The White House “Porngate” scandal could be potentially damaging to
Vice President Al Gore’s campaign for the presidency this fall if the
White House does not swiftly and definitively punish those responsible,
says Sen. James Inhofe’s office, which was caught up in a similar
scandal last year.
Porngate, as it is being called —
broken last week by WorldNetDaily — caused a firestorm of outrage on the eve of the
Democratic National Convention, which began yesterday in Los Angeles and runs through Thursday.
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| Vice President Al Gore, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, may have trouble dodging ‘Porngate’ and other White House scandals. |
At issue are revelations that White House staffers and officials were caught last year downloading massive files containing hard-core pornographic videos from the Internet onto their government computers.
“There were things that said ‘teen.’ There was gay and bestiality stuff too. … Donkeys, goats, dogs. It’s embarrassing,” one source told WND.
The White House has since confirmed the cyber-porn problem, adding that staffers involved have been punished. Officials have declined to provide those details and have said that no high-ranking White House administration officials were involved. The White House has denied reports that there was no policy specifically prohibiting the downloading of such materials, as WND reported last week.
However, as the Democrats — already battling the GOP in nationwide presidential polls — headed into their L.A. convention, questions about the integrity of a potential Gore administration lingered as outraged Americans and some lawmakers openly questioned whether Democrats were fit to lead.
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| Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla. |
Inhofe has some personal experience with the issue, said Gary Hoitsma, chief spokesman for the Republican senator from OklahomaIn June 1999, staffers in Inhofe’s office were caught downloading pornography onto Senate computers.
Though criticized for the incident, Hoitsma noted that Inhofe wasted no time in dealing with the offenders, who broke a Senate rule against downloading Internet pornography.
Without elaboration, Hoitsma told WorldNetDaily Monday, “I can say that those staffers are no longer on staff here.”
However, because of the criticism his office received last year, the spokesman said he could “sympathize somewhat” with the White House.
“I hesitate to be too critical at this point because we had a similar problem, and people tried to characterize us at the time as somehow being hypocritical, with [Inhofe] being very conservative,” Hoitsma said. “This is a management problem, and we would want to wait and see how the White House deals with this.
“We would encourage them to take swift and decisive action,” he said, adding that if the administration failed to do so, “then I think more criticism might be warranted.”
Hoitsma also noted that the White House, which was critical of Inhofe after last year’s incident in his office, would have been prudent to examine what its own staffers were doing before making such criticism public.
“I would think all managers, all people in the computer workplace today, would be making some accommodations for this,” he said. “There have been lots of incidents of this happening in many companies.”
Some reports have also said White House computer experts knew of the Porngate problem a year or so ago — about the time Inhofe’s incident occurred.
Related stories:
Web porn scandal rocks White House
Porn downloaders ‘ought to be fired’
