Bilecki Wins Full Acquittal in Malmstrom Internet Sting Trial

Bilecki Wins Full Acquittal in Malmstrom Internet Sting Trial

April 2026

Andersen Air Force Base, Guam and Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana

Air Force Technical Sergeant – E-6

Allegations: UCMJ Article 80 Attempted Sexual Abuse of a Child (3 Specifications); UCMJ Article 80 Attempted Possession of Child Pornography in a TCAP / ICAC Undercover Sting Operation

Facts

The government ran an undercover ICAC-style sting at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, arrested a Technical Sergeant with twelve years of clean service, and charged him with three specifications of attempted sexual abuse of a child and attempted possession of child pornography. The case was tried at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana. After a fully contested general court-martial to members, the panel acquitted him of everything.

The operation was called Island Fever. It was not started because of a tip. There was no prior complaint. There was no intelligence basis. There was no identified threat. An AFOSI agent was TDY to Andersen to fill a 60-day gap and decided to create an undercover operation. The agents picked a dating application, built a profile using photographs of a 31-year-old woman, and started fishing. Within six days, they had arrested nine people. Our client was one of them.

That mattered because this was not a case about a predator who went looking for a child. This was a case about a government operation that created the criminal opportunity, pushed the conversation, escalated the sexual content, and then used interrogation pressure to make a highly compliant man say the words the government needed.

The undercover agent posed as a 13-year-old girl using a fictional online persona. The photographs sent to our client were overwhelmingly photographs of a 31-year-old woman. Only two photos were age-regressed using FaceApp, a Russian-developed application that had raised federal counterintelligence and security concerns. The rest were unaltered photographs of an adult woman in gym clothes, medical scrubs, and athletic wear. The defense position was simple: the images created obvious age confusion, and the government chose to build a child-sex sting around photographs that overwhelmingly depicted an adult woman.

The charged language all traced back to the government. Every sexual topic in the conversation was introduced by the undercover agent, not by our client. Every escalation came from the government. Every time our client gave a neutral or non-committal response, the undercover pushed harder. Over five hours and nineteen minutes of messaging, the government created nine separate pressure windows and offered zero off-ramps. When one of the government's own agents was asked on cross-examination why no off-ramp was ever provided, she testified that it was a law enforcement decision.

Our client's own words told the real story. He told the agents he did not believe the persona was a real person. He said he wanted to see if she was real. He said he thought it was not her. He gave a false name, a false vehicle, and a false military branch when he went to the meeting location. He went to the base gym during peak hours, not to a private location. He fabricated an emergency to avoid a second meeting. He wore his wedding ring. After three hours and fifteen minutes of interrogation, he was still asking the agents whether the persona was a real person.

When the agents asked him what "naughty" meant to him, he told them it meant a beach picture. People at the beach. The government took that word and turned it into charged conduct.

Tim Bilecki did not let the government's version of this case go unchallenged.

Bilecki Law Group built the defense around two legal theories: entrapment and mistake of fact as to age. Under the military judge's instructions, a mistake as to age, no matter how unreasonable, was a complete defense. Entrapment required the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that our client was not entrapped. Those were the government's burdens, and Bilecki made the government carry them.

The defense team included a forensic mental-health expert who testified about our client's Gudjonsson Compliance Scale score of 19 out of 20, placing him at the extreme end of dispositional compliance. The expert walked the panel through the Reid-style interrogation techniques used against our client during three successive interviews, the last of which occurred after a midnight apprehension on approximately five hours of prior sleep. The agents used minimization, maximization, theme development, leading questions, and the threat of interrogating his pregnant wife. At one point, our client asked the agents to help him make his answers consistent. Those were not the words of a man confessing. They were the words of a man trying to comply.

Cross-examination drove the case. Bilecki forced concession after concession from the government's own witnesses. The case agent admitted the operation had no intelligence basis and that she was only weeks out of training when she ran it. The undercover agent admitted that our client's definition of "naughty" was a beach picture and that the backstory the government created for the persona supported a mistaken belief as to age. The lead interviewer admitted she implanted the age during the interrogation and that our client still asked whether the persona was real even after being told. A third agent admitted it was her first operation of this kind and that she lied to our client during the interview.

The defense also attacked what was missing. There was no Form 4 documenting the undercover operation. There was no Form 159 authorizing the use of the photographs. There was no legal review before the operation launched. There were violations of ICAC Operational Standard 8.6 on tone, pace, and subject matter. The government's own case agent admitted on cross-examination that ICAC standards exist to avoid a solid entrapment defense. That admission told the panel what this case really was.

This was an ICAC-style sting with no intelligence basis, no complaint, no predisposition evidence, government-originated sexual content, a 31-year-old woman's photographs passed off as a child, and three coercive interrogations of an extremely compliant man. Bilecki forced the government to answer for every one of those facts in front of the panel.

It could not.

After a fully contested general court-martial at Malmstrom Air Force Base, the panel returned not guilty findings on all charges and specifications. Our client was fully acquitted.

Result: Full acquittal after fully contested general court-martial to members. Not guilty of all charges and specifications.

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FAQ

Q: What supported the entrapment and mistake-of-age defenses?
Bilecki examined the complete conversation, the photographs, the agent's escalation and our client's repeated doubts that the persona was real. Under the instructions in this attempt case, an actual mistake about age did not have to be reasonable. Once entrapment was raised, the government had to disprove it beyond a reasonable doubt. Bilecki used the agents' own concessions to test both issues.

Q: What did the mental-health expert add?
The expert addressed the client's unusually high compliance score and the pressure used during the interviews. That supported the defense argument that the answers needed to be assessed against the circumstances in which agents obtained them. A test score alone did not establish that any particular statement was false. The panel heard the expert and the cross-examinations and acquitted our client of all charges.