Day: December 16, 2023

A former high-ranking FBI counterintelligence official has been indicted on charges he helped a Russian oligarch, in violation of U.S. sanctions. He was also charged, in a separate indictment, with taking cash from a former foreign security officer.

Show Notes

[opening song is WE CAN’T BREATHE, with music by Rayna Zemel and Chief Wakil, lyrics by Chief Wakil and Kelli Wakili, film by Miranda Winters, Rocky Romano and Rayna Zemel.]

Sarah Kendzior (00:31):

I’m Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestsellers, The View from Flyover Country, and Hiding in Plain Sight and of the book, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent, out now.

Andrea Chalupa (00:43):

And I’m Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin’s genocide famine in Ukraine. The film the Kremlin does not want you to see, so be sure to watch it. The song you just heard was, ‘We Can’t Breathe’ with music by Rayna Zemel and Chief Wakil, and lyrics by Chief Wakil and Kelli Wakili. The song is featured in a short film by Miranda Winters, Rocky Romano and Rayna Zemel. Rayna, who submitted this song to us, is a music producer, playback engineer, live show designer, photographer, film producer, and consultant. She’s toured the world with the likes of The Lonely Island, Logic, Lana Del Ray, Dua Lipa and more. After the touring industry shut down in 2020, Rayna pursued her passion for documentary photography. She’s documented over 120 protests in the Los Angeles area and  her work and efforts are featured in the short film We Can’t Breathe, which was awarded Best Music Video and Audience Award at the 2021 San Luis Obispo Film Festival.

Andrea Chalupa (01:49):

Additionally, the film was the official selection at the Cleveland Film Festival and Athena Film Festival. Rayna shared this statement about the song: “I wrote this instrumental two days after news of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder in May, 2020. 3 weeks later, the George Floyd uprisings began in Los Angeles and alongside my partner, I spent June, 2020 photographing dozens of protests. We compiled so much footage, we decided to make a short film to serve as a time capsule for future generations. I enlisted the vocal talents of Chief Wakil and Kelly Wakili to write lyrics about Black exhaustion. There isn’t a specific reason that I create, it’s one of the few activities that make me feel joy and is an avenue to channel my emotions.” We’ll post a link to this incredible film on our Twitter page and in the show notes for this episode on our Patreon page. You can find Rayna on Instagram @rayzemel and @wintersrockentertainment, and on Soundcloud at soundcloud.com/rayzemi. You can find all those links on our Patreon. Thank you so much, Rayna, for your incredible talents, and thank you so much to Chief Wakil and Kelly Wakili. If you have a song that you wanna submit, any kind of song that brings truth, joy, your light into the world, please share it with us. You can find the link on where to submit that on the Patreon link for this week’s episode. We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you.

Sarah Kendzior (03:15):

And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world. We are doing a live taping right now, so it’s gonna get wild in here. For some reason, every time Andrea and I do a live taping, some major piece of news related to what we’ve been studying from the very beginning of Gaslit Nation breaks, granted there’s been exactly two live tapings. This is the second one. Last time around, it was the Mar-a-Lago raid. This time around it is the indictment of FBI traitor, Charlie McGonigal. And so if you have listened to any Gaslit Nation episode over the past five years, including last week’s episode, “The Real Story of the Biden Documents”, but also going all the way back to our first three episodes in 2018, you will hear us say that Trump and the FBI have spent decades in a mutually beneficial relationship based around streamlining organized crime and allowing organized crime to infiltrate US institutions.

Sarah Kendzior (04:22):

In many of these episodes, we mentioned Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, as a key node in this transnational crime syndicate. So it came to no surprise to us when yesterday the FBI’s top counterintelligence official in the New York Field office, Charlie McGonigal was indicted for secretly working for Deripaska and facilitating Russian money laundering. McGonigal worked for the FBI from 1996 until 2018, and he follows in a long line of leading FBI officials who worked to serve the interests of the Russian Mafia. And I’m just going to review these very quickly. I feel like I could give y’all a quiz and you’d pass on this. So [laughs], there were FBI heads, Williams Sessions and Louis Freeh, in the 1990s, both of whom worked for the mafia directly after leaving. There was Jim Comey, who took the head of the Russian Mafia, Semyon Mogilevich, off the Top 10 Most Wanted List in the end of 2015, replaced him with a bank robber, never gave an explanation for this decision. We’re going to be returning to Comey today and the circumstances of that action. And then of course there was Robert Mueller, former FBI head while the Trump crime cult was, you know, out criming for things Mueller later indicted them for, for example, Manafort with a 2002 indictment. But basically he let them run wild and also did not do anything about Charlie McGonigal, who was in a position to not only work with the FBI but monitor action at the CIA. And so, you know, the only thing that’s surprising to me is that the DOJ bothered to indict a corrupt FBI official at all, although you have to ask why it took so long and what McGonigal was up to.

