There goes the last shred of public trust in America's institutions.

Yes, you read the source of this story correctly.

BUZZFEED.

Not the AP, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX, The New York Times, Time, or any of the other among the prestigious journalism class.

Freaking Buzzfeed is the one out here doing investigative reporting!

Now for the grotesque details of this horrible CIA corruption:

Over the past 14 years, the Central Intelligence Agency has secretly amassed credible evidence that at least 10 of its employees and contractors committed sexual crimes involving children.

Though most of these cases were referred to US attorneys for prosecution, only one of the individuals was ever charged with a crime. Prosecutors sent the rest of the cases back to the CIA to handle internally, meaning few faced any consequences beyond the possible loss of their jobs and security clearances. That marks a striking deviation from how sex crimes involving children have been handled at other federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Administration. CIA insiders say the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets.

Translation: The government's secrets are more important than the lives of children and stopping pedophiles.

One employee had sexual contact with a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old. He was fired. A second employee purchased three sexually explicit videos of young girls, filmed by their mothers. He resigned. A third employee estimated that he had viewed up to 1,400 sexually abusive images of children while on agency assignments. The records do not say what action, if any, the CIA took against him. A contractor who arranged for sex with an undercover FBI agent posing as a child had his contract revoked.

Only one of the individuals cited in these documents was charged with a crime. In that case, as in the only previously known case of a CIA staffer being charged with child sexual crimes, the employee was also under investigation for mishandling classified material.

In other words, the only pedophile who was charged was someone who had already broken the government's trust.

I know DC gets called "The Swamp" a lot, but it really is a muddy, watery pit filled with monsters.

The CIA did not answer detailed questions, saying only that the agency "takes all allegations of possible criminal misconduct committed by personnel seriously."

I'd argue that giving passes to depraved sexual predators proves otherwise, but this is the agency that's famous for starting wars and assassinating undesirables so I guess lying is just their default.

It's not just the CIA, either.

At a symposium in 2016, Daniel Payne, a top Pentagon security official, said that when workers' computers were examined, "the amount of child porn I see is just unbelievable."

It took nearly a decade and multiple lawsuits for Buzzfeed (again, BUZZFEED!) to wrestle this information from the CIA.

BuzzFeed News gained access to these documents after a decadelong pursuit, which included 13 public records requests and three separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

Those requests, the earliest of which date back to 2012, were for investigations closed by the Office of the Inspector General, which acts independently of the agency to examine misconduct by employees or contractors.

New requests were filed each subsequent year. At first the CIA did not respond to the requests; then, it said it would take years to provide any documents. Those requests were followed in 2014, 2015, and 2020 by lawsuits, and the agency entered into negotiations about what documents to release. The coronavirus pandemic delayed the process by a year, but the agency finally began to release the documents in March and will release the final set in December.

BuzzFeed News is publishing the reports here for public review.

Five of the 11 (known) CIA staffers who committed sex crimes against kids were fired or resigned – but without any charges against them, they were free to go continue being pedophiles elsewhere. Four were referred for internal review, and two are unknown. In one of the latter cases, the CIA found that the male staffer had "a consistent interest and pattern of [redacted] conversations involving sexual activities between adults and minors."

Beyond the CIA's handling of these cases, questions linger over why US attorneys chose not to charge anyone, even when they seemed to have significant evidence.

I'd say questions more than "linger."

This in unconscionable. The agencies responsible for keeping Americans safe must have zero room for such depravity.

Not only is there the more minor issue of national security (wanna bet how fast China can blackmail agents over child porn?), but there are eternal, civilization-ending implications for countries that raise such a horrid stink to heaven above.