Law&Crime Sidebar - Angelina Jolie Demands to Know Why FBI Didn't Arrest Brad Pitt for Assault: Reports

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Brad Pitt reportedly was almost arrested by the FBI and Angelina Jolie allegedly has filed a lawsuit to know why the investigation ended! Could Pitt be in trouble? I’m joined by Former FBI special agent and attorney Bobby Chacon. PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW:Get 20% OFF @manscaped + Free Shipping with promo code SIDEBAR at https://www.manscaped.com/ !GUESTS:Bobby Chacon, Former FBI Special Agent: https://twitter.com/BobbyChaconFBILAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokePodcasting - Sam GoldbergVideo Editing - Michael DeiningerGuest Booking - Alyssa FisherSocial Media Management - Kiera BronsonSUBSCRIBE TO OUR OTHER PODCASTS:Court JunkieObjectionsThey Walk Among AmericaCoptales and CocktailsThe Disturbing TruthSpeaking FreelyLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Brad Pitt reportedly was almost arrested by the FBI and Angelina Jolie allegedly has filed a lawsuit to know why that investigation has ended. The question is, could Pitt be in trouble? I'm joined by former FBI special agent and attorney Bobby Chaconne. Welcome to Sidebar, presented by Law and Crime. I'm Jesse Weber. Now, did you really think, did you really think that the celebrity battles and drama would end with Johnny Depp and Amber Hurd? Of course not. But I will tell you that I was surprised by the latest development between Brad Pitt and Angelina Joe Lee. It is being reported that the FBI almost arrested Brad Pitt.

in 2016 over him allegedly becoming drunk and abusive on a private jet. The FBI is obviously involved because when you're dealing with the skies, that is under the jurisdiction of the federal government. Now, an FBI spokesperson had commented, quote, in response to allegations made following a flight within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States, which landed in Los Angeles carrying Mr. Brad Pitt and his children, the FBI has conducted a review of the circumstances and will not pursue further investigation. No charges have been filed in this matter.

And at the time, Pitt was also cleared by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. Now, that didn't stop them from ultimately getting a divorce. In fact, I believe Jolie filed for divorce days after this happened. But what we are learning right now is that there is so much more to this story. Because now there is evidence coming out that Jolie has sued the FBI under a Freedom of Information Act complaint saying that there has been a lack of transparency on why this investigation into Brad Pitt was closed. Well, to make sense of this, and there is a lot to talk about

right now, I am joined by Bobby Chacon, former FBI special agent and attorney Bobby. Great to have you back here on Sidebar. Thanks for having me back, Jesse. All right, we got to make sense of this. And I think this is the best way to start. Here's what we know. What we know is that earlier this year, an anonymous lawsuit was filed by the FBI. Now, a reporter, Eric Gardner, from Puck News is reporting that it was indeed Angelina Jolie who filed this lawsuit. And he says, quote, I can now confirm that Jolie is indeed the plaintiff in the FBI suit. I can also reveal that the synonymous, I think it's synonymous. The synonymous lawsuit.

I like that. Synonymous lawsuit is available publicly for the first time. On August 9th, Jolie amended the complaint, which includes an interesting new detail. And that new detail is, quote, before the FBI announced that Pitt, would not be charged with assault on an airplane, the agent investigating the September 2016 incident prepared a statement of probable cause and presented it to the chief of the criminal division of the United States Attorney's Office in Los Angeles. Ed Gardner further reports that that probable cause statement was actually presented, I believe, to a assistant U.S. attorney, but again, no action was taken.

So, Bobby, let's start there. What do we mean by a probable cause statement and what do we mean about the process in which this was presented to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Well, Jesse, a probable cause statement is a document that an agent types up after he does his, he or she does their preliminary investigation. They interview some people, they review some records. And you get to a certain point and you have what we call probable cause, right? And so you go and you type up this probable cause affidavit and basically it's saying we have probable cause to believe that this person committed this crime. Now, Now, if you think about it as the old law and order shows, the structure of it, as we all saw,

the shows been on for 30 years or whatever. The first 20 minutes is the investigators and detectives doing their job out in the street. The second 20 minutes is kind of like them interacting with the prosecutors and their and their give and take in the back and forth about the prosecutors need this, and the detectives go out and get it. And then the last 20 minutes of the, you know, the prosecutors on their own in the courtroom. Well, we're talking about that, the middle 20 minutes. So the FBI did this investigation.