Sarah Kendzior (06:20):

First, I just wanna add one more quick bit of context as to the recent news. In addition to the New York based charges, McGonigal was also indicted on separate charges in Washington DC. I’m just gonna read a description of these charges from CBS: “In a separate case, McGonigal is also facing federal charges in the District of Columbia related to at least $225,000 in cash he allegedly received from a person with business interests in Europe and who worked for a foreign intelligence service. In that nine count indictment also unsealed Monday, McGonigal allegedly hid from the FBI the nature of his relationship with a former foreign security officer who later served as a source for the Bureau in a criminal investigation involving foreign political lobbying. McGonigal purportedly had ‘official supervisory responsibility over the lobbying cases,’ the Justice Department said in a release.” And so there’s some more history to this, but first, Andrea, I’m gonna pass it over to you. I was wondering if you could explain to everybody who Oleg Deripaska is and how this case fits into the broader history of the FBI, organized crime, Trump, and the Kremlin.

Andrea Chalupa (07:39):

Dear Lord. Well, that’s a lot. I just wanna give my initial human reaction as a human being experiencing history as it’s happening. My first reaction to this was the meme from the movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where Leo DiCaprio is pointing at the TV and he’s like, “That’s it.” Right? “I spotted that thing, that thing that we all knew was always there, like our thing.” And this was us. This was flashbacks of you and I meeting and partnering up in 2016, because remember, all those years that I spent focused on Ukraine, which is ground zero for the Kremlin aggression experiment that was then used on us, including the golden handcuffs of entrapping politicians with dark money, including the hacking of elections and so on and so on. And also the divide-and-conquering that Manafort did in creating divisive culture wars against Ukrainians, creating fake protests, fake activist groups, including in Crimea before the Russian occupation.

Andrea Chalupa (08:34):

Manafort manufactured a fake protest in Crimea against NATO, and so on and so on. So all these years that I was watching that and you were watching Uzbekistan and other places, and then you and I were like, “It’s very obvious what’s happening with Trump. He’s coming to power. He is being helped in this election through the same sort of Kremlin mafia state corruption that infiltrates post-Soviet states to keep them in Moscow’s orbit.” It was very obvious, plain as day. And then you have this big New York Times story that comes out—I believe it was Halloween—saying that the FBI sees no connection between Trump and Russia. Then people like us were automatically deemed conspiracy theorists, nevermind our years of writing and researching and talking about this subject, a subject that the political journalist class—the cable news TV pundit class—was not ready for at all, had no expertise in. They were strapped to their desks. They’re trapped in their social climbing in their careers to try to get on television and so on and so on. And they were the ones that were at best ignoring us, at worst writing hit pieces against us and saying, “Don’t listen to these women. Don’t take them seriously,” even though we were the ones risking our personal safety, you know, getting all these weird phishing emails, getting all these death threats and sticking our necks out, ringing the alarm on this. Everything felt like it was falling apart.

Sarah Kendzior (09:53):

I just wanna add one additional note of context there, which is that another thing that contributed to our fear at that time wasn’t just our decades of experience studying the former Soviet Union, but the fact that Harry Reid had written two letters to the FBI, one of them in August, 2016, and then a follow-up letter in October, 2016 saying that Russia planned to interfere in the election, to alter results, that the FBI absolutely knew this, that they were doing nothing about it, and that Comey owed the American public an explanation before they went to the polls. And he said this in an open letter. They published the letter online. The story was generally buried, but it wasn’t just our intuition. We actually had a few officials—and Reid, of course, was Senate Minority Leader at the time—stating this. And that’s a very serious charge. And unfortunately he never completely followed up on what that meant, and then passed away. But I just wanted to throw that in there. Now, back to you.

Andrea Chalupa (10:52):

We will get on Comey in a second because he’s clearly complicit on all this and that needs to be highlighted for eternity. But in 2016, I’d already partnered with Agnieszka Holland for Mr. Jones, so at this time I was already working on trying to get Mr. Jones made, and obviously the villain of Mr. Jones is the New York Times Moscow bureau chief. Who shared a byline on that big New York Times story that seemed to close the case for everyone that there’s nothing to see between Trump and Russia? The New York Times Moscow Bureau chief at the time. So this was just layers of hell for me that I was plunging into. And luckily I had you by my side  [laughs] to go through all that. But, so it brought all of that back. Also deserving of attention is the big Alpha Bank story.

