Former ABC News producer James Gordon Meek arrested on federal child porn charges

A former producer for ABC News was arrested Tuesday on federal charges of transporting child pornography.

James Gordon Meek, who lives in Arlington, Va., had several devices seized from his home by the FBI last April, the Department of Justice said in a statement. According to court documents, they contained images of children engaged in sexually explicit conduct.

Authorities also found multiple chat conversations with users who expressed enthusiasm for sexually abusing children.

The Department of Justice said that, in two of those conversations, a username allegedly associated with Meek received and distributed child sexual abuse materials through an internet-based messaging platform.

Meek was investigated after the government received a tip in 2021 from Dropbox, the file-hosting platform. Dropbox found five videos that depicted child pornography in an account in Meek’s name, according to an affidavit from an FBI agent investigating the case.

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

Meek, 53, quit ABC News on April 27, the day the FBI raided his home. He also had his name removed from a book he co-authored that was published last summer by Simon & Schuster about Operation Pineapple Express, a secret mission in which a group of U.S. military veterans rescued hundreds of allied operatives from Afghanistan.

An ABC News representative had no comment on Meek’s arrest.

Meek specialized in covering national security since the late 1990s. He joined ABC News in 2013 after serving two years as a senior counterterrorism advisor and investigator for the House Committee on Homeland Security.

The Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section and Assistant U.S. Atty. Zoe Bedell for the Eastern District of Virginia are prosecuting the case.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.