The fired chief of staff for Sen. Lamar Alexander made his first court appearance Thursday on charges of possession and distribution of child pornography.

Ryan Loskarn answered softly, "Yes, sir," when U.S. Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola asked Loskarn whether he understood that he was charged with serious offenses.

Prosecutor Mi Yung Park argued that Loskarn, 35, was a flight risk and danger to society and asked the judge to hold him until a preliminary hearing Monday, when Loskarn will enter his plea. Facciola agreed to the prosecution's request.

The defendant wore blue jeans and a gray pullover shirt, and sported glasses. He faces up to 10 years on the possession charge, with no minimum, and five to 25 years on the distribution charge.

According to a filing with the U.S. District Court on Thursday, police used a ram to enter Loskarn's home the day before, and noticed that he put something on the ledge outside a window. It turned out to a portable hard drive with videos depicting child pornography, according to the filing.

The filing states that in 2010, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and Toronto Police Service were investigating a movie production company, a majority of whose films feature young nude boys, and found that Loskarn had made several purchases from the company in 2010 and 2011.

Then in October of this year, the filing said, federal investigators identified Loskarn's residential IP address on a peer-to-peer network offering files "with names that are consistent with child pornography broadcasting as a download candidate."

Loskarn was a rising star who had spent the past decade working his way up to increasingly important posts in the House and then the Senate.