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A lawyer who ran for governor of Maine twice was arrested on child pornography charges Friday.
Eliot Cutler, 75, faces four counts of possession of sexually explicit material of a minor under 12 after investigators found 10 files of children being exploited on his computer, according to The Portland Press Herald.
Culter may face additional charges as cops continued to look through terabytes of data on devices seized from two of the former Independent candidate’s homes, the article said.
Officials arrested Cutler at his farm in Brooklin even as the probe continued, prosecutors said. He was being held on $50,000 bail.
“Given the incredibly high bail of $50,000 cash, set on a Friday night after banks are closed no less, it is unclear whether the bail will be posted,” Cutler’s attorney Walt McKee told the newspaper.
The investigation stemmed from a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that someone in Maine had downloaded or uploaded an illegal image, the report said.
“It was a known piece of child pornography,” Hancock County District Attorney Matt Foster told the paper.
Cutler, a former member of President Jimmy Carter’s administration, ran for governor in 2010 and 2014 after working as a Washington DC attorney.
He resigned from his post as president of the board of the Lerner Foundation, which encourages rural students to go to college, on Wednesday, following a raid on one of his homes.
“We were deeply disturbed to learn about the serious accusations brought against Eliot Cutler today,” the foundation’s executive director, Don Carpenter, wrote in an email on Friday, the Herald reported.
“In his former role on the board of directors, Eliot was involved in high-level strategy and governance and did not directly interface with students who participated in grant funded programming.”
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