An award-winning national security producer has gone missing after the FBI raided his home months ago.
James Gordon Meek disappeared without a trace back in April following a mysterious, heavily-armed raid on his Washington, D.C., penthouse apartment, Rolling Stone reported on Tuesday. The reasons for the raid and his disappearance, as well as his current whereabouts, appear to be totally unknown by the public.
“He fell off the face of the Earth,” a former colleague told the news outlet. “And people asked, but no one knew the answer.”
Meek was a credentialed journalist for ABC News, having won several awards for breaking several major cases, including uncovering a United States military cover-up of the deaths of four Special Forces soldiers in Niger, which he made into a documentary, 3212 Un-Redacted. He is also a former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee and was working on a book about the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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The FBI raid on his apartment in April involved at least 10 “heavily armed” agents, occupying several unmarked vehicles, including an armored tactical vehicle that an eyewitness said could have easily been mistaken for a tank, the report said, citing Meek’s neighbor John Antonelli. The whole operation was estimated to have taken around 10 minutes.
Sources familiar with the subject told Rolling Stone they weren’t aware if the FBI took Meek away during the raid or if he left on his own accord. Still, he hasn’t been seen since. These sources also claim that the FBI found classified material on his laptop.
In a statement to Rolling Stone, Meek’s lawyer said that Meek is “unaware” of allegations that he possesses classified documents but that if he did, it would be well within his scope as an investigative reporter. Whatever the case, he hasn’t been charged with any crime. The statement made no mention of Meek’s whereabouts.
An FBI representative seemed to confirm the raid to the news outlet, saying agents were present on the morning of April 27 “at the 2300 block of Columbia Pike, Arlington, Virginia, conducting court-authorized law-enforcement activity. The FBI cannot comment further due to an ongoing investigation.”
Meek’s last article from ABC, according to his author page, is from April 14, about the trial of one of the “ISIS Beatles.” His last post on social media, responding to a tweet talking about U.S. monitoring of Russian troop tactics, was posted on Twitter at 4:59 a.m. on April 27. His neighbor and eyewitness to the raid said that he saw the unmarked police vehicles “just before dawn,” meaning his last post was just moments before the raid and his disappearance.
Due to a recently passed law that bars law enforcement from seizing the records of journalists, the raid would have had to have been approved by Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, per the report. Observers believe that the raid on Meek may have been the first case of the Biden administration sending law enforcement against a journalist.
A spokesperson for ABC News told the outlet that Meek abruptly resigned from his post back in April with no explanation, despite having plenty of time left on his contract. Around the same time, he also canceled his other projects, including his book on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he struck a deal for with Simon & Schuster.
Seemingly one of the only hints about Meek’s disappearance comes from the co-author of the Afghanistan withdrawal book, Lt. Col. Scott Mann.
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“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 told Rolling Stone, relaying the last time he heard from Meek. “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.”
