President Trump’s election victory in 2016 panicked the adult film industry because it expected the biggest crackdown on pornography since the Reagan administration.
Mr. Trump was the only presidential candidate to sign a pledge from an anti-pornography group vowing to enforce existing laws against adult materials. The Republican platform branded pornography “a public health crisis” and conservative culture warriors filled the administration.
Pornography producers braced for a Justice Department clampdown that would hamstring the estimated $16 billion industry.
But obscenity prosecutions never materialized. Now Congress and anti-porn advocates want to know what happened.
“What is the Justice Department too busy with?” fumed Patrick Trueman, who headed up the Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section from 1988 to 1993. “What is more important than human trafficking? What is more important than child sexual abuse?”
He continued, “If you don’t vigorously prosecute adult pornography you will be overwhelmed with child pornography because the men who consume vast amounts of adult pornography will look for something harder and more deviant, and many will land on child pornography.”
Earlier this month, four Republican Congressmen wrote a letter to Attorney General William Barr urging him to honor Mr. Trump’s campaign promise.
