An Arkansas County man who is serving time in state prison pleaded guilty Monday in a Little Rock federal courtroom to threatening to assault and murder an FBI agent and an FBI employee earlier this year.
U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright, who presided over the plea hearing by videoconference from her home, accepted Clayton M. Jackson's guilty plea to five charges: three counts of threatening to assault the FBI officials on three different dates, and two counts of mailing threatening statements to the officials at the FBI's Little Rock headquarters.
Jackson, 34, was indicted June 4 by a federal grand jury in connection with threats made Jan. 30, March 3 and March 17.
Records at the Arkansas Department of Corrections show that on Jan. 4, 2019, he was returned to prison to begin serving a three-year sentence after his probation in a 2014 second-degree battery case was revoked. The records indicate he is being housed in the prison's maximum security unit in Tucker.
According to another FBI agent's May 7 affidavit in support of a criminal complaint and an arrest warrant for Jackson, the FBI received handwritten letters through the mail on Feb. 4 and March 9 at the agency's Little Rock headquarters.
In one letter, Jackson blames the agent for his parole being revoked. He said the agent questioned him in DeWitt in June 2019 about a case against Charles David Chastain, a former auxiliary deputy for the Arkansas County sheriff's office who in late 2017 was charged in federal court with extortion.
The letter vowed that upon Jackson's release in 2022, "I promise not threaten but promise I will kill his [the agent's] a, take it at face value or whatever but he will die."
The other, addressed to a public affairs officer whom Jackson mistakenly referred to as an agent, warned that "when I am released from this prison I have (2) bullets with both your names on it, and I swear with everything in me I will stop at nothing to kill both of you."
The agent who wrote the affidavit said he interviewed Jackson in state prison in March about the letters, and Jackson readily agreed he had written them. Jackson then explained why.
He told the agent that in June 2019, he agreed to provide a statement to the FBI about the possible corruption of public officials. He said he was on parole at the time, and he asked the agent who interviewed him if he needed to tell his parole officer about the interview. But he said the agent told him not to report it, to prevent potential subjects of the investigation from knowing about the interview.
Jackson said that after the interview, however, his parole officer arrested him for failing to report interaction with the FBI. The affidavit said Jackson revealed that he also sent a letter to the public affairs officer, thinking he was an agent, because he had been given the employee's name to call if he couldn't reach the agent directly.
In the interview in March, Jackson admitted writing the letters and maintained that he still meant what he said in them, according to the affidavit. It said Jackson believed that the agent who interviewed him in 2019 did so with the purpose of having him sent back to prison.
The affidavit said that during the interview in March, Jackson reiterated his threat against the agent he spoke to in 2019, and even suggested he take a lie-detector test to prove that he wasn't lying about his threats, which he called "a promise."
"I'm making these statements completely sane. I'm completely coherent," he added, according to the affidavit.
Jackson vowed that he had an extensive plan for killing the agent he talked to in 2019, and he said he had researched the agent online and knew where he lived, the affidavit said.
The agent who interviewed Jackson in March wrote that he then interviewed Jackson's previous parole officer, who indicated it was her experiences with Jackson after his release from prison that led to his parole being revoked.
The parole officer said that she had developed a relationship with Jackson at the time he was paroled, and she let him live with her after his release. She reported that Jackson stole her phone, keys and wallet and made unauthorized charges on her credit cards and her bank account.
"Because of these crimes," the agent wrote, "Jackson was charged with coercion and theft of property. Both charges were misdemeanors; however, they were enough to have Jackson's parole revoked."
Meanwhile, Chastain, previously a state trooper, was convicted in February 2019 of extortion, attempted extortion and receipt of a firearm with intent to commit a felony. A jury in Little Rock found he had pressured a confidential informant he supervised in late 2017 in Arkansas County to steal an all-terrain vehicle and obtain some stolen guns for him.
On July 26, 2019, Chastain, 49, of Stuttgart was sentenced to 2½ years in federal prison. His convictions were upheld Wednesday by a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis.