Former ABC reporter and subject of right-wing conspiracy theories pleads guilty to transporting child sex abuse material

• Former ABC News reporter James Gordon Meek pleaded guilty Friday to child sex abuse charges.
• Meek admitted to sending and receiving images of abused children.
• After the FBI raided Meek's home last year, Tucker Carlson suggested he was being targeted for his reporting.

A former ABC News reporter who some conservative commenters have suggested was a target of a Biden administration war on journalism has pleaded guilty to possessing and transporting images of sexually abused children, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

Police arrested James Gordon Meek, whose reporting focused on national security, in February after an FBI raid on his home. Prosecutors then charged him with distributing child porn.

Initial reporting suggested that FBI agents had found classified material, without saying why the raid occurred in the first place, or that agents also found hard drives full of child sex abuse material. That, plus Meek's ensuing silence and unknown whereabouts, prompted some right-wing pundits to speculate that he was being targeted for his reporting on topics like Afghanistan and the Biden administration's controversial withdrawal of US troops from the country.

"This is disappearing someone who is investigating corruption in the government," conservative commentator Glenn Beck, a former host on CNN and Fox News, assured viewers of his online program. Tucker Carlson, then employed by Fox, included a report on Meek's case in a segment on how such raids on journalists — "a visit from armed men with guns from the Biden administration" — are "the hallmark of a dictatorship."

Neither pundit noted Meek's subsequent arrest.

What Meek ultimately admitted to were grotesque crimes that had nothing to do with his reporting. In particular, he pleaded guilty to sending and receiving photos and videos of children under the age of 12 being sexually abused, including an infant being raped, according to the Department of Justice.

Although the government initially accused Meek of directly engaging with minors on Snapchat, that allegation is not included in the statement of facts, signed by the defendant, that prosecutors submitted Friday to the US District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia.

Meek, who is due to be sentenced in September, faces up to 40 years in prison. His attorney, Eugene Gorokhov, declined Insider's request for comment, citing federal court rules.

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