An award-winning ABC News investigative reporter who was working on a book about President Joe Biden’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan has not been seen since his apartment was raided by the FBI back in April. The FBI allegedly found classified information on his laptop during the raid.
Rolling Stone broke the story about James Gordon Meek, an Emmy-winning journalist, on Tuesday. Meek was also former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee.
None of Meek’s co-workers or neighbors have seen Meek since the raid. “He fell off the face of the Earth,” one neighbor said, noting that they’ve asked around, “but no one knew the answer.”
Meek resigned abruptly back in April and no one at ABC has heard from him since.
Meek allegedly had classified materials according to anonymous sources, which Meek’s Attorney believes came from within our government.
“Mr. Meek is unaware of what allegations anonymous sources are making about his possession of classified documents,” Eugene Gorokhov, Meeks’ attorney, 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 allegations in your inquiry 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. We hope that the DOJ [Department of Justice] promptly investigates the source of this leak.”
So why the raid? Was it because he held classified material or was he working on something that spooked someone?
Lt. Col. Scott Mann, who was co-authoring a book on the disasterous withdrawal of Afghanistan, said that he got a call from Meeks earlier this year indicating that something was going on.
“He contacted me in the spring, and was really distraught, and told me that he had some serious personal issues going on and that he needed to withdraw from the project,” Mann said. “As a guy who’s a combat veteran who has seen that kind of strain — I don’t know what it was — I honored it. And he went on his way, and I continued on the project.”
Does his disappearance have something to do with Afghanistan or was it another story that he was working on?
According to Rolling Stone “It is unclear what story, if any, would have put Meek in the FBI’s crosshairs. Meek worked on extremely sensitive topics — from high-profile terrorists to Americans held abroad to the exploits of Erik Prince, the founder of the infamous military contractor Blackwater. In recent years, some of Meek’s highest-profile reporting delved into a 2017 ambush by ISIS in Niger that left four American Green Berets dead. Meek and ABC then adapted the story into the feature-length documentary 3212 Un-Redacted, which debuted last year on Veteran’s Day on ABC’s sister company Hulu.
A robust Emmy campaign began prior to Meek’s disappearance, with events like a screening and Q&A at the Motion Picture Association in D.C. that the journalist attended with one of his daughters. The story was particularly incendiary because it undermined the Pentagon’s official narrative of what happened on the ground in the African nation, and presented “evidence of a cover-up at the highest levels of the Army,” according to the film’s logline. Adding intrigue, sources say another ABC News investigative journalist, Brian Epstein, also abruptly and inexplicably left the network a few months before Meek. Epstein also worked as a director, producer, and cinematographer on 3212 Un-Redacted (Hulu stopped Emmy campaigning after Meek apparently went AWOL, and the documentary ultimately failed to receive a nomination). Epstein told Rolling Stone, “I’m not commenting on this story,” before abruptly hanging up. “
Meek’s last tweet before the raid was “facts” and he retweeted a post from someone who previously worked for the CIA.
Facts: https://t.co/VNyhbFETvT— James Gordon Meek (@meekwire) April 27, 2022
It has now been six months since Meek has gone missing and we still don’t have any answers on what happened to him and he still has not been charged with a crime.
There are several questions that need to be asked.
Is he currently being held by the FBI or another organization outside of the U.S. government? His lawyer seems to think that the FBI did play a role in his capturing, and he did go missing after the raid, but is he being held by the FBI or is another organization holding him hostage and the government is in on it?
Why is the FBI or DOJ refusing to answer any questions about the case?
Why did it take so long to report the story? Was there anyone in his life that was concerned about his disappearance?
Where is James Gordon Meek?