Thune denies ties

| Sunday, March 06, 2005

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Alleged link to writer stirs controversy

Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series on the impact of controversial conservative journalist Jeff Gannon and his connection to Internet blogs on the 2004 Senate campaign, as well as the future of blogs in political discourse.

By Kevin Woster, Journal Staff Writer

Four months after ending Sen. Tom Daschle's 26-year congressional career, Republican Sen. John Thune is facing questions about his ties to an Internet journalist who recently made headlines for his controversial access to White House news conferences and his connection to sexually suggestive Web sites.

Jeff Gannon is a conservative writer that some Thune critics believe will become the freshman senator's "Gannongate," referring to the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s. Thune doubts that will happen, and he questions whether the issue is a story at all — beyond the fact that Daschle supporters can't accept their candidate's defeat last November.

"Sometimes, I think it's harder for your supporters to deal with that than the candidates themselves," Thune said. "I think some folks are in denial, and they're tilting at windmills and chasing ghosts."

Most of the chase so far has been on Internet sites called Web logs — blogs for short — where mostly liberal commentators are pushing the Gannon story as major news and questioning how closely Gannon was tied to the Thune campaign in 2004.

They are circulating images of Gannon taken from Web sites apparently offering gay escort services and questioning how he got so entwined in the 2004 campaign.

Some traditional media outlets also wonder how a self-professed conservative with little journalism experience or training got daily passes to White House Press briefings. And some ranking Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are seeking an official inquiry into Gannon's White House access.

Thune said last week that he barely knew Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert. A 47-year-old Pennsylvania native and self-professed conservative, Guckert writes and maintains a political Web site under the name Jeff Gannon. He resigned last month from his job as White House correspondent for a conservative Internet site called Talon News, which was bankrolled by a conservative Republican businessman from Texas.

Thune said he appeared on Gannon's radio show once early in the campaign and later may have done another interview to be printed on Talon News' Web site. Thune said his campaign didn't pay Gannon for his reporting services and didn't coordinate its campaign strategy with him, as some critics have implied.

The campaign did, however, see the value of working with a journalist with a clear conservative philosophy, Thune said.

"As far as we knew, he was just another reporter at a conservative news organization. We talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of news sources through the course of the campaign," Thune said. "We figured if he was reaching a conservative audience, it was going to be helpful for us."

Steve Hildebrand, an experienced Democratic strategist from Sioux Falls who was Daschle's 2004 campaign manager, said Friday that Gannon was more manipulator than reporter in the campaign. Funded with money from wealthy Republican sources and working with conservative bloggers in South Dakota, Gannon generated one-sided news stories aimed at hurting Daschle rather than covering news, Hildebrand said.

"I believe that Jeff Gannon played a role in trying to destroy Tom Daschle," Hildebrand said. "He's proud of his effort to defeat Tom Daschle."

As for Gannon's personal life, Hildebrand said it was newsworthy because of the escort service connection and the possibility that Gannon was involved in illegal activity.

"If this would have been a liberal reporter who was caught as a gay prostitute advertising himself for sex, John Thune and Dick Wadhams and the far right would have been attacking him vociferously," Hildebrand said.

But the most important part of the story was that a person with that background and no legitimate journalism standing got White House press access, he said.

"In my opinion, that has nothing to do with John Thune. It has everything to do with the fact that the communications director for the White House was allowing this guy a daily pass to sit in the briefing room and ask the president of the United States, the leader of the free world, questions that were less than newsworthy," Hildebrand said.

During a telephone interview Friday, Gannon declined to discuss his personal life or involvement in the sexually oriented Web sites.

"Like anyone else, I have a past. I made mistakes in my past. And there are things I've done in the course of my life that I'm not proud of," Gannon said. "But I've had good fortune, and I believe in a God of redemption … who will allow you to leave the past in the past."

Gannon said that although some of what people said was true, there also were "so many wild, inaccurate things out there," in relation to his personal life.

"That's the reason I haven't been talking about it," he said. "There will be a time for that, but while this whole thing is going on, I couldn't deal with it. I have a team of lawyers looking at all the things out there, who said what."

Nothing in his past personal life should reflect poorly on Thune, President Bush or the conservative cause, Gannon said.

