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Former CEO pleads guilty to child porn charges after relative finds hard drive
Jason Christopher Yates, the former CEO of a Christian nonprofit, has pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography images.
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The former CEO of a Christian nonprofit has pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography images. The admission comes months after Jason Christopher Yates was arrested. According to a report in USA Today, Yates, 56, pleaded guilty to two of eight felony counts of possession of child pornography on July 22. His case was heard in a district court in McLeod County, Minnesota.
Yates is the former CEO of My Faith Votes – a group that encourages Christians in America to vote in every election.
When was Yates arrested?
According to the USA Today report, Jason Christopher Yates was first arrested in October 2024. My Faith Votes confirmed that he had served as the nonprofit’s CEO till August 2024.
“In early August 2024, the My Faith Votes board of directors separated Jason Yates from My Faith Votes and board member Chris Sadler assumed the position of Acting CEO," My Faith Votes said in a statement to Religion News Service. "Over the last three months Chris has been working with the dedicated My Faith Votes team to encourage millions of Christians to vote, pray and think biblically about this election in America.”
How was his crime discovered?
On July 31, 2024, an individual gave the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension a hard drive containing images of child abuse.
The person claimed they had received the hard drive from a relative of Yates’s who “accidentally discovered it” inside a dresser in his office.
Yates’s relative apparently chanced across the hard drive and when they tried connecting it to their computer for more storage, they discovered it contained child pornography.
When agents met Yates in September, he confirmed that the child abuse images on the hard drive did not belong to the relative who found them. Yates also told Minnesota agents that he had a prior conviction for possessing child sex abuse images, but it had been expunged from his record.
