James Gordon Meek
 James Gordon Meek     (journalist) | ||||||||||||||||
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| Born | 1968 Chicago, Illinois, United States | |||||||||||||||
| Alma mater | Virginia Commonwealth University | |||||||||||||||
| Spouse | Jessica Lenard | |||||||||||||||
ABC News journalist close to the national security apparatus. Concerns about his welfare after he resigned suddenly from his job and dropped out of sight after a 2022 FBI raid. In January 2023, he was charged with transportation of child pornography.
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Not to be confused the British corporate journalist, James Meek.
James Gordon Meek is a US journalist close to the national security apparatus[1]. Meek was a well-known figure in "national security" circles, both as an Emmy-winning journalist for ABC and a former counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee.[2]
In the last half of 2022, there were concerns about his welfare[3] after he resigned suddenly from his job and dropped out of sight after a April 2022 FBI raid. In January 2023, he was charged with transportation of child pornography.[4]
The concern about his welfare in some "alternative media" and parts of corporate media[5][6] might have been a red herring, laid out to distract and lead astray the parts of the public reading opposition media. Another interpretation is that the raid was an internal settlement of scores in the national security apparatus.
Contents
Corporate career
In 2006, reporting for the Daily News, Meek was the first journalist to report on that year's Al Qaeda-organized Hudson River bomb plot. From 2011, Meek was a senior counterterrorism advisor and investigator for the US House Committee on Homeland Security, where he investigated, among other terrorist acts, the Boston Marathon bombing.[7][8] Simon & Schuster has stated that Meek spent five years investigating the death of Dave Sharrett II.[8]
He was a writer and narrator for the 2021 Emmy-nominated documentary film 3212 Un-redacted[9] which detailed the Tongo Tongo ambush, an ambush of Green Berets in Niger in 2017.[10]
Child porn investigation
Federal prosecutors say their investigation into Meek first began after the cloud storage company Dropbox tipped off the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about the presence of five suspected videos of child sexual exploitation material in a Dropbox account, according to the complaint.[2]
Search warrants
After 13 months, a search warrant was obtained for Meek's Virginia home. It was raided on April 27 2022 by the FBI's Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force in DC.[11][12][13] The FBI seized an iPhone 8 named "Bone Machine" and other devices on which Meek had "expressed enthusiasm for the sexual abuse of children" and both sent and received images of child sexual abuse through Kik.[12][14][15] Meek had boasted that a younger woman had planned to have a child with him so they could jointly partake in sexually abusing the infant when born.[12][16]
In April 2022, Meek resigned very abruptly from his ABC News post without warning or explanation, with even close coworkers unaware of the reasons for his departure.[17] His lawyer Eugene Gorokhov claimed anonymous rumors were suggesting that the FBI raid had been seeking classified documents related to Meek's work as a journalist and national security advisor - however this was doubtful as new legislation had just passed the previous year which would've required Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco to sign off on any raid seeking journalistic materials.[18][19]
iCloud
On November 14 2022, the FBI obtained a second search warrant for Meek's iCloud account which had been linked to many of his devices found in the earlier raid.[12] He was arrested January 31, 2023 on the basis of an FBI complaint which redacted names to avoid compromising investigations of other suspects who had communicated with Meek.[12] Prosecutors appealed his immediate request for bail which resulted in a determination he would be held in prison until trial.[20][21] At his bail hearing, his lawyer reminded the Court that Meek "advised top congressional leaders and held a top-secret clearance".[22]
Arrest
In January 2023, he was arrested on a charge of transportation of child pornography. The Department of Justice took an unusually long time — eight months — to formally charge Meek.[2]
The oldest images of child pornography referenced by the FBI in their criminal complaint were saved to Meek's devices in 2014, and the most recent were from 2022.[12][23]
References
- ↑ https://redstate.com/jenniferoo/2022/10/21/the-fbi-raid-and-disappearance-of-journalist-james-gordon-meek-should-chill-you-to-the-bone-n646672
- ↑ a b c https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/james-gordon-meek-warrant-1234672165/
- ↑ https://www.thedailybeast.com/producer-james-gordon-meek-disappeared-after-fbi-raid-rolling-stone-reports
- ↑ https://deadline.com/2023/02/abc-news-producer-arrested-child-pornography-1235246591/
- ↑ https://nypost.com/2022/10/19/journalist-james-gordon-meek-missing-since-fbi-seized-classified-docs-in-home-raid-report/
- ↑ https://thefreethoughtproject.com/the-state/award-winning-journalist-missing-after-fbi-raided-his-home-following-tweet-about-us-intervention-in-ukraine
- ↑ https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/04/abc-news-expands-its-award-winning-investigative-unit
- ↑ a b https://web.archive.org/web/20220117101323/https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Operation-Pineapple-Express/Scott-Mann/9781668003534
- ↑ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/national-academy-of-tv-arts-sciences-announces-2022-news-documentary-emmy-nominees-1235188293/
- ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/movies/3212-un-redacted-review.html
- ↑ https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/former-abc-news-producer-arrested-child-pornography-james-gordon-meek-1235509508/
- ↑ a b c d e f FBI Complaint, United States v. James Gordon Meek, Case No 1:23-MJ-32, 23 January, 2023.
- ↑ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/james-gordon-meek-warrant-1234672165/
- ↑ https://nypost.com/2023/02/01/reporter-james-gordon-meek-charged-in-child-pornography-case/
- ↑ Keybase, Meekwire: Bone Machine, 7 September 2019.
- ↑ https://www.oxygen.com/crime-news/reporter-james-gordon-meek-facing-child-porn-charge
- ↑ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/fbi-raid-abc-news_producer-1234613619/
- ↑ Cite error: Invalid
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- ↑ "Former ABC News Producer to be Detained Until Trial on Child Pornography Charges". Rolling Stone. February 7, 2023.Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto").
- ↑ "Man Arrested for Transporting Images of Child Sexual Abuse". February 2023.Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto").
- ↑ Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs namedwapo - ↑ USA v James Gordon Meek, Memorandum Brief of Appellant, February 21 2023
