A staff sergeant who led the U.S. Army's communications detail at President Donald Trump's club in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, admitted to lying to federal officers during a child pornography investigation, NBC News reports.
Richard Ciccarella, 34, was alleged to have posted photographs of a young relative with the caption "dirty comment's [sic] welcome" on a Russian message board between November 2017 and February 2018, according to court documents.
The posts allegedly made by Ciccarella were linked to a Yahoo email address, which the soldier denied belonged to him when federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security first questioned him at President Trump's club in Palm Beach in March 2018.
Ciccarella, who received numerous commendations for his military service and deployed to Iraq twice, was in charge of all White House communications for the U.S. Army at Mar-a-Lago as a telecommunications operations chief from August 2017 to March 2018. He enlisted in the military at 19.
In a federal court ruling filed late on Friday, Ciccarella pleaded guilty to one count of making a false statement to a federal officer about whether the email address belonged to him.
