Former Daschle Campaign Spokesman Says Media Was Aware Jeff Gannon Had Told Lies About His Identity As Far Back as the Summer of 2003
By ADVOCATE STAFF
You might have thought the strange saga of Jeff Gannon was a recent development, a story whose genesis is not so deep in the murky annals of Washington political history, but, in fact, only about four weeks old, when John Aravosis of America Blog discovered that Gannon has moonlighted as a male escort.
Well, you'd be wrong.
According to Dan Pfeiffer, former spokesman for Tom Daschle--the U.S. Senate Minority Leader until his defeat in the 2004 general election--Jeff Gannon's use of assumed identities was information available to the media as far back as the summer of 2003.
It was then, more than a year and a half ago, that Pfeiffer received an e-mail from someone claiming to be a citizen of South Dakota, wanting to know the Daschle campaign's reaction to a story by "Jeff Gannon."
The concerned "citizen of South Dakota" turned out to be Gannon himself, as the Daschle campaign quickly uncovered by tracking the e-mail account from which the query had been sent, "jdg17@aol.com." That e-mail address led Daschle campaign staffers to Gannon's AOL website, at which point the entire campaign became instantly aware that Gannon, then a White House correspondent for "Talon News," had attempted to deceive them. This incident, combined with Gannon's "reporting" of the 2004 general election in South Dakota and the sheer oddity of his website, prompted the Daschle campaign to conclude Gannon was not a legitimate reporter.
http://nashuaadvocate.blogspot.com/2005/02/former-daschle-campaign-spokesman-says_23.html