Report: ABC Producer Hasn't Been Seen Since April FBI Raid

Colleagues say James Gordon Meek 'fell off the face of the Earth'
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 19, 2022 12:37 PM CDT

ABC News investigative producer James Gordon Meek resigned abruptly and has apparently been lying very low since an FBI raid on his Arlington, Virginia, home in April, according to a report in Rolling Stone. In what the magazine notes could be the first raid carried out on a journalist by the Biden administration, federal law enforcement vehicles including an armored vehicle arrived outside Meek's apartment building on the morning of April 27. Neighbors say the operation only lasted 10 minutes. It's not clear whether Meek, who has not been charged with any crime, left with the agents, but neighbors say they haven't seen him since, and his apartment appears to be vacant. His most recent tweets, about Ukraine and Afghanistan, were posted on the morning of the raid.

The 52-year-old Emmy-winning producer, a former senior counterterrorism adviser for the House Homeland Security Committee, had broken numerous national security stories during his nine years at ABC and "seemed to be at the height of his powers and the pinnacle of his profession," Rolling Stone reports. Colleagues told the magazine they had no idea what happened to him. "He fell off the face of the Earth," one said. "And people asked, but no one knew the answer." Meek had been co-authoring a book—Operation Pineapple Express: The Incredible Story of a Group of Americans Who Undertook One Last Mission and Honored a Promise in Afghanistan—with Lt. Col. Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret, but his name was wiped from the project after the raid. Mann says a distraught Meek contacted him in the spring and said he "had some serious personal issues going on."

Sources tell Rolling Stone that federal agents allegedly found classified material on Meek's laptop during the raid. "Mr. Meek is unaware of what allegations anonymous sources are making about his possession of classified documents," Meek's lawyer, Eugene Gorokhov, said in a statement. "If such documents exist, as claimed, this would be within the scope of his long career as an investigative journalist covering government wrongdoing." The lawyer added that the allegations in Rolling Stone's investigation "are troubling for a different reason: they appear to come from a source inside the government. It is highly inappropriate, and illegal, for individuals in the government to leak information about an ongoing investigation." (More journalist stories.)

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