon News," a news organization of little to no reputation. And that this guy has connections to, well... one thing at a time.

So curious, a few bloggers started digging. And what they discovered is bizarre. Or rather, what they are discovering, because more and more is coming in on this guy, and every time you think it cannot possibly get any weirder it does.

Yyesterday we found out that in addition to owning web domains for his pseudonym, such as JeffGannon.com, he also owns the rights to several domains with distinct male pornography connotations. For example, MilitaryEscortsM4M.com. Which, if you think it through is more than just porn, its prostitution. That prompted more digging, and today the blogs have been on fire with this one.

In particular, AmericaBlog has been all over it, discovering not only the guy's real name, but proving that the domains are his (some under one name, others under the other), that they are registered to his home address, AND that he had an oddly suggestive AOL profile which, along with all of his websites, has been deleted.

Still with me?

Well, last night, "Jeff Gannon" decided to "resign" from Talon News, and Talon pulled from their web archives all of the articles he has ever written. Plus, they've pulled some written under OTHER names, suggesting a new possible a.k.a..

But why should I care, you ask?

Well, aside from the fact that the guy has served as a shill for the White House on a number of key social conservative issues, including gay marriage in particular (adding an ironic and improtant twist to the domain names that moves his private activities into the realm of legitimate public inquiry), it now seems there is a link between this guy and the Valerie Plame case. For those of you who have forgotten, that's the case currently under investigation involving an undercover CIA operative outed for revenge against her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, a vocal critic of the President in the run up to the Iraq war.

The connections between the Plame case and Gannon aren't new. For a full - and quite compelling summary - check out this summary from Daily Kos. Here's just one highlight:

As the Iraq war raged and as the truth surrounding the forged documents that claimed Saddam attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger emerged, a website and news organization came into being... Talon News (March 29, 2003)... owned by GOPUSA.com. Within days `Jeff Gannon', a man with no journalism experience secured White House briefing room press credentials (April 3, 2003). As the hunt for the supposed WMDs kept going to no avail, Ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote a NYTimes Op-Ed entitled "What I didn't find in Africa" (July 6, 2003). On July 7, 2003 the White House retracted their Niger claim, which was their sole admission to date that the justification for war was not accurate. Within a week Robert Novak (July 14, 2003) wrote a column and `outed' Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame as a CIA operative and claimed she was responsible for the decision to send Mr. Wilson to Niger. It was quite clear that Novak was trying to discredit the CIA at the behest of "two senior administration officials" by silencing any critics and making the claim that the CIA sent a diplomat vs. an intelligence operative to verify the yellowcake documents for patronage reasons. Novak's CIA source however would not confirm that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA. Two Newsday reporters, with CIA contacts, attempt to verify that Ms. Plame was an undercover operative, and they do so. They also interview Mr. Novak and he claims that "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it." Two days later, JeffGannon.com debuts online (July 24, 2003).

Follow the timeline all the way through and you start to see the critical role Gannon played in pushing the White House's version of the story.

And THAT is why this story may matter, and may matter big. A man with no experience or credentials becomes a member of the ultra exclusive White House press corps, gets access to classified CIA information on practically his first day on the job, and then serves as an in-house shill for the administration on this and many, many other issues. And now, after serving dutifully for many months, it has quite possibly been discovered that he has links to male pornography and prostitution.

There are only two possible explanations for this. One, that the administration utterly failed in its background check of a new member of the White House press corps, providing access on a daily basis to the White House to a man with who had no legitimate reason to be there. Or, Two, that he was planted by the White House in the press corps to help their pre and post-war propaganda efforts. Given this administration's record with both the Bernie Kerik nomination and the Armstrong Williams columnist-for-hire scandal, it seems both options are equally plausible. But let's be honest, option two seems much, much more likely. Without the Plame connection this would be big news. With it it may be explosive. Either way, it makes for one hell of an entertaining story, doesn't it?

Stay tuned. Stay tuned...

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