It sounds like something out of Iron Curtain Eastern Europe or a movie: Government agents raid a journalist’s home and seize information from him.
Then he disappears — and even months later, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances have no idea where he is.
Except that this just happened in real life, this year, in these United States. As the Independent reports:
Acclaimed national security reporter James Gordon Meek hasn’t been seen since an April FBI raid on his apartment just outside of Washington, DC.
Former colleagues at ABC News, a co-author on his forthcoming book, and even his neighbours say they have no idea where the documentary producer has been.
The worrying disappearance raises questions over whether the Biden administration has targeted or arrested the journalist, a major test of the president, who made a point last year to put new safeguards in place protecting reporters during leak investigations.
…Anonymous sources familiar with the operation told Rolling Stone the reporter was suspected of possessing classified material on his laptop, something not out of the realm of possibility for a national security reporter.
As for Rolling Stone, it opened its piece on Meek writing, “AT A MINUTE before 5 a.m. on April 27, ABC News’ James Gordon Meek fired off a tweet with a single word: ‘FACTS.’” Here’s another fact, too:
Meek’s home would be raided later that very morning. (Tweet is below.)
Rolling Stone elaborated on the tweet and also, with a bit of a Tom Clancy flavor, provided some insight into Meek’s doings, writing that he
was responding to former CIA agent Marc Polymeropoulos’ take that the Ukrainian military — with assistance from the U.S. — was thriving against Russian forces. Polymeropoulos’ tweet — filled with acronyms indecipherable to the layperson, like “TTPs,” “UW,” and “EW” — was itself a reply to a missive from Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe, who noted the wealth of information the U.S. military had gathered about Russian ops by observing their combat strategy in real time. The interchange illustrated the interplay between the national-security community and those who cover it. And no one straddled both worlds quite like Meek, an Emmy-winning deep-dive journalist who also was a former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee. To his detractors within ABC, Meek was something of a “military fanboy.” But his track record of exclusives was undeniable, breaking the news of foiled terrorist plots in New York City and the Army’s coverup of the fratricidal death of Pfc. Dave Sharrett II in Iraq, a bombshell that earned Meek a face-to-face meeting with President Obama. With nine years at ABC under his belt, a buzzy Hulu documentary poised for Emmy attention, and an upcoming book on the military’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the 52-year-old bear of a man seemed to be at the height of his powers and the pinnacle of his profession.
And now he’s, well, we know not where.
The Daily Caller added to the story:
A spokesperson for ABC News told Rolling Stone that Meek “resigned very abruptly and hasn’t worked for us for months.”
…Neighbors told the outlet they’ve not seen him and witnesses reportedly said his apartment appears vacant.
It remains unclear why authorities targeted Meek, who has broken several high-profile stories.
Meek broke a major story in 2017 about the Pentagon covering up the deaths of U.S. servicemen in Niger, which later served as the basis for the Hulu documentary 3212 Un-Redacted.
Brian Epstein, an ABC News investigative journalist who worked on 3212 Un-Redacted alongside Meek[,] also abruptly left the network months before Meek was last heard from. Epstein told Rolling Stone he would not comment on the story.
Another person who worked on 3212 Un-Redacted told the Rolling Stone “I just want to know what happened.”
“[Meek’s situation] is making me nervous. I’m just gonna deadbolt my door,” the unnamed person added.
The book Meek was writing, referenced by Rolling Stone, was being co-authored by an individual named Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, who did provide some input. Meek “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,” Rolling Stone related the retired colonel as saying, before adding that “Mann says he hasn’t heard from Meek since.”
If Meek was having personal problems, it’s possible he was depressed, that the FBI raid might’ve pushed him over the edge and that he committed suicide (possibly with some “help”?). The absence of a body makes this less plausible, however.
Not surprisingly, this mystery has inspired some dark speculation. As respondent “rodney owens” wrote under Meek’s final tweet, speaking for many: “So you were kidnapped by the fbi and taken to a blacksite to be ‘helped.’… “Hopefully we hear from you safe and sound but since you were kidnapped by the us government that possibility grows slimmer every day.”
This might have been unthinkable even just 15 years ago. But with the FBI’s politicization — where it helped sway the 2020 election against Donald Trump and targets the Biden administration’s opponents while ignoring its allies’ illegality (e.g., the Hunter Biden laptop) — the once fanciful is now plausible.
Whatever the case, for sure is that more and more Americans are getting an object lesson in the truth of the apocryphal saying, “Government, like fire, is a troublesome servant and a terrible master.”
