Vegas Mayor's iPad Magically Filled With Child Porn, Cops Help Wipe It
The (now former) North Las Vegas Chief of Police Joseph Chronister retired yesterday, and with it, he’s decided to reveal some of the more disturbing goings-on in the force. More specifically, the fact that “what he believed to be” child pornography somehow just kept “popping up” on Mayor John Lee’s iPad—which the cops then helped him promptly delete.
The confession apparently comes out of remorse that the former North Vegas chief’s department hadn’t done more to investigate the mysterious case of the kiddie porn iPad ghost. Because while the chief did assign a detective to the case after the mayor claimed the images popped up upon opening an email, the investigation itself only lasted a day. From the Las Vegas Review Journal:
In his report, the detective said he found no emails having to do with pornography of any kind but did find links to three pornographic websites in the iPad’s browser history. Two of the sites were not illegal, the detective determined, but the third showed pornography organized by the country where the images originated. He said the site looked illegal.
“I did locate several possible photos that could be considered child pornography, but since they were in a different country, I could not verify the age of the people pictured,” the detective wrote.
But as a retired computer crimes task force FBI agent told the Review, “If he thinks it’s child porn, it’s child porn. It doesn’t matter what country it’s in. That sentence makes no sense to me.” What’s more, the mayor’s account of pornography suddenly popping up thanks to the email “couldn’t have happened as the mayor described it.”
Either way, deciding that he couldn’t prove anything definitively, the detective’s next step was to have the Apple Store wipe the iPad clean, return the device to the poor, kiddie porn-addled mayor, and close the investigation.
Chronister only went so far as to admit that it’s a “good question” regarding whether the department should have looked into the case more, but that his department “serve[s] a difficult role in law enforcement” and has “elected officials that [they] depend upon to provide to us resources, funding, and things like that.” Although he “guesses it’s his fault, maybe, for not telling the detective to go on.”
Which sounds like an awfully weak mea culpa, but for a Vegas-adjacent police department, it’s still a relatively surprising sense of accountability. And as for Mayor Lee, “As far as I know there were people who were doing evil to children. I don’t have anything to do with that sin.”
That’s more like it.
