Jason Loera Pleads Guilty to Federal Receipt of Child Pornography Charge

ALBUQUERQUE – Jason Loera, 47, a former political consultant and resident of Albuquerque, N.M., who currently resides in Los Angeles, Calif., pled guilty today in federal court in Albuquerque to receiving a visual depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct.  Loera entered his guilty plea under a plea agreement that permits him to appeal from a court order denying his motion to suppress evidence.

Loera was arrested in Los Angeles in June 2013 on an indictment filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico.  The indictment charged Loera with two counts of receiving child pornography and one count of possessing child pornography.  According to the indictment, Loera committed these offenses in in Bernalillo County, N.M.

The indictment against Loera subsequently was superseded twice, most recently on March 8, 2016.  The six-count second superseding indictment charged Loera with three counts of receiving child pornography and three counts of possessing child pornography.  It alleged that Loera received child pornography on three occasions between March 31, 2010 and April 15, 2010, and that he possessed child pornography on a laptop computer and two CDs on Nov. 20, 2012, in Bernalillo County.

During today’s change of plea hearing, Loera entered a guilty plea to Count 3 of the second superseding indictment charging him with receiving child pornography on April 15, 2010.  In his plea agreement, Loera admitted using his laptop computer to download from the internet an electronic file that he knew contained child pornography.  The file contained 45 images of a prepubescent girl, many of which showed the girl engaged in sexually explicit conduct.  Loera also admitted that when the FBI searched his residence on Nov. 20, 2012, he knowingly possessed child pornography on his laptop computer and two CDs.  Loera admitted that he had more than 600 images of child pornography, some of which depicted violence.

Loera, who had been on conditions of release under pretrial supervision since June 2013, was ordered to surrender himself to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service by June 1, 2016.  Thereafter, he will remain in federal custody pending his sentencing hearing, which has yet to be scheduled.  At sentencing, Loera faces a statutory mandatory minimum of five years and a maximum of 20 years in prison followed by a term of supervised release to be set by the court.  Loera will be required to register as a sex offender after completing his prison sentence.

The case was investigated by the Albuquerque Division of the FBI and the New Mexico Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory.  It is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Dean S. Tuckman and Kristopher N. Houghton as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse.  Led by United States Attorneys’ Offices and DOJ’s Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims.  For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit http://www.justice.gov/psc/.