and then it has to go over to the U.S. Attorney's Office, which is our prosecutors, our DAs or state attorneys, if you will. So an assistant United States attorney is like an ADA on the federal level. So we present the evidence to them. Now, I always cringe when I read that the FBI wasn't going to file charges and things like that because we don't file charges. The prosecutor's office, their job, they're in the courthouse. They go and they file charges when they deem it's appropriate. So we have to kind of sell them sometimes on, hey, we have enough information here. We want to go forward with this case. And I've often had, you know, kind of back and forth discussions and they say, you don't have enough, go out and get more. Or they say, look, we're just

simply not going to pursue this case. And then you get what we call a letter of declination. The U.S. Attorney's Office is declining to prosecute. And you can close your case on that because there's no reason to waste time investigating a case where the U.S. Attorney's Office is not going to prosecute it. So in this case, the agent did what they were going to do. They interviewed the appropriate parties. They did whatever else, record checks and things. things like that. Then they went over to the prosecutor's office in L.A. And they said, hey, we think we have a case. We think we have probable cause. For some reason, at that point, the U.S. Attorney's Office decided not to go forward with prosecuting. That's my read of this situation, including this lawsuit, who's now this kind of a Jane Doe, we're theorizing it's edge of Lena Jolie because everything else kind of seems to point to that. But it seems like the U.S. Attorney's Office looked at the probable cause statement and for whatever reason decided. not to pursue charges. Support for Saibar is brought to you by Manscape,

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This is alleged right now. We can't 100% confirm it, but this is what we believe happened. on that airplane. So the report says, quote, Jolie told the special agent that Pitt was drinking and had taken her to the back of the plane. This is according to the agent's notes at the time. And he allegedly grabbed her shoulders and shook her and yelled things like, quote, you're effing up this family. And later during that same flight, another physical altercation allegedly took place. And Jolie said that she sustained injuries. And she even gave the agent a photo of her elbow in an attempt to corroborate this. And another point, Jolie says Pitt,

poured beard on her. So Bobby, assuming this is true, the FBI felt that there was enough to actually present this to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Why was there not enough or why was there this discrepancy to not arrest Brad Pitt and charge him? Well, that's a good question. I think that's the question that Angelina Jolie is really looking for. I think that's the answer to that question. Maybe in the FBI file, it may not be. Normally at the point where they declined to press charges, the U.S. attorney's office, the agent will type up saying, I met with the AUSA, the prosecutor on this case in such and such a date. And for these reasons, he's not pursuing it and that we're going to close the case. And that's, we can't go any further if the prosecutor's office won't pursue it.

So I think that this clearly, well, it does make out a crime aboard an aircraft, which is the FBI's jurisdiction. It does, it's a simple assault in this case. And that's a felony. And that's a felony. That is a felony aboard an aircraft, sure. But, but, but, you know, the U.S. Attorney's office weighs a lot of things, I think, when they, when they are determining whether or not they're going to pursue charges in a case. And it's not always whether a crime was committed or not. I used to work drugs in New York. And if I couldn't walk through the door of the federal prosecutor's office, unless my targets would do in 5,000 pounds of marijuana or, you know, certain thresholds. It's still a crime below that, but the U.S. Attorney's Office would be

inundated with cases like that if that were, if they were to take cases like that. So they have certain thresholds, even with bank robberies. There are certain thresholds for bank robberies. They aren't in the statutes per se, but they are in the U.S. Attorney's Office, and they'll defer to a local prosecution on a bank robbery that has less a less a dollar amount. And so these are normal course of business for the U.S. Attorney's Office. They tend to determine when to pursue charges, not just based on whether or not you have enough for, you know, to prove the crime. Again, remember, too, this is a probable cause statement.

So the agent feels that they have probable cause to, say, obtain an arrest warrant. That's not the same standard that we're going to have a trial, right? The prosecutor is going to need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. So there's often that case where the agents have probable cause and they can go further and the prosecutors know, well, we need to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt in the court. And I'm the one as a prosecutor that's going to stand up in a court of law and before a judge and jury and have to make this case. So there's often times where you think an agent will think they have enough evidence and the prosecutor won't or the prosecutor will set them, send them back out, get more evidence that they're comfortable with, or sometimes as in this case, they may just say, we're not going to pursue the charges. But he was very close, based on this understanding of this, very close to being arrested and charged, as you said, with assault on an aircraft, which, again, you said, is a felony and I'm assuming there's significant prison time for that?

Well, yeah, I mean, according to the statute, so in these cases, you can look at it, and the press does that. They always say what the statutory maxims could be. He could face this much time in jail. But you have to look at the actual details of the case. And in a domestic violence case, a case where maybe somebody doesn't have a criminal record, you know, it's very often the case that they're not going to face jail time, even though the statute could call for them to face jail time. There are oftentimes in these, the sentences are some kind of counseling and things like that. that, but he could have faced jail time if the agent would have gotten an arrest warrant for him, an arrest, and of course, had they convicted him of the crime.

