Reply #40: Here's an account from a Santa Cruz, CA site about Sanford's WH press incident

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http://www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/09.21.05/nuz-0538.html
T Is for Treason

Ever since it turned out that so-called "White House reporter JEFF GANNON" was really a Republican activist named JAMES DALE GUCKERT, and that he was the one lobbing softball questions as the scandal over the missing WMDs in Iraq blew up, Nüz has dreamed of infiltrating said press corps--only we'd do it to play extreme hardball, of course.

So, imagine our surprise when we learned that Aptos resident, constitutional law professor and Democratic activist PAUL SANFORD beat us to that particular finish line this July. As it happens, Sanford's arrival on the D.C. circuit came two years after "Gannon" started floating out Bushista talking points--including the poisonous notion that CIA operative VALERIE PLAME's name was common knowledge, and therefore outing her was not a crime.

All of which made it all the more sublimely symmetrical that Sanford managed to circle neatly back to the Plame affair with his very first question, nicely fingering KARL ROVE along the way--as he wondered aloud if the whole mess added up to, well, treason. Or to quote Sanford directly from the July 25, 2005, White House press conference transcript: "There has been a lot of speculation concerning the meaning of the underlying statute and the grand jury investigation concerning Mr. Rove. The question is, have the legal counsel to the White House or White House staff reviewed the statute in sufficient specificity to determine whether a violation of that statute would, in effect, constitute treason?"

According to notes on the blogosphere, this was the first time since the Plame leak two years earlier that the T-word got dropped. And according to Sanford, this unexpected bombing led a flustered press secretary SCOTT MCCLELLAND to shut down the conference after rebuffing his query with the typical White House wafflespeak, namely, "I think, in terms of decisions regarding the investigation, those are matters for those overseeing the investigation to decide."

SNIP