Duggar’s kid-porn trial gets started

Defense: He’s a victim of set-up

FAYETTEVILLE — Josh Duggar’s child pornography trial opened Wednesday morning with the defense telling jurors someone else downloaded the images or caused them to be placed on the computer at Duggar’s used car lot.

“If you like a mystery, then this is the case for you,” Justin Gilfand, representing Duggar, told jurors in his opening statement. “This is a classic, old-fashioned whodunit.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Dustin Roberts countered with logs showing, minute-by-minute, the activity on Duggar’s computer alternating between sending personal messages, downloading child porn and saving pictures of notes.

Duggar, 33, of Springdale, is charged in federal court with two counts involving receiving and possessing child pornography. He faces up to 20 years’ imprisonment and fines up to $250,000 on each count if convicted.

Duggar, best known for being part of his family’s cable television reality show, is accused of using the internet in May 2019 to download and possess the material, some of which depicts the sexual abuse of children younger than 12, according to court documents.

Prosecutors say detective Amber Kalmer in Little Rock used a law enforcement tool to download files depicting the sexual abuse of children directly from Duggar’s computer. The detective then sent a lead related to her undercover downloads to Special Agent Gerald Faulkner with Homeland Security Inves

tigations, who determined the IP address was assigned to Duggar’s small used-car dealership in Springdale at the time of the downloads.

Faulkner obtained a warrant to search the business. The dealership’s computer and multiple electronic devices belonging to Duggar were seized. Based on forensic evidence found on those devices, among other evidence, a federal grand jury returned a two-count indictment charging Duggar with receipt and possession of child pornography.

Gilfand said a slow and shoddy investigation raises serious reasonable doubt about whether Duggar knowingly downloaded child pornography and forensic evidence generated by the defense creates more questions than answers.

“Computer forensics are as close to DNA as you can get,” Gilfand said. “This is equal to the blood trail from a murder scene.”

A partition was installed on the computer at the car dealership the day before child porn was first downloaded and installing that partition required more expertise to install than Duggar has because it required manually typing in computer language, Gilfand said. An operating system used to access the “dark web” and download child pornography was hidden by the partition, he said.

“The bad stuff all happened on the Linux side,” Gilfand said. “He is not a computer genius.”

Gilfand also contends someone plugged a thumb drive into the computer the day the partition was installed and opened files that had been created on a different computer, a Dell. That drive was not among those found by investigators when they searched the dealership, he said.

“There’s no evidence Josh was a Dell user, he was a Mac guy,” Gilfand said. He added that no child pornography was found on Duggar’s personal devices, a phone and a laptop.

Prosecutors contend the partition was installed to defeat Covenant Eyes, an application that would report to Duggar’s wife if he accessed pornography of any kind. Roberts said Duggar talked to a friend about how he could bypass the reporting application and may have received help.

Gilfand also theorized the child pornography could have been placed on the dealership computer by a remote user and that the files were deleted one minute after they were downloaded.

Gilfand also told jurors that nine devices were used to access Duggar’s IP address and pointed to the possibility an employee could have used the address to download the pornography. He said investigators could not determine with their search software what devices were connected at the time or whether there was a human behind the screen.

Prosecutors say Duggar’s payroll records indicate he had no employees working during the time the child pornography was downloaded.

Kalmer testified Wednesday that Torrential Downpour, the law enforcement search tool, looks specifically for child porn and whether it is being shared, then generates a report that includes the IP address.

The tool hit on Duggar’s IP address two days in a row, May 14 and 15, 2019, and the same program was being used to download child porn both days, Kalmer said.

Faulkner told jurors Wednesday that when they first arrived to serve their search warrant, Duggar, unprompted, asked if they were there because someone had been downloading child pornography.

The trial will resume this morning.