Do you think the fact that he's Brad Pitt, A-less celebrity, incredibly powerful, that something let that, that's what led to maybe a pause on this. If it was somebody else, could we have seen something else? Now, again, I know we don't know all the details of it, but you're having a situation here where Angelina feels strongly enough to sue the FBI to get more information as to why this investigation ended, if she really sent photos. I'm curious if it was somebody else, would we have seen a different action here? I mean, that's what I think people are looking at the story and might be wondering. Yeah, it's hard to say. It also could cut the other way. And in fact, sometimes the U.S. turns off is sensitive to, you know, you have to look

at the fair application of law. And the law should be applied to everybody, you know, equally and uniformly. And so if this was a domestic violence case, you know, in L.A. County, you know, with a husband throwing a beer on a wife, would the local prosecutor have prosecuted this case and what they would have done with it? You know, and so like maybe, you know, they're looking at, well, if we wouldn't have done this in a routine domestic violence case or domestic incident case, you know, on the ground, should we pursue it here just because they're celebrity? So that That argument could, I see it as possibly cutting both ways. It's like, you know, if you're going to prosecute every husband that grabs the light by the elbow and throws a beer on her,

your prosecutor's office is going to be very, not that I'm not condoning that behavior at all, but the prosecutor's office is going to be very busy in LA County, you know, every week on cases like that. So now she's filed this, okay, allegedly filed this lawsuit against the FBI to get more information. Typically, this Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, how is this going to play out? Because the question that I'm wondering, and we've seen this before with other high profile celebrity cases, when something is brought back into the attention of the media and the public, sometimes you see action happen, right? Something could be put under the radar for a long time. When it's brought out into the public, I wonder if that pressures the U.S. Attorney's Office to then

take a second look at this case and maybe file charges. I don't know if there would be a statute of limitations issue here. This happened back in 2016. But again, I'm curious what the effect of Angelina Jolie's lawsuit, or assuming it's Angelina Jolie, seems to be, what the effect of this lawsuit could be. Yeah, I honestly don't see the U.S. Attorney's Office going forward charges unless something has happened in the interim, unless some new evidence has come to light or something like that. They've decided that this was a minor event among the family at the time. and they, for whatever reason, that's what she needs to get at, what reason they made to not go forward with the charges, even though the FBI agent clearly felt by typing up a probable

cause statement that he had probable cause, he or she had probable cause. So, yeah, so I think that I don't think that it's necessarily that as much as, you know, they're still embroiled. That's an incident from the past in that crime, like you said, statute of limitations, I don't think it's run, but it could. But I think that what's currently going on is there's still very much embroiled in a custody battle for the children. And so, you know, this could be maneuvering by her defense counsel to get more records. Anything you can get that dirties up the other person in a custody battle or in a divorce action helps your side. And so they now have come to this realization that, oh, my God, there could be some more damning stuff about Brad in that FBI file. Let's get our

hands on it. So, you know, because a criminal case against Brad Pitt really doesn't help Angelina Jolie much. But if she can use some of the information that filed in her proceedings for custody and in her divorce proceedings, then it may be of greater value to her. So I'm glad that you mentioned that because in the lawsuit, right, in the lawsuit that was initially filed, it seemed that the intention was to try to advocate for health and trauma of, you know, I'll read it to you right now. This is from Amanda Kramer, the attorney who filed the lawsuit on behalf of, again, Jane, Doe. Now we're assuming it's Angelina Jolie. I'm unable to comment on the identity of Jane Doe, who is sought to preserve the family's privacy. Our position is that victims and survivors should be able to access federal agency records of crimes they experienced or reported as is common at the state level so they can advocate for health and trauma care and legal protections for their children and

themselves. Now, that may very well be a noble cause. You had mentioned maybe this is a strategy on Angelina Jolie because one of the things we have to mention is that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are currently embroiled in a legal lawsuit over our French winery. Pitt sued Jolie because she apparently sold her ownership in it without his consent. And so they're, you know, kind of engaged in that. I wonder if she could use that as leverage against him or a bargaining chip against him. I mean, do you see it that way. I mean, this is pure speculation, by the way. Sure. And I do, you know, I know, I know my fair share of defense attorneys, some of the friends of mine, they, you don't, you pull out all the stops and things like this. You get everything you can. Any kind of negative information that you can possibly develop or put your hands on with respect to the other side, then you then you pursue that. And so I think that that may be the case here. Unfortunately, and I agree with the attorney's principle that about victims, you know, and family members. However, the FBI has a longstanding policy of not opening. our files that were closed without charges because we don't want to tarnish somebody who hasn't

been charged with a criminal offense, right? Those are public things. You can look at a public court docket and you can see what charges a file. That's out there. But when we investigate a case from the beginning, there are oftentimes we have suspects or people of interest that turn out not to be the person. And we don't want them tarnished because in the investigative file, you know, we followed a few leads looking at that person. And then it turned out not to be them. Well, in the age of podcasts and things like that and true crime, people are going to pick that up and people could run with it. And we don't want, you know, it was an absolute criminal, obviously, what happened to those people like Richard Jewell. And, you know, you know, Jim Comey broke this longstanding policy in 2016 when he stood before the cameras and said, we've concluded that we're not going to file charges against Hillary Clinton.

