Secret Service Officer Pleads Guilty to Enticing Minors for Sex
Now-fired employee was assigned to White House before arrest.
A uniformed Secret Service officer who was arrested while protecting the White House in November 2015 pleaded guilty on Wednesday to enticing a minor female to engage in sexual activity, the Justice Department announced.
Lee Robert Moore, 38, of Church Hill, Md., also admitted to attempting to send a minor obscene materials, according to the plea entered in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Moore, who has been incarcerated since his arrest, was terminated from Secret Service employment, the department’s Criminal Division prosecutors said.
Moore, who was found to have communicated on sex issues with minors in Texas and Florida, was caught after investigators discovered that he maintained a profile on the social media application “Meet24.” Delaware State Police detectives created a profile on this site, posing as a 14-year-old girl, and over two months engaged Moore in a series of online chats while he was on the job.
“A number of the online chats between Moore and the undercover officers posing as a female minor were sexual in nature and, on several occasions, Moore sent pictures of himself, including one sexually explicit image,” Justice reported.
Moore’s case, which was transferred to Florida at his request to combine charges, was investigated federally by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations and the Delaware Child Predator Task Force. The prosecution of the federal employee was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse, launched by Justice in May 2006.