“Missing” ABC News Producer Arrested for Transportation of Child Porn

James Gordon Meek, an ABC News producer. The headlines of last year When he reportedly went “missing” After the FBI was seen invading his Virginia house, the FBI arrested him on charges related the transportation of “images depicting the sexual abuse of children,” Wednesday was the announcement of the Justice Department. 

The announcement, Meek was taken into custody on Tuesday after the FBI Washington Field Office’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force received an investigated lead, which ultimately led to a court-authorized search of the investigative journalists’ residence in April 2022, where law enforcement seized “multiple devices that allegedly contained evidence of the transportation of images of child sexual abuse.” 

After the raid on his Arlington home, the father of two daughters hadn’t been seen until November, when he was spotted at his elderly mother’s townhouse in McLean. In December, federal law enforcement announced they would be prosecuting him, but didn’t make the details of the case public until now. 

Speculation surrounding his mysterious disappearance included theories centered around a book he co-authored with retired Green Beret Lt. Col. Scott Mann on Biden’s botched military pull-out of Afghanistan. After the FBI raid and his subsequent “disappearance,” he was wiped from all promotional materials and social media associated with the book, titled “Operation Pineapple Express: The Incredible Story of a Group of Americans Who Undertook One Last Mission and Honored a Promise in Afghanistan.”

The Justice Department continued its statement, saying “several of Meek’s devices allegedly contained images depicting children engaged in sexually explicit conduct and multiple chat conversations with users engaged in sexually explicit conversations where the participants expressed enthusiasm for the sexual abuse of children.”

In two of those conversations, a username allegedly associated with Meek received and sent child sexual abuse material, the press release stated. 

If convicted, Meek faces a mandatory minimum of five years and a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.