But here's all the list of bad things that she did. I don't agree with that. If you're not going to charge a person with a crime, you don't, you don't tarnish them in the public, in the court of public opinion by showing everyone. everything that you came up with. You either charge them with a crime and then all that will come out in public, you know, through the court system, or you'd bury it and you don't, you don't, I mean, we're not, we're not, you know, the muscle for some private defense attorney to, to dig up dirt on people. And so if a case doesn't end in charges, I think that it should stay closed. The question is with what Angelina Jolie, again, allegedly Angelina Jolie saying in this

Freedom of Information Act, isn't she criticizing the FBI? isn't she saying you weren't transparent about why this investigation closed? Is that fair for her to do that? Am I misreading it? Because it sounds a bit critical of their investigation. Well, yeah, I think that's what she's saying. And it's not critical of the investigation. It's critical of how the investigation ended. I think she'd probably be a very big proponent of the investigation if, in fact, it did result in probable cause to arrest Brad Pitt, which it looks like it may have. Now, she wants to know why the decision was made, not press charges. And I'm saying that that decision was probably made over at the U.S. Attorney's Office and not the FBI office. And so I think that, you know, transparency is great in most instances, but in cases where we investigate a case and it doesn't result in charges, it's very tenuous to say that you must have transparency because you could also ruin somebody's life, you know, just by showing them that they were a suspect in a case, even though they

attended not, they ultimately ended up not being charged. And like I said, the Richard Jewel is a good example of that, that case where he was, you know, said he was a person of interest and the media went crazy with it and stuff. I mean, that's why we keep everything close to the best until we're sure we have our person. And then when we have our person, then we have the U.S. Attorney's Office, hopefully file charges. Do you think Brad Pitt has any mechanism to intervene here to try to say, hey, listen, I don't want more information about this investigation to come forward. I want to intervene in this Angelina's attempts through the Freedom of Information Act, or does he really not have a really standing to do that?

That's an interesting question, because right now, the lawsuit, he's not a party for the lawsuit. The lawsuit is Angelina Jolie, can see, we think, against the FBI to open the file and show me what's in that file. Now, you know, there is amicus briefs. You can have a friend of the court brief filed and say, we agree with the government's position not to make this public. I don't know the mechanisms of that, whether his attorneys can actually interject in a case where he's not a party to. But right now, he doesn't have standing to make that argument because he's not a party to this lawsuit. This is a lawsuit against Jane Doak,

and we think, who's Angie Lee versus the FBI. Those are the two parties involved in the suit. Before I let you go, Bobby, overall, do you think that we're going to get an answer as to, you know, why the U.S. Attorney's Office chose not to go forward with this? Do you think we're going to get any kind of answers, or is this just going to, you know, not really go anywhere? Well, I think we will get an answer. It's really tough. I'm about 50, 50, 100. But like, when I think about it, I think that, you know, it depends on how much pressure

the U.S. Attorney's Office feels. They may tell the FBI, open the file, just show her what we got. And we'll take the heat for not filing charges or we'll explain why we deferred prosecution on this case. I mean, I kind of, in a way, I hope that happens because she, you know, she probably deserves at this point to know why the transparency on why not going forward lies over the U.S. Attorney's Office in this case, because it looks like by our reading of it, and you're reading in mine, that the FBI did have a probable cause statement. They went over to the U.S. Attorney's Office. They gave it to them and they said, we want to file for an arrest warrant. And then it didn't go forward from there.

So at that point in the U.S. Attorney's Office, that decision, I think, is what she's trying to get to. What a development, huh? I mean, my goodness, I was, I tell you, I said at the beginning, I was not expecting this, you know, this, what was happening behind the scenes. But we definitely are getting a lot more answers and see if we have more answers down the road. Bobby Chacon, thanks so much for coming on to Sidebar. Pleasure as always. Anytime, Jesse. I always enjoy it. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us here on Sidebar. Please subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your. podcast. Sybar is produced by Sam Goldberg, YouTube manager Robert Zoki, Alyssa Fisher as our

booking producer, and of course our video editor, Michael Dineger. I'm Jesse Weber. Speak to you next time. or Spotify.