Wow, nice to have some discussion here even though I do not agree with it all.
Hopefully, we can all continue to play nice here. This case draws out passionate responses which can devolve into arguements quickly. That is why we all should reread our post before hitting the send button to make sure that what we say is what we really mean.
And Tim White? Why in the world would "Jimmy Gibson" send pics to him? None of that story makes sense to me.....why believe him?
There seems to be corroboration that Tim White was the first to be sent the pics. He claims in his post that an anonymous emailer sent him the pics, which he then forwarded to Noreen, Gunderson, Rothstein, et al.
Someone who calls himself Jimmy Gibson on another site claims to have initially sent the pics to White and one other person. Gibson says that he did not send them to Noreen and theorized that White must have forwarded them to her. These two stories match up if Gibson was White's anonymous sender, but either way, both are saying that it was White who first received the pics, who then forwarded them to Noreen.
Now specifically to your question: Why would Gibson send them to White? Tim has a reputation as being a kook - even among other kooks. His posts are often filled with profanity-laced tirades against any and all perceived enemies who seem to be most everyone. Other kook bloggers rail against him as a child pornographer, a disinformation agent, a homeless crossdresser, etc. If I was picking someone to "expose the truth", I would not come near this guy. But "Jimmy Gibson" seems to have picked him. Why?
The following is pure speculation based on what I have seen in this case. The first question is which "Jimmy Gibson" sent the pictures? The Gibson who claims to have sent the pictures seems to have been relatively literate, unlike the JG who was posting occasionally on the Franklin Files site. The difference in writing skills between the two makes me suspect that they were two different people claiming to be the same guy. I think that the shadowy nature of what we know about Gibson makes his identity an easy one for any prankster to appropriate to give their stunts added validity. It may be that "Gibson" was not the Jimmy Gibson and that he/they recognized that White had the least discriminating eye of all of those involved and would be the most likely to believe the story.
I say the above because I do not believe that the pictures are of Johnny. I do believe that they do depict actual boys in bondage (mostly, one boy over a period of years), but am undecided on whether this bondage was forced or consentual. In most of the pics, the boy seems rather undistressed, yet in at least one picture he looks highly distressed and perhaps beaten or drugged. However, when I did a side-by-side comparison of the pics of this boy and Johnny, I concluded that they were two different people. I know that many believe that many people believe that "Noreen would know her own son", but this is where Noreen's gullibility to believe anything that "proves" her theories comes into play - I cannot go on Noreen's determinations alone. And the pics do not look like Johnny to me.
So if these were sent by "Jimmy Gibson" and Jimmy claims that they are of Johnny, I conclude that this "Jimmy Gibson" found pictures of a boy who vaguely resembled Johnny and sent them to White knowing that he would immediately dissemenate them as authentic across the net. I believe that "Jimmy Gibson" had no idea if they were of Johnny or not, he just perpetuated a hoax that many still believe to this day. And he used White as a "useful idiot" to pull this off.