Gannon is no longer with Talon News, but he maintains his own Web site —

jeffgannon.com. He expects to continue to write political commentaries and intends to keep a high profile on political issues. Gannon rejected the notion that he was unqualified as a reporter or that he received special treatment from White House press officials because of his political leanings.

For almost two years, Gannon received media day passes to the White House, which are much easier to get than a more permanent "hard" pass, he said. He had been rejected repeatedly in his requests for congressional press credentials, which are based in part on paid subscribers and advertisers.

Gannon said that by the end of the Daschle-Thune campaign, Talon News was being read by up to 700,000 people — clear evidence, he said, that he was a bona fide journalist with a legitimate audience.

The initial impact of his stories on the Daschle campaign were limited to Talon News readers. But their reach extended when the stories were featured by conservative Web blogs run by Jason Van Beek of Vermillion and Jon Lauck, a history professor at South Dakota State University in Brookings.

Thune's campaign paid Lauck $27,000 and Van Beek $8,000 to be research consultants. Van Beek now works for Thune, and Lauck continues to help maintain the conservative political blog, South Dakota Politics. Lauck said the recent publicity about Gannon's personal life didn't mean that his reporting was inaccurate, or invalid.

"It's weird, but I try to leave personal lives out of it," Lauck said. "Who knows who this guy was? He was writing for some news organization, putting out some articles on the campaign that were pretty interesting and seemed to be pretty factual. That's my challenge to them (Gannon critics). What was wrong? What was inaccurate?"

Hildebrand said Gannon and the blogs frequently distorted reality. An example was the story Gannon wrote and promoted about a tax break Daschle and his wife, Linda, received for their $1.9-million home in the District of Columbia. It was Linda Daschle's residency that qualified the Daschles for the tax break, because she paid taxes in D.C., Hildebrand said.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, Gannon obtained an original application for the tax break signed by Tom Daschle. Gannon broke that story near the end of September, and the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls and some other media outlets followed up with their own.

Hildebrand said Tom Daschle signed the form by mistake, along with other real-estate forms, when he and his wife closed on their house. District of Columbia officials erred in accepting it and later had Linda sign a replacement form, he said. Gannon believes that was done to cover the fact that Tom Daschle took the tax break, about $250, evidence that he was a D.C. resident taking advantage of that residency while claiming to maintain his residency in South Dakota, where he votes and is licensed to drive.

The Thune campaign promoted that story and the issue and others Gannon raised. But former campaign manager Dick Wadhams said he never paid Gannon or coordinated campaign tactics with his news stories.

Wadhams said the campaign had been promoting the Daschles' tax break on their $1.9-million home — which the Thune campaign called a mansion — to show the senator was losing his South Dakota roots. But when Gannon found the document with Tom Daschle's signature, the value of that issue soared, Wadhams said.

"From the day I first set foot in South Dakota, the issue of the mansion and homestead (tax) exemption was out there," he said. "But what happened at the end of the campaign, Jeff Gannon, or whatever his name is, went to the District of Columbia and got the document that showed the application was actually signed by Sen. Daschle.

"That wasn't coordination. Heck, we would have liked to have had that a lot sooner."

Hildebrand maintains that reality was manipulated in that and other issues, and that Gannon helped in that effort. But Hildebrand doesn't believe Gannon's influence was the key to Thune's win.

"Was he the key reason that Tom Daschle lost? Absolutely not," he said.

Thune points to effective advertising on policy differences between him and Daschle as a key to his win. He said Daschle, who declined to be interviewed for this story, had trouble reconciling some of positions as leader of the Senate Democrats with the more conservative philosophy in South Dakota. Gannon covered some of those differences, and his impact was spread by in-state political blogs, Thune said.

"The blogs were a dynamic in the race that didn't exist two years ago," Thune said. "And there's a lot of frustration among the liberals who now have started their own blogs, that this is a medium they didn't use effectively in the race."

- Monday: The Journal looks at the new phenomenon of political blogs, their impact on the 2004 campaign and their potential role in future races.

Contact Kevin Woster at 394-84123 or kevin.woster@rapidcityjournal.com