James Meek, a celebrated investigative reporter who formerly worked with ABC News, was arrested on Wednesday for transporting child pornography. His penthouse was raided by the FBI in April 2022 and multiple devices were seized.
The Department of Justice said that images of ‘child sex abuse’ was found on the seized devices. If convicted of the charges, the 53-year-old could face up to 20 years in prison.
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Who is James Meek?
James Gordon Meek was born in 1968, according to several news outlets that reported on the raid on him last year. The place of his birth or where he grew up is not in the public domain.
According to his Wikipedia profile, back in 2006 when while working for Daily News, Meek was the first reporter to report on the Al Qaeda-organized Hudson River bomb plot.
It further says that Meek served as a senior counterterrorism advisor and investigator for the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security starting in 2011. While there, he looked into the Boston Marathon bombing among other terrorist attacks. According to Simon & Schuster, Meek spent five years looking into Dave Sharrett II’s passing.
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He wrote and narrated the documentary film 3212 Un-redacted-on the 2017 Green Beret ambush in Tongo Tongo. It was nominated for an Emmy in 2021.
The ongoing investigation started with a tip from Dropbox to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children where they said that a user – Meek, as it later became clear, uploaded videos that were confirmed to be child pornography by the authorities, per a criminal complaint.
The agency tracked him down to his Arlington home and seized an external hard drive that contained “58 images and videos of child pornography” and “approximately 34 images and videos of suspected child pornography”, according to the DOJ.
The DOJ further said: “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.”
