Jesse Ryan Loskarn, the former chief of staff to Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, appeared in a Washington, D.C. federal court Thursday on charges of possession and distribution of child pornography.
Alexander fired Loskarn on Thursday after learning he was under investigation.
Loskarn — who goes by his middle name — was caught during a joint investigation between the Toronto Police Service and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service into a website that was selling DVDs and streaming movies, most of which “feature young nude boys.” Investigators found that Loskarn “made several purchases between November 2010 and March 2011,” according to the official complaint document.
In early October this year, USPIS “identified Loskarn’s residential IP address on the Gnutella peer to peer network offering files with names that are consistent with child pornography broadcasting as a download candidate,” according to the complaint. Investigators obtained partial downloads of the files and discovered that they were indeed videos of pornography featuring young children in sexual situations.
Police arrived at Loskarn’s D.C. home on Wednesday, armed with a search warrant. When no one answered the door, they used a battering ram to gain entry to the home. As they were entering, they noticed a man, whom they identified as Loskarn, leaning out of a window. He “appeared to be in a nervous state looking right and left,” and he then made a motion that inspectors believed was him placing an object outside of the window and then shut the window.
Inspectors recovered a Toshiba external hardrive from outside that window, on which computer forensic examiners discovered child pornography featuring children as young as 10 and 8 years old, according to the file titles.
The full complaint appears here. **EDITOR’S NOTE: This link contains very graphic descriptions of the child pornography recovered in Loskarn’s files.**
“The courts will determine his guilt or innocence, but the information in the complaint is repugnant and disturbing,” Sen. Alexander said in a statement after the details of the complaint were released.
Loskarn appeared in court Thursday afternoon wearing jeans and a gray zip-up sweatshirt that appeared to be the same outfit he was wearing when he was arrested on Wednesday. He did not speak except when asked to state his name, and sat looking unhappy for the short hearing.
Loskarn is being held in the custody of U.S. Marshals as a flight risk and a danger to the community. The judge set a detention hearing for Monday morning, when a judge will determine whether Loskarn should continue to be held, or if he should be released on bail.
The charges of possession and distribution of child pornography could result in a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison: possession has a maximum sentence of 10 years, and distribution has a maximum sentence of 20 years, and a minimum of five years.