I hope you're not trying to intentionally mislead people here. Many tend to think of children as only pre teens, when the fact of the matter is "child" can be used for anyone, as everyone is someone's child. As to the facts, I think Wikipedia does a decent job. Quoting from it:
**
Ritter was the subject of two law enforcement sting operations in 2001.[36] He was charged in June 2001 with trying to set up a meeting with an undercover police officer posing as a 16-year-old girl.[37][38] He was charged with a misdemeanor crime of "attempted endangerment of the welfare of a child". The charge was dismissed and the record was sealed after he completed six months of pre-trial probation.[38][8] After this information was made public in early 2003, Ritter said that the timing of the leak was politically motivated in order to silence his opposition to the Bush administration's push toward war with Iraq.[37][38][39]
Ritter was arrested again in November 2009[40] over communications with a police decoy he met on an Internet chat site. Police said that he exposed himself, via a web camera, after the officer repeatedly identified himself as a 15-year-old girl.[5] Ritter said in his own testimony during the trial that he believed the other party was an adult acting out her fantasy.[7] The chat room had an "age 18 and above" policy, which Ritter stated to the undercover officer.[5]
The next month, Ritter waived his right to a preliminary hearing and was released on $25,000 unsecured bail. Charges included "unlawful contact with a minor, criminal use of a communications facility, corruption of minors, indecent exposure, possessing instruments of crime, criminal attempt and criminal solicitation".[2] Ritter rejected a plea bargain and was found guilty of all but the criminal attempt count in a courtroom in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, on April 14, 2011.[5][41]
In October 2011, he received a sentence of one and a half to five and a half years in prison.[3] He was sent to Laurel Highlands state prison in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, in March 2012 and paroled in September 2014.[4][7][8]
**
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Ritter
So there you have it- he was charged because 2 cops posed as underage teens- in the first instance, his only crime was trying to meet with a fictional teen, in the second, he masturbated to a fictional teen, who he stated he believed was actually an adult, presumably via webcam. It may be that one or both essentially entrapped Ritter for political reasons and in at least one of the events, Ritter said he thought the alleged teen was in fact an adult.
The bottom line, he did his time for what amounted to victimless crimes in his case. What he's been doing now in relation to revealing a lot of truths regarding the war in Ukraine shouldn't be dismissed simply because of these past actions. But perhaps the truth is you'd rather focus on his past instead of focusing on what this thread is about, which is the government lying for political gain.
