Senate Democratic Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois has added his voice to the growing chorus on Capitol Hill calling for an investigation into phony White House journalist and male prostitute James Dale Guckert.
Durbin circulated a letter among his Senate colleagues calling on President George W. Bush to come clean about how Guckert, using the alias Jeff Gannon and working for a Republican Party front organization called Talon News, was able to breach White House security nearly every day for two years.
Four of Durbin's Democratic colleagues -- Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Sens. Ted Kennedy and John Kerry of Massachusetts and Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey -- signed the letter, which was sent to the president on Friday.
This latest effort comes in the wake of Rep. Louise Slaughter's Feb. 9 letter to Bush concerning the Guckert affair. Along with Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, she has asked Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the media, to look into Guckert's role in that case, and called on the Government Accountability Office to include Guckert in its probe of mainstream media figures who accepted payola to promote the Bush administration agenda.
In an interview with "Editor and Publisher" last week, Guckert revealed he had kept a personal diary during his two years at the White House, said it was about 200 pages long, and suggested it might become the basis for a book.
Slaughter jumped on the statement.
"I hope the Special Prosecutor will take seriously the revelation that Mr. Gannon kept a detailed diary of his time inside the White House," she said. "He may find many answers to the questions we have sought surrounding Mr. Gannon's White House access on those pages."
In a Feb. 23 letter, Slaughter and Conyers called on Fitzgerald to subpoena the diary.
Talon News, which was owned by Texas Republican Bobby Eberle, shut down operations last week in the face of the mounting calls for investigations. Although Eberle was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2000, other prominent Texas Republicans, including Bush, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan and Chief of Staff Karl Rove, claim not to know him.
Sources told the Reporter that -- despite the efforts of Slaughter and Conyers in the House of Representatives and Durbin, Kennedy, Kerry, Lautenberg and Reid in the Senate -- the chances of full-blown hearings on the scandal are slim at best so long as the Republicans control Congress.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | March 1 2005 |