Retired CBS News White House Reporter Mark Knoller Passed Away; Keeper of Presidential Statistics Who Covered Up Cindy Sheehan’s Terrorist Sympathies During Iraq War Protest

Retired CBS News Radio White House reporter Mark Knoller has passed away at age 73 in Washington, D.C., CBS News announced on Saturday. Knoller, who retired in 2020, was well-regarded by his fellow correspondents for his generosity and sense of humor, as well as being the unofficial keeper of presidential statistics for the media who could tell you how many days a president took off for vacations or how many trips on Marine One they took. Knoller covered the White House from President George H.W. Bush through President Donald Trump’s first term.

Knoller’s reporting was not without controversy. In August 2005 he was the first national reporter to interview Cindy Sheehan in Crawford, Texas when the Gold Star mother of Iraq KIA Army Spc. Casey Sheehan arrived by bus with pro-terrorist communist radicals to protest President George W. Bush over the Iraq war while he spent the month on a working vacation at his Crawford ranch.

Knoller and the other reporters there chose not to report that Sheehan called the Islamist terrorists flooding into Iraq from overseas to kill American soldiers and Iraqis, “freedom fighters.”

Knoller’s failure to report Sheehan’s sympathy for Islamist terrorists helped the media paint her as a grieving ‘everymom’ protesting the war rather than as the radical activist she was.

This writer first reported Knoller’s cover-up of Sheehan’s radicalism in 2005 at FreeRepublic.com (excerpt):

Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq whose August antiwar vigil in Crawford, Texas has captured the nation’s attention as she camped out on the side of a road leading to President Bush’s ranch demanding a meeting with him, called the foreign terrorists in Iraq (AKA al Qaeda in Iraq) ‘freedom fighters’ during her first meeting with reporters when she arrived in Crawford, August 6–remarks that when unreported until now.

Mrs. Sheehan also expressed sympathy for Iraqis who have used car bombs and suicide bombings to fight the American-led coalition forces in Iraq.

Video of her incendiary remarks were found on a link from the website of Veterans for Peace, one of the groups that accompanied Mrs. Sheehan to Crawford.

Surrounded by reporters with notepads, tape recorders and video cameras, Mrs. Sheehan spoke freely in response to a question by CBS News’ Mark Knoller.

Mr. Knoller asked, “You know that the president says Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism, don’t you believe that?”

Mrs. Sheehan replied, “No, because it’s not true. You know Iraq was no threat to the United States of America until we invaded. I mean they’re not even a threat to the United States of America. Iraq was not involved in 9/11, Iraq was not a terrorist state. But now that we have decimated the country the borders are open, freedom fighters from other countries are going in and they (America) have created more terrorism by going to an Islamic country, devastating the country and killing innocent people in that country. The terrorism is growing and people who never thought of being car bombers or suicide bombers are now doing it because they want the United States of America out of their country.”

The video was shot by an unknown person who accompanied Mrs. Sheehan on her bus ride from the Veterans for Peace convention, held in in Dallas, to Crawford.

When asked by columnist John Leo about his not reporting on Sheehan’s extremist statements, Knoller replied he “really wasn’t interested.”

Excerpt from the CBS News report on Knoller’s passing:

Longtime CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller has died at the age of 73.

He died in Washington, D.C., according to a close friend. The cause of death was not disclosed, but he suffered from diabetes and had been in ill health.

Knoller was, to put it simply, a legend. For decades, everyone in the White House press corps knew him as the unofficial presidential historian and statistician.

His frustration over the lack of a central database of daily presidential actions inspired him to take upon himself the enormous burden of keeping meticulous records of every presidential act, movement, and utterance, single-handedly filling an immense void in American history.

As he once put it: “I keep a daily log of everything the president does. I keep a list of speeches. I keep a list of travel – foreign travel, domestic travel. A list of outings. A list of golf. A list of pardons, vetoes, states that he’s visited, states that he hasn’t visited. Every time he goes on vacation, every visit to Camp David.”

…And what did Knoller do with this hard-earned gold mine of statistics and numbers? In the extremely competitive world of journalism, you might think he would hoard it for his own use. But no. This remarkably generous man shared it with anyone who asked – reporters on deadline, historians, even White House aides filling gaps in their own administration’s records. He believed the public had a right to know.

Tribute to Knoller on Face the Nation:

Knoller speaking in 2009 about condensing reporting down to 140 characters in the early years of Twitter, now known as X.

Knoller’s last tweet, posted August 11, was a joking comment on President Trump’s policing takeover in Washington, D.C., “What city gets the Trump treatment next? Mayberry?”

Last March, as the controversy of the Biden administration’s use of an auto=pen heated up, Knoller flashed back to his reporting on President Obama’s use of of an auto-pen to sign bills, “In 2015, when I questioned Obama’s use of the Autopen to sign legislation into law, his WH cited DOJ Office of Legal Counsel asserting that “the President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign.””