The White House is facing fresh accusations of a clandestine propaganda campaign after it emerged this week that it granted regular access to a rightwing blogger with a habit of asking President Bush easy questions. Jeff Gannon, who represented a rightwing site owned by a Texas-based Republican activist, had been a regular at White House briefings since 2003 but aroused reporters” suspicions after posing ideologically loaded questions. The fake White House correspondent quit his job at the Talon News site on Wednesday after bloggers found he had been operating under a pseudonym, and that he was linked to several gay pornographic web domain addresses under his real identity, James Guckert; web sites such as hotmilitarystud.com and militaryescorts.com are registered to the same owner as Gannon’s Web site, jeffgannon.com. White House spokesman, Scott McLellan, has dismissed charges that Gannon was part of an underground propaganda effort as “just a wild conspiracy theory”. But questions remain about why the White House suspended the normally rigorous vetting process to issue daily passes to an organization rejected by the Senate last year for not being a legitimate media outlet. The extent of Gannon’s links to an earlier White House scandal–the leaking of the name of the CIA operative Valerie Plame–also remained unclear yesterday. Gannon has been targeted for questioning in that case. Gannon’s unmasking comes only weeks after the Bush administration admitted paying handsome sums to three conservative commentators to promote its social programs in print, radio and TV.