Back in 2015, the mainstream media and the blogosphere turned the hot lights on how Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar slow-walked eldest son Josh’s molestation of several area girls when he was a teenager—including his own sisters. During that time, we saw a lot of pearl-clutching from right-wingers claiming that those evil libruls were persecuting a good conservative Christian family.
Well, a lot of people choked on their words last weekend, when Josh was arrested on federal charges of receiving and possessing child pornography. Apparently his lawyers must be really good talkers, because on Wednesday a federal judge released him on bail. At that bail hearing, Garrett Faulkner, one of the Homeland Security Investigations agents who took part in the two-plus year investigation that culminated in Josh’s arrest, made a disclosure that should have destroyed the Duggar charade once and for all. Apparently Josh deliberately evaded a software program that was supposed to help him kick his porn addiction.
From KFSM-TV in Fort Smith:
During Wednesday's hearing, a Department of Homeland Security special agent was called as a witness to testify. He stated that in May 2019, the FBI Little Rock Office traced materials described as child pornography downloaded through peer-to-peer file sharing torrents to an IP address in Fayetteville. After an investigation, Homeland Security agents matched the location to a used car lot Duggar owns in Springdale. Later that year, agents searched the property and seized multiple computers and Duggar's personal iPhone. The agent claimed Duggar used a Linux partition on one of the computers at the car lot to get around software that alerted his wife if he viewed pornography. After analyzing the seized materials, the agent says his team found several files depicting child porn on a computer that Duggar had accessed.
When I first saw this, I had to read several more articles about the hearing to believe what I was seeing. But it wasn’t snark. Anna was actually trying to help him curb his desire to look at porn—and from the looks of it, Josh willfully evaded it.
According to People magazine, that software is called “Covenant Eyes.” Designed to monitor the screen activity of users with porn addictions, it captures screenshots and sends them to an “ally” who can hold his or her partner to account for looking at inappropriate sites. In this case, Anna was Josh’s Covenant Eyes “ally.” Faulkner revealed that Covenant Eyes couldn’t track Josh’s Internet usage after Josh installed a password-protected Linux network on his work computer.
The images were found on a portion of Josh’s hard drive that could not be monitored by Covenant Eyes. Faulkner characterized some of them as among the worst he’d ever seen in his career. You have to have a pretty strong stomach to take part in child porn investigations, so when a veteran agent says that in open court, that’s a BFD.
According to a timeline Faulkner laid out during his testimony, the Linux partition was installed on May 13, 2019, along with a Tor browser that allows access to the darknet. Josh accessed pornographic images from May 14 to May 16. Unknown to Josh, a Little Rock cop discovered one of those images on a peer-to-peer network, and was able to trace it to the IP address of Josh’s computer. It was that image that triggered the investigation.
This is one of the most stomach-turning things I’ve ever seen in my three decades of watching the religious right. Anna was actually trying to help Josh kick his habit—and he does this? Apparently Josh has so little respect for Anna and his six kids (with a seventh on the way) that he decided to do an end run in order to continue getting “satisfaction” from child porn.
Josh was released to the custody of two family friends, and can only see his kids with Anna’s permission and under her supervision. Frankly, I have to wonder what that judge was thinking. This is a guy who cannot be allowed within an area code of kids, supervised or not.
To my mind, Josh better enjoy even his limited freedom. Under federal sentencing guidelines, he faces a minimum of 8 to 11 years in prison. Though based on what we now know, anything less than a total of 20 years would be a joke. And after seeing the timeline Faulkner laid out, if that gets entered into evidence, Josh is toast.
It may take awhile, but for all intents and purposes, Josh and Anna’s marriage is over. I suspect that Anna is going to find it hard to believe that her husband is a self-absorbed monster—and it’s going to be even more difficult given that IFBers like the Duggars and Anna’s family consider divorce the eighth deadly sin. But at some point, someone is going to tell Anna that she can have either the kids or Josh, but she can’t have both. In any event, any credible sentence will mean Anna will be without a husband, and her kids without a father, for a very long time. That’s one of many tragedies in this affair.