Just days after he was booked on child porn charges, we got our first hints that Josh Duggar was wearing a big ol’ guilty sign around his neck. A Special Agent in charge of the arrest said in his report that the 19 Kids and Counting star — unprompted by any accusations — greeted agents raiding his workplace by saying:
“What is this about? Has someone been downloading child pornography?”
Well, it turns out it didn’t get much better after that. He was apparently just as bumbling like a Coen Brothers character throughout the interview.
Related: Josh Duggar’s Child Porn Computer Wallpaper Was His Kids!
It turns out after reading him his rights, the FBI agents asked if he would consent to the interview being recorded. DailyMail.com got their hands on the audio recordings (via the Freedom of Information Act), and it is… not good.
Things start off with a reference to Jim Bob Duggar as Josh tells agents Gerald Faulkner and Howard Aycock about the Wholesale Motors where the feds had tracked a child porn download:
“I own this business. I also do some real estate as well. My dad has commercial properties so I help with the management. I dabble in a lot of things. This is, you know, this is probably my primary income as far as that goes.”
The agents then ask Josh about who has access to his electronic devices and particularly about his internet setup. Things get eyebrow-raising when they ask the reality star if he’s familiar with “peer2peer” programs such as Tor Browser which allow people to share files anonymously. These are commonly used on the dark web to share illegal items like child pornography, so apart from hearing about them on the news or in a documentary, probably best if you aren’t that “familiar” with them. Josh’s response?
“I mean, I’m familiar with, I guess you could say.”
Uh huh. Next the agents asked which of his computers had these kinds of file-sharing programs downloaded on them. Josh admitted, “Probably all.” But he excused the behavior by saying:
“We upload stuff for our cars and things like that. I’ve had a friend of mine that came and set us up with file sharing so we could do, you know, more encrypted type stuff. He just said, it’s safer that way. He got me onto it to be safer.”
People sell just about everything on the regular internet all day long. Cars on the dark web? Hmm.
Agent Faulkner then explains the kind of work they do, saying:
“Part of the other stuff we do is child exploitation. So we’re, we kind of work with saving kids essentially. A lot of times we’ll find, through internet tips, that people have, you know, downloaded child pornography, stuff like that.”
Josh begins tripping over his words at the mention, saying:
“Is that what you’re saying? Is that what you’re saying is going on? Is there some, is there something going on, on my devices, where that’s been something accessed or something downloaded or uploaded or something like that? Does it, does it include, so did it mark this IP address? Is that basically what you’re saying? Yes. Okay. So does it, so I guess in the scope of your investigation, is there going to be, I guess, I mean, you’ll narrow it down?”
Faulkner warns:
“That’s what you see all these other guys running around doing. They are computer forensic analysts. So even if something’s on a computer that someone might have downloaded and then deleted, they’re gonna be able to find it.”
The agent then tells Duggar how their task force detected a child porn file being shared in the Western Arkansas area, which was then narrowed down to the computer. Faulkner told him:
“These are somebody’s little boy or little girl at the end of the day. Our main objective is to find out who’s doing it.”
Josh responded:
“I appreciate the work you guys do. I guess I have, I mean, I have quite a few questions about it, but I don’t know, you know, how much you can divulge. I’m just, I’m curious, you’re saying there’s images being uploaded or images being downloaded?”
The agents give Duggar the chance to admit any wrongdoing. He tells them he can’t cooperate because it’s too dangerous:
“I’ve watched my friends, you know, answer things and they get them for conspiracy or for something.”
WTF? We mean, we know he used to spend time with Republican congressmen, but what the heck is he talking about?? He continues, clearly rattled:
“And I’m just, I’m not, federal statutes are broad and there’s a lot of things to it. And I’m not gonna say anything that’s gonna incriminate me or anything at all. I’m not denying guilt and I’m not, I’m not saying that I’m, you know, I mean, as far as anything goes, I don’t wanna be, I don’t wanna say the wrong thing. I don’t wanna say that I’m guilty or not. I’m just not saying, you know, on searching, finding, accessing inappropriate content at some point, right, at any point in my life.”
Oof. “I don’t wanna say that I’m guilty or not”? This is NOT how innocent people respond to investigations, right?? We mean, it’s just so easy to deny having downloaded child porn if you’ve never downloaded child porn.
Of course, they ended up finding plenty of evidence without his cooperation. We knew it was a slam-dunk case from what we heard during the trial, but wow he just never gave feds a reason to doubt it, did he?
[Image via Washington County Sheriff’s Office.]
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