The FBI and an American Journalist's Disappearance

A very disturbing tale at Rolling Stone.

[A neighbor] inched closer to get a better vantage, when he saw an olive-green Lenco BearCat G2, an armored tactical vehicle often employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, among other law-enforcement agencies. A few Arlington County cruisers surrounded the jaw-dropping scene, but all of the other vehicles were unmarked, including the BearCat. Antonelli counted at least 10 heavily armed personnel in the group. None bore anything identifying which agency was conducting the raid....

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. 

So if he was charged with no crime, was he arrested? No one seems to be able to confirm or deny it. He disappeared, though, and has not been seen nor has he posted on Twitter as was his wont. He also 'abruptly resigned' from his job even though his contract was not complete. 

His lawyer declined to comment on accusations that he might have had classified documents, except to state that (a) an investigative journalist just might, if he was looking into government wrongdoing, and (b) the source of that suggestion would have to be an illegal government leak to the press.

This caught my eye:

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. Meek even featured a picture of the soon-to-publish book in his bio on social media and frequently tweeted about his involvement. But post-April 27, the book-jacket photo disappeared from his bio, and Simon & Schuster has scrubbed his name from all press materials. 

Uh-oh.

Is covering up the administration's wrongdoing in the Afghanistan withdrawal -- which entailed abandoning thousands of American citizens to the Taliban as well as strategic planning so awful as to have been malevolent -- such a high priority at DOJ that it could get the Deputy Attorney General to sign off on it? If not that, what did? Where is Mr. Meek, and why are these corporations for whom he worked suddenly scrubbing his name and pretending he never existed? 

This kind of disappearance is well-known in China. It's not supposed to happen here.