ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: NPR: The FBI raided a notable journalist’s home. Rolling Stone didn’t tell readers why.
FBI raids on journalists are rare. News organizations often respond with formal protests and legal challenges. Under a 2021 Justice Department policy, raids, subpoenas and other compulsory means of obtaining materials from reporters are banned for any investigation of matters related to their journalism. The policy became the basis for a significant shift in the stance of the Justice Department toward the press.
The Rolling Stone story created a stir. Reporter Tatiana Siegel stated that the April 22 raid was “quite possibly, the first” carried out by the Biden administration on a journalist.
In this case, the journalist was ABC* News national security producer James Gordon Meek. A former investigator for the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, Meek had been with ABC News since 2013. He also was a producer of 3212 Un-Redacted, an investigative documentary that streamed on Hulu.
“Meek appears to be on the wrong side of the national-security apparatus,” it stated.
As the story noted, Siegel’s sources told her “federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek’s laptop during their raid.” Siegel reported that Meek left his job at ABC after the raid; a publishing contract with Simon & Schuster evaporated.
As edited by Rolling Stone Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman, however, the article omitted a key fact that Siegel initially intended to include: Siegel had learned from her sources that Meek had been raided as part of a federal investigation into images of child sex abuse, something not publicly revealed until last month.
Rolling Stone, you say?
* A subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company: Is Disney’s “awokening” the reason it refused to release ‘Sound of Freedom’ for five years?