Tyler Durden   ZEROHEDGE

Emmy award winner James Gordon Meek - a deep-dive journalist who was also a former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee, abruptly quit his job of 9 years and "fell off the face of the earth," after the raid, one of his colleagues told Rolling Stone.

At the time of the raid, Meek, 52, was co-authoring a now-published book about the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan. According to 'sources familiar with the matter,' federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek's laptop during their raid - though one investigative journalist who had worked with him said it would be highly unusual for a reporter to do so.

"Mr. Meek is unaware of what allegations anonymous sources are making about his possession of classified documents," said his lawyer, Eugene Gorokhov, in a statement. "If such documents exist, as claimed, this would be within the scope of his long career as an investigative journalist covering government wrongdoing. The allegations in your inquiry are troubling for a different reason: they appear to come from a source inside the government. It is highly inappropriate, and illegal, for individuals in the government to leak information about an ongoing investigation. We hope that the DOJ [Department of Justice] promptly investigates the source of this leak."

As Rolling Stone notes, it's unclear what story Meek could have been working on that would have put him in the FBI's crosshairs.

Meek worked on extremely sensitive topics — from high-profile terrorists to Americans held abroad to the exploits of Erik Prince, the founder of the infamous military contractor Blackwater. In recent years, some of Meek’s highest-profile reporting delved into a 2017 ambush by ISIS in Niger that left four American Green Berets dead. Meek and ABC then adapted the story into the feature-length documentary 3212 Un-Redacted, which debuted last year on Veteran’s Day on ABC’s sister company Hulu.