Andrea Chalupa (11:35):

There were computer scientists that, in 2016, were part of a group of independent people just stepping forward, trying to ring the alarm, doing whatever they could with very little access and power that they had. And as part of that group in 2016 were these computer scientists who saw strange communications pinging, going back and forth between servers in Alpha Bank, linked to the Kremlin, and servers within the Trump organization and other sort of entities connected to the Trump campaign. And it was sort of like, “What is going on?” And then the secret server story came out. Then, of course, the big New York Times story saying the FBI sees no connections destroyed it. It made it seem like a big laughing stock and, again, we’re all a bunch of conspiracy theorists. What’s really interesting is that this story deserves further scrutiny now that we know what we know about McGonigal, now that we’ve had our deep suspicions—our credible suspicions—confirmed. We all need to go back to that secret server story now because that is an important node in understanding how Trump potentially worked with the Kremlin to come to power.

Andrea Chalupa (12:42):

And that has been underlooked in all these years. It was largely dismissed in 2016 and then Durham, John Durham, the DOJ lackey that Trump appointed to launch an actual witch hunt against people that stepped forward to blow the whistle on connections—really weird connections—between Trump and Russia. Durham went on to hit people connected to them with indictments and produced this big muddled report to basically twist their findings and their conclusions about these really troubling findings. So the fact that Durham prioritized the secret server story at all is another big red arrow pointing to the fact that we need to dig up this story and beat the drum on this story because I think it’s an extremely important facet to this whole crime. In the show notes for this episode, we link to an article looking at that and people need to reread that to ground themselves in the reality of what went on in 2016.

Andrea Chalupa (13:40):

And the simple reality is this; that the Kremlin worked with the Trump family to bring Trump to power. I mean, the obvious smoking gun for that was Paul Manafort. Paul Manafort is in the family of the Russian Mafia. You know that Paul Manafort, longtime Kremlin operative who was hand to the king of Yanukovitch, the Ukrainian Trump, you know that he’s in the family, you know that he’s in with them. How do you know that? Because Paul Manaford took $19 million from Deripaska and made it disappear. And instead of killing him, as Deripaska—a thugged out Russian oligarch—has been known to do, instead of killing him, he allowed Paul Manafort to live because Paul Manafort is within the family of the Russian mafia state and he’s more useful to them alive than dead. How does Paul Manaford go on to repay Deripaska?

Andrea Chalupa (14:28):

As we all know, he works for his longtime friend, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign for free, being blessed in that role by Jared and Ivanka, being in the big June, 2016 tower meeting with known Kremlin spies, with Jared in the room and Don Jr. in the room, and so on and so on. And I’m bringing up all this old history to point out that yes, this crime really did happen. Yes, it was real. Yes, it is ongoing. Yes, as we talked about in our recent Florida Super Special, George Santos is a mini version of Russiagate. George Santos was collecting dirty Kremlin money for a Ponzi scheme, an actual Ponzi scheme busted by the SEC in Florida that he was working for. He collected money for that Ponzi scheme from Andrew Intrater, who was a person of interest for a time in Mueller’s Russia investigation, who is a cousin of super sanctioned oligarch, Victor Veckselberg, who’s close to Putin.

Andrea Chalupa (15:24):

What does that point to? That before he ran for Congress, George Santos was already being groomed with dirty Kremlin-linked money. And then Andrew Intrater goes on to dump a bunch of money into his campaign for Congress. And the Republicans, including Elise Stefanik, know all about this and they’re absolutely fine with this. The Russiagate crime is continuing to this day. So that’s what we’re really stressing here, is that this isn’t about 2016, it’s about the utter lack of accountability for 2016 and all those crimes being allowed to continue out in the open. So back to Deripaska, who is he? Simply put, he is one of the thuggiest of the thugged out oligarchs. He’s the guy that won the aluminum wars in the car bomb 1990s where there was an actual body count. He owns a bunch of massive businesses.

Andrea Chalupa (16:10):

He’s not as polished as a Roman Abramovich who really cleaned up his act and how he presents himself to be accepted into high society in the UK. Deripaska is in high society in the UK as well, but he’s not a very polished guy. He’s a bit too dirty for the US and so he’s been trying relentlessly for years to try to break into the US. And he’s just too dirty for the US. He’s perfectly fine for the UK and the Tories in the UK and so on. He’s got a lot of politicians on payroll there, but he was not acceptable enough for us. And the poor guy, like a 16 year old desperate to get into Studio 54 back in the day is trying, trying, trying with the US.

