I doubt it was a set up.
Yeah no one set him up twice.
What MORE likely and utterly disgusting is years and years of likely getting away with it in between.
Funny they mention he plead guilty but fail to mention if he served any time.
He was never convicted. Nor was he even charged with possession of child pornography. He was charged with two counts of importing filthy magazines, both dropped. The magazines such as they were , were never opened by the accused but were sent to his place of business. And someone in the postal service suspected the package contained porn ...without opening it, for whatever reason, ...and reported it, triggering a search of his business, where the package was found, still unopened.
He was caught trying to bring in videos, hidden in candy tins, in 1990 ...in that case he pled guilty to one charge of importing kiddie porn and served 6 months in a VA halfway house. At the time he was apparently being used to negotiate the release of American hostages in Beirut and the defense team presented a letter from the wife of a hostage confirming that.
Either he is turned on by this stuff but they couldn’t find enough to give him hard time, or they Had additional evidence they never revealed. Maybe they never leaked it because they made a plea deal with him either to gain his cooperation or maybethey didn’t want to embarrass the UAE prince and let him off because it involved diplomatic matters. ...or perhaps he was being set up by an opponent of the prince in some sort of palace intrigue, or perhaps by someone opposed to the hostages deal.
Note the Democrats esp. Kerry were attempting to foil the deals involved both freeing hostages from Hezbollah and overthrowing the communist Ortega in Nicaragua (who himself was molesting his own daughter) Oddly, this is similar to today’s confrontation with Hezbollah and IRGC and opposition to Iran’s ally Maduro in Venezuela ...over a deal made by Democrats today including Kerry.
Most likely the feds made a deal to get his cooperation as an informant.