WAS A LEAK AFTER THE RAID ON JAMES GORDON MEEK'S HOUSE MEANT TO FALSELY DIRECT OUTRAGE AT PRESIDENT BIDEN?

The Department of Justice is charging a well-known reporter with child pornography offenses:

In a statement, the DOJ said that it was charging James Gordon Meek, a former foreign correspondent for ABC News, with the alleged transportation of images depicting the sexual abuse of children.

The DOJ said that an online username associated with Meek "received and distributed child sexual abuse materials," and devices owned by Meek allegedly contained images depicting children engaged in sexually explicit conduct.

Wednesday's arrest came after months of speculation around the circumstances of a federal investigation into Meek. Last April, the FBI raided Meek's Arlington, Va. home, a move that the DOJ clarified at the time was unrelated to his work as a journalist. Meek abruptly resigned from ABC following the raid without giving any clear explanation to network bosses.

After the April raid, Meek disappeared from public view. In October, a leak to Rolling Stone suggested that the raid was in search of classified material on Meek's computer, at a time when he was about to publish a book about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan:

Meek has been charged with no crime. But independent observers believe the raid is among the first — and quite possibly, the first — to be carried out on a journalist by the Biden administration. A federal magistrate judge in the Virginia Eastern District Court signed off on the search warrant the day before the raid. If the raid was for Meek’s records, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco would have had to give her blessing; a new policy enacted last year prohibits federal prosecutors from seizing journalists’ documents. Any exception requires the deputy AG’s approval....

Sources familiar with the matter say federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek’s laptop during their raid.

The "sources familiar with the matter" said this even though a professional colleague of Meek's found it implausible.

One investigative journalist who worked with Meek says it would be highly unusual for a reporter or producer to keep any classified information on a computer.

And did this all happen because Meek was about to embarrass the Biden administration? The Rolling Stone story implied that it did.

Even stranger, in the months before he vanished, Meek was finishing up work on a book for Simon & Schuster titled Operation Pineapple Express: The Incredible Story of a Group of Americans Who Undertook One Last Mission and Honored a Promise in Afghanistan, which he co-authored with Lt. Col. Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret.... But post-April 27, the book-jacket photo disappeared from his bio, and Simon & Schuster has scrubbed his name from all press materials.

(The raid didn't suppress the book, which was published on August 30, with Mann listed as the sole author. It became a New York Times bestseller.)

When the Rolling Stone story appeared, right-wingers flipped out, of course. A RedState post was titled "The FBI Raid and Disappearance of Journalist James Gordon Meek Should Chill You to the Bone."

This is chilling. The Department of Justice has truly become Joe Biden’s enforcement arm. From parents who are vocal about the immorality occurring in their local school boards being targeted as domestic terrorists to waging vendettas against former President Donald Trump, to raiding the homes of investigative journalist James O’Keefe and other Project Veritas journalists over presidential daughter Ashley Biden’s journal. We have moved far past the covert targeting of Sharyl Atkisson and James Rosen to overt action to quell free speech and silence anyone seeking, documenting, and publishing the truth.

Glenn Beck called it "the year's biggest story," telling his listeners:

... do we live now in Russia? The FBI is completely and totally out of control. A Emmy award winning journalist ... is whisked away into, we don't know if it's the FBI, into black vans where no one is wearing identification on their flack jacket.... Why? And where is this guy? And why isn't, why isn't the world of ABC on fire. Where are the journalists? If Donald Trump had anyone in a gray sedan ... and an old lady got out and said hey, I'm with the Trump administration and I just like to ask you about an article, they would have been screaming to high heaven. Now we have a FBI that is completely out of control. And they pick up a journalist in April. We're just hearing it about it now?

This is not good. The fear and the madness has got to stop. The fear and the madness has got to stop. We must end it November 8.... I don't know what warnings you're getting elsewhere, but if you're not hearing an urgent warning on the loss of your country, our Bill of Rights, your freedom, and your economic freedom, you're listening to the wrong people.

And now we have truly repellent details about material allegedly found on Meek's laptop. I won't share them with you, but you can read the affidavit details here. They may make you physically ill.

Was Rolling Stone misled by sources who had been given incorrect information and repeated it in good faith? Did the sources provide a fake scoop out of simple dishonesty?

Or was this an effort to make the Biden Justice Department look like jackbooted thugs, less than a month before Election Day? (That's what Glenn Beck meant when he said, "We must end it November 8.")

Maybe you believe that the child porn was planted on the computer of a reporter whose work made President Biden look bad. If so, it's odd that this happened and no effort was made to halt publication of the reporter's book. Someone misled Rolling Stone, and there was a significant freakout on the right, shortly before the midterms. Was that by design?