Who is James Gordon Meek? Ex-ABC News journo accused of using social media to allegedly obtain child porn
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ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA: James Gordon Meek, a former investigative reporter for ABC News, was arrested on Tuesday, 31 January on suspicion of criminally transporting photos of child sex abuse. If found guilty of the child pornography transit charge by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, Meek will be sentenced to a minimum of five years in prison and a maximum of twenty years, the Department of Justice said in a statement.
Following an FBI raid on his Arlington, Virginia, home last spring, Meek abruptly resigned from the Disney-owned network. Media insiders who believed the raid might have been related to Meek's work were perplexed by his abrupt resignation. Meek often worked on sensitive issues while serving as an investigative producer for ABC News on national security, as reported by Fox News.
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Who is James Gordon Meek?
James Gordon Meek, a former producer for ABC News, worked as a New York Daily News reporter in 2013. He was the first to report on Al-foiled Qaeda's attempt to attack the tunnels beneath New York City in 2006. He started working for the US House Committee on Homeland Security as a senior counterterrorism advisor and investigator in 2011. In addition, Meek also spent five years looking into the puzzling 2008 death of Army Private First Class David Sharrett in Iraq, according to Simon & Schuster. His research is said to have compelled the Army to acknowledge that Sharrett was murdered by his own commander.
Meek also participated in significant inquiries into important terrorist activities, such as the Boston Marathon Bombing, while serving on the committee. Later, he received a 2017 Emmy Award for Outstanding Breaking News Coverage from ABC for his coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting for ABC News Special Events.
More recently, the Emmy-nominated Hulu documentary "3212 Un-redacted" was inspired by his persistent reporting on the 2017 Pentagon cover-up of the deaths of American servicemen in Niger. Meek contributed to the movie as a writer and narrator, as reported by The New York Post.
Result of the investigation
According to an affidavit released on Wednesday, 1 February, by FBI Special Agent Tonya Sturgill Griffith, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was informed by Dropbox that a Dropbox account had five allegedly child sexual exploitation movies. The videos were purportedly linked to Meek's account and child pornography was depicted in them, according to a further inquiry into the tip. This information prompted the federal prosecutors to launch their investigation into Meek. Following an inquiry, it was claimed that Meek had pretended to be a youngster in order to obtain pornographic photos of minors.
Prosecutors claim that after federal officials searched Meek's house, they discovered a wealth of pornographic photographs showing the abuse of young children on the producer's iPhone 8, iPhone 6, external hard drive, and laptop. “The iPhone 8 contained three chat conversations in which the username ‘Pawny4’ was engaging in sexually explicit conversations where the participants expressed enthusiasm for the sexual abuse of children,” Griffith wrote.
Meek was also discovered to have used the chat app Kik to receive and send child pornographic photos and videos. Meek allegedly asked an unnamed user, "Have you ever raped a toddler girl?" in one especially horrifying chat. It's incredible." "It's my [sic] dream," said the user. Meek told a separate anonymous Kik user about his fantasy of "abducting, drugging, and raping" her as a 12-year-old girl in another conversation from late winter 2020. The affidavit also highlighted Meek's other devices' caches of unsettling images and videos, as well as his interactions with nameless children on platforms like Omegle.
The Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force of the FBI's Washington Field Office investigated Meek's case with "significant assistance" from neighborhood police, according to the Justice Department. If found guilty, he may spend up to 20 years behind bars, as reported by MSN. Meek, 53, had a distinguished international reputation as a prize-winning national security journalist before the raid's repercussions.