Federal prosecutors charged a former ABC News national security journalist with a child pornography offense. James Gordon Meek, 53, a producer who covered wars, terrorism and major crimes for the network, was charged with one count of transporting child pornography. The FBI said agents searched Meek’s apartment in Arlington, Va., last year and found explicit images and videos of minors on his electronic devices. He was taken into custody Tuesday. Meek's last report for ABC was published in April 2022, days before the FBI searched his apartment. He resigned the same month.
The investigation into Meek became public last year, when Rolling Stone magazine reported that the FBI had searched Meek’s home and found classified information. The magazine said the search of Meek’s apartment appeared to be the first “carried out on a journalist by the Biden administration.” The Justice Department previously had been embroiled in controversy over its efforts to seek journalists’ records in leak cases. Attorney General Merrick Garland in October issued formal rules that prohibit federal investigators from seizing reporters’ phone records. The policy did not cover journalists’ activities unrelated to newsgathering. In the Meek case, the subject of classified materials did not come up. In March 2021, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a tip from the company Dropbox regarding five suspected child pornography videos stored on one of its users’ accounts, the FBI said. The Dropbox username was “James Meek,” and the IP address was a match with Meek’s apartment. A forensic review of an iPhone found in Meek’s apartment showed that the phone’s user and another person on the messaging application Kik exchanged videos of minors being sexually abused, the FBI said. An external hard drive in Meek’s kitchen and a laptop in his living room also contained images of child sexual exploitation.
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