An Emmy Award-winning ABC News journalist has been missing since the FBI raided his home and reportedly found classified information on a laptop, according to Rolling Stone.
Colleagues and neighbors said they haven’t seen or heard from star national security reporter James Gordon Meek since April 27, when heavily armored FBI agents conducted a 10-minute raid on his apartment outside Washington, D.C.
“He fell off the face of the Earth,” an anonymous ABC News colleague told Rolling Stone. Meek “resigned very abruptly” from ABC News, a representative said.
His lawyer said Meek is “unaware” of allegations “about his possession of classified documents,” adding that if the documents existed, they “would be within the scope of his long career” as a journalist.
A federal magistrate judge in Virginia signed the search warrant, and under a new Biden policy, the raid would also have needed the approval of U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, according to Rolling Stone.
The 52-year-old Meek had been a senior congressional advisor on counterterrorism before breaking a number of sensitive national security stories over nine years at ABC News, where he was known to some as a “military fanboy,” according to Rolling Stone.
Rolling Stone reported that Meek’s colleague Brian Epstein also “abruptly and inexplicably” left ABC News in the months before the raid. The two worked together on “3212 Un-redacted,” a documentary about a 2017 ISIS ambush that killed four U.S. soldiers. Epstein told Rolling Stone, “I’m not commenting on this story,” before hanging up.
Also, before the raid, Meek had openly promoted a book he was co-authoring with a retired Green Beret, but when the book was released in August, it had no mention of his involvement, according to Rolling Stone.
The former Green Beret, Lt. Col. Scott Mann, told Rolling Stone that Meek had contacted him in the spring and seemed “really distraught.”
“[He] told me that he had some serious personal issues going on and that he needed to withdraw from the project,” he 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.”
