Silver State Times

Former CNN producer John Griffin recently was charged with the child sex trafficking of a girl from Nevada, although evidence against him dated back to August 2020.

On Dec 22, Griffin, 44, pleaded not guilty to charges that he paid a Nevada woman to fly her daughter, who was 9, to Griffin’s ski house in Vermont to engage in criminal sexual activity. He has been charged with three counts of “using a facility of interstate commerce to attempt to entice minors to engage in unlawful sexual activity.”

Griffin faces up to life in prison if convicted. He was fired from CNN in December after the charges were filed and he was arrested Dec. 10.

According to the Vermont Digger, Griffin paid the child’s mother more than $3,000 to travel to Vermont with her daughter. 

Noting that evidence in the case dates to August 2020, former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani said the lengthy wait made no sense to him.

“I can’t think of any legitimate reason for the delay in arresting Griffin, especially when the adoptive mother was arrested in August 2020,” Rahmani told Fox News. “Even if he were cooperating, it would usually be post-arrest and indictment.”

According to Fox News, there was a 17-month delay between the search warrant obtained by the feds against Griffin and his actual arrest. Jane Turner, former FBI agent and whistleblower, told Fox News that Griffin "obviously is a sexual predator, and has gone from grooming children into actually ‘capturing’ them,” calling him a “very, very dangerous offender.”

Rahmani told Silver State Times said there was clear evidence of a serious crime.

“The investigation started when the victim’s biological mother reported explicit text messages to law enforcement,” he said. “But I have no reasonable explanation as to why it took federal agents more than a year to arrest Griffin, especially when they had executed a search warrant and seized his cell phone.

“Crimes against children, particularly sex trafficking, have always been a high priority for the Department of Justice, regardless of who is in the Oval Office,” Rahmani said.

The Associated Press reports that Griffin communicated with the child’s parents using the messaging systems Kik and Google Hangouts. In these communications, Griffin allegedly stated that young girls should be taught to “be sexually subservient and inferior to men,” 8 News Now reporters. Additionally, Griffin allegedly tried to pay off other members of the Nevada-based family.

In a motion, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Drescher wrote that Griffin should remain in custody.

“Griffin has tried to deceive, delete and spend his way out of being held accountable,” Drescher wrote. “He is a wealthy man who will be desperate to avoid facing justice.”

Rahmani said the reason for the lengthy delay must be explained.

“I don’t know what happened here, and I hope that Griffin wasn’t treated differently because of his position," he told Silver State Times. "But the delay in taking an alleged sex offender and predator into custody is inconsistent with the department’s normal practice and makes no sense.” 

According to the UNLV Center for Crime and Justice Policy, Nevada is ninth in the nation for most human trafficking cases, reporting 199 cases in a single year. In Nevada sex trafficking is the most common form of trafficking, comprising 89% of trafficking cases in the state. 

This is higher than the national percentage of sex trafficking cases, where 71% of total trafficking cases are centered around selling sex.

Rahmani is president and co-founder of West Coast Trial Lawyers. He graduated from UCLA at 19 and Harvard Law School at 22, making him one of the youngest graduates in the 200-year history of the law school. After working for O’Melveny & Myers, the largest law firm in Los Angeles at the time, he felt a calling to help ordinary people.

Rahmani then joined the U.S. States Attorney’s Office, where he prosecuted drug and human trafficking cases along the United States-Mexico border. He later was named director of enforcement of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, an independent watchdog that oversees and investigates elected officials and high-level employees of the city of Los Angeles, before forming his own law firm.