Sarah Kendzior (16:52):

I mean, 2016 is the year that doesn’t end. It’s the year that was not resolved. It’s the year where the people who got into power continued to plot coups and try to destroy not only our democracy, but others in part because, of course, Trump’s ability as president was to pardon everybody who had been in this crime cult, including Manafort, Stone, Bannon, etc. I do want to kind of contextualize McGonigal with 2016, in particular with October, 2016, because there’s really interesting timing here. One of the questions we always ask on Gaslit Nation is, Who knew what and when and who did they tell? Did they let it be publicly known? Were they transparent? Was there an opportunity for accountability that was not taken? And yes, but there’s some, you know, crazy shit—even by 2016 standards—happening in October and in early November.

Sarah Kendzior (17:49):

So just to review that, McGonigal, the announcement that he’s hired comes on October 4th, 2016, but he then starts working there at the end. And this is when the FBI began a series of strange actions that I actually wrote about in real time. I published an article in The Globe and Mail on November 3rd called “Trump’s Strategy: Pull the Fringes into the Center and Mainstream Extremism”. This seems to be up without the paywall. I also tweeted out some excerpts, so get it while you can. Anyway, there are some things happening that we all remember well; Comey announcing that he had reopened the investigation into Clinton’s emails and then taking that back, but not until many people had voted. And that, of course, Comey’s actions had influenced their vote against Clinton. But then there were smaller, stranger actions.

Sarah Kendzior (18:41):

The FBI had a Twitter account called @FBIVault and all of the sudden, this account, which had been dormant for a long time, just starts tweeting out all these files about investigations of the Clintons, along with files about the Trump family portraying them as noble philanthropists. And again, this is coming from an official FBI account. This is before people’s knowledge of the FBI’s relationship with the Russian mafia, with the Kremlin, was widely known. I mean, it should have been. These relationships weren’t exactly hidden, but it was not widely known. So people were looking at this and really thinking, you know, that the Clintons represented a type of criminality. I’m not sure they really bought that the Trumps were these noble good-doers, but mostly people were like, “Whoa, this is very openly, overtly partisan.”

Sarah Kendzior (19:38):

Then there’s a second thing that happened that a lot of folks blew off, which was that a former State Department official named Steve Pieczenik made a video (this video is still up) in which he said that the FBI was involved in what he called a “counter coup”. According to Pieczenik, the Clintons had committed the original coup of worming their way into office, I guess beforehand, and then running again. But the FBI had taken care of everything. The FBI had prevented any possibility that Clinton would win this election. And, you know, he’s known as a conspiracy theorist. He’s known as a kook. He’s also somebody deeply tied to people at the highest level of government, particularly in the Republican Party. So I took this somewhat seriously, and when I was watching all this action online, I thought, “This is what it looks like in other countries when the National Security Services are plotting a coup.”

Sarah Kendzior (20:39):

So it was kind of jarring to see Pieczenik in this video. I wrote about that both in The Globe and Mail article and in Hiding and in Plain Sight. Developments that stemmed from that were the Comey change, and then of course The New York Times hyping that investigation to no end while burying others. I just wanna read the report that was released on McGonigal in October, 2016 to kind of give you a sense of his background. This comes from the FBI itself: “Charlie McGonigal named special agent in charge of the counterintelligence division for the New York Field Office.” And then it goes on to say: “FBI Director James B. Comey has named Charlie McGonigal as the special agent in charge of the counterintelligence division of New York Field Office. Mr. McGonigal most recently served as the section chief of the Cyber Counterintelligence Coordination Section at FBI headquarters.”

Sarah Kendzior (21:32):

Well, that’s very interesting. That kind of brings to mind WikiLeaks and Cambridge Analytica and a lot of nefarious actions involving cyber security and hacking and, of course, what Andrea just mentioned about Alpha Bank to mind. So that’s an interesting little background there. “Mr. McGonigal entered on duty with the FBI in 1996.”—This is still the press release.—”He was first assigned to the New York Field office where he worked Russian foreign counterintelligence and organized crime matters.” And I’m jumping in again because [laughs], what the fuck? It’s like this guy is like rolled up in a package to wreak havoc for the Trump camp. This is a guy who is deeply immersed in all of the areas that they relied upon to rise to power through illicit means. And of course we know that while he was “working Russian foreign counterintelligence”, he was working with Russian intelligence, with oligarchs that were deeply tied to the Kremlin such as Deripaska.

