“Bernie was in the process of writing a book about hypocrisy in America,” Weinberg told The AP. “As part of it, for a few days in December of 2004, he accessed child pornography.”
Since that time, Ward and his attorneys have tried to convince investigators that his efforts were done in the pursuit of journalism, Weinberg said.
From the article at KTVU:
Weinberg said the case stems from an “error of judgment” Ward made when he spent a few days in 2004 looking at pornography images and exchanging images with other adults when doing research for a book on hypocrisy.
I could almost believe that someone who was relatively unsophisticated about configuring web browsers might “accidently” get slammed to a porn site and have a bunch of image popups splatter across their screen, but it's pretty hard to explain actively exchanging pornographic images.
I guess being a journalist and writing a book means it's OK to commit crimes. The people of San Francisco are lucky he wasn't researching a new book on Jack the Ripper.
By the way, according to the same KTVU article: Ward never finished the book because the FBI searched his house and seized his hard drive in early 2005, the attorney said.
Actually, when you're a leftist, crimes are a "resume enhancement" (Rush's term.)