A former high-ranking aide to U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer was sentenced to five years in prison for possessing child pornography.
Jeff P. Rosato, 32, of Arlington, received the minimum sentencing allowed under federal guidelines at his hearing Friday before District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria. Rosato faced a maximum 20 years. Prosecutors asked for 6 1/2 years. He will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
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His attorneys argued that he had been molested and bullied as a child and never properly dealt with those issues.
“He lost everything he worked so hard to achieve” his attorney, Lavonda Graham-Williams, wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
Graham-Williams’ sentencing recommendation was accompanied by dozens of letters of support from friends and family. Graham-Williams added out that Rosato enjoyed mild success as a child actor, playing an extra next to Tom Hanks on “Saturday Night Live” and playing a body double for child actor Fred Savage in a major motion picture.
Other letters lauded his accomplishments as a Peace Corps volunteer in Armenia, a legislative assistant and counsel in the U.S. Senate, and a senior policy adviser and counsel for the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which Boxer chairs.
Rosato earned $101,000 and focused on issues such as endangered species, water policy and oceans. He was fired from Boxer’s office after the California Democrat learned of the charges.
Rosato was charged in November, months after FBI agents discovered thousands of child pornographic images on his computer. Many of the images matched pictures in a national database of missing children.
Investigators were led to Rosato after linking his IP address to a Google Hello user name that had received hundreds of child pornographic images from a known porn distributor, identified in court documents as “Mr. X.”
The unnamed distributor’s computer was seized in January 2008, and Rosato’s user name was among several who had been receiving the pornographic files, the statement said.