Sarah Kendzior (22:36):

Then it goes on to say: “During his tenure in New York, Mr. McGonigal worked on the TWA Flight 800 investigation, was assigned to the task force investigating Wen Ho Lee, investigated the 1998 terrorist bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and investigated the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. Now, if I talk after every single one of these things, the show is never going to end, but I’m just going to say there is a deep and poorly studied relationship between Felix Sater (a mafia that worked for Trump in the company Bayrock and who was also deeply tied to the Russian mafia and to Semyon Mogilevich in particular), Mogilevich himself, and Al-Qaeda. The Russian Mafia was in a relationship with Al Qaeda; trading weapons, money, etc. in the years before the 9/11 attacks. Sater claims to have been aware of this and informed the FBI.

Sarah Kendzior (23:38):

And we, of course, know about the difficulties that the FBI and the CIA had in, you know, I don’t wanna say in anticipating the events because some did. They just told George W. Bush and he couldn’t care less. But, you know, we’ve gone into this before with Garland’s mentor, Jamie Gorelick, creating a kind of division between the agencies, making it difficult to share information, thus leading to the attacks being able to be pulled off. Now, it’s very unnerving to me that this guy, McGonigal, is somebody who was involved in these investigations of the 1998 Al-Qaeda bombings and also of 9/11. So I’ll just leave it at that for now. Then it says: “Following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, Mr. McGonigal was assigned to an investigative response squad which focused on pending international terrorist threats in the New York City area.”

Sarah Kendzior (24:33):

From there, it just goes on about how he worked in different divisions, worked in counter espionage. So I guess he just stared at a mirror all day long. Then it ends by saying, “Mr. McGonigal will assume this new role at the end of October.” And so that’s the kicker there is that they were saving him. I think Charlie McGonigal was the October surprise—or one of their October surprises. He was equipped to pull this off. He was deeply attached to a key figure, Deripaska, in this operation who of course was attached to Manafort and Trump and so on and so forth. So this is just another piece of the puzzle, another bit of proof that this was a deliberate operation. It was not just a perfect storm that just happened to the United States and swept us away. This was planned well in advance. Andrea, do you have thoughts on all that?

Andrea Chalupa (25:28):

Well, that brings us to Comey, doesn’t it? [laughs]

Sarah Kendzior:

It does.

Andrea Chalupa:

Let’s talk about novelist Comey. I mean, thank God he’s… I guess we should be happy that he is living out his years now writing novels. I dunno if you saw this.

Sarah Kendzior (25:41):

I did not see this. [laughs] I thought his novel was A Higher Loyalty because it’s so full of bullshit that it shouldn’t suffice as nonfiction. My publisher is shrieking right now, but go on.

Andrea Chalupa (25:53):

I guess I’m happy that Comey decided to become a novelist instead of joining the rotating door of corruption following Louis Freeh and Williams Sessions, former FBI directors who became lawyers for the Russian mafia. So I guess we should be happy that Comey’s scratching his artistic itch, but he wasn’t just incompetent. He wasn’t just misogynistic. There are all these horrific stories of women who were in the FBI Academy who’ve felt discriminated against. And when they took their stories to Comey, he just piled on with the misogyny. And of course he’s going to attack someone like Hillary Clinton and break protocol as he did in July, 2016 in holding a press conference which created a bunch of headlines, helping Trump, saying that, “FBI Director Comey chooses not to charge Hillary for her emails.”

Andrea Chalupa (26:47):

Remember the emails? “He does find that what she and her team did was extremely careless.” And obviously the screaming dog whistle, the misogynistic dog whistle of that is that you cannot trust this woman, the first woman, God help us, to be the president of the United States. And when Comey did that, he was very much amplifying that he would be an easy mark to work with any of the proud misogynists that make up the Russian mafia. Russia under Putin, the prevailing cultural norms being deeply xenophobic, misogynistic and racist and proudly so, that’s why they’re financially and materialistically, ideologically aligned with Trumpism, the whole Trump movement. It’s deeper than just good old fashioned misogyny. We saw Comey taking the head of the Russian Mafia, the brainy Don, Mogilevich, off the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List in December, 2015.

Andrea Chalupa (27:47):

And then one year later you have a Russian asset elected to be president of the United States. That was willfully done by Comey. And the excuse given at the time was that Mogilevich was in Russia and Russia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States, so of course take him off. But why would that stop us? You wanna keep him on the 10 Most Wanted List so you sent a strong message to him, so you sent a strong message to your agents, “Do whatever it takes to get