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- There's yet another porn scandal in Washington, DC.
- An FEC employee was caught storing 125 gigabytes of porn on his government-issued laptop.
- Some of those images were even deemed "potentially unlawful." The employee has since resigned.
An employee of the Federal Election Commission resigned last year after being caught storing a rather large amount of pornography on government-issued devices.
According to a little-noticed report released last week by the Office of the Inspector General at the FEC, investigators began looking into the matter in January 2022 after top staff flagged several videos of a nude person on a shared drive.
Altogether, the resulting investigation dug up the following:
5 video clips of a "nude female performing various sexually suggestive acts" on the shared drive.
22 files containing "inappropriate material" on a laptop issued by the agency in 2021.
687 pornographic videos on a laptop issued by the agency in 2017.
8,166 sexually explicit or suggestive photos on the 2017 laptop.
Adult tourism guides and prostitution maps for Costa Rica, Italy, Mexico, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Investigators said that a total of 125 gigabytes of "potentially inappropriate material" were discovered on the 2017 laptop via a forensic analysis — despite the employee denying its existence.
The employee admitted to uploading the images and videos from his personal cellphone to the shared drive and the 2021 laptop, which was issued during an agency-wide migration that year.
The report also suggested that the employee "used his 2017 laptop exclusively for inappropriate and unofficial purposes after he received his 2021 laptop."
Investigators also said they found "potentially unlawful" sexually explicit images and referred the matter to external law enforcement authorities, who ultimately closed the case due to insufficient evidence.
The employee — whose identity was not disclosed — resigned on June 30, 2022, and the investigation ultimately determined that he had violated agency policies.
It's an unusual scandal to rock the FEC, an otherwise low-profile federal agency tasked with enforcing federal campaign finance laws and maintaining public data on political contributions.
But the release of the report comes on the heels of two scandals that rocked Capitol Hill in recent weeks, including a Democratic staffer allegedly filming himself having sex in a Senate committee room earlier this month and the revelation that a Republican staffer allegedly filmed sex acts in a House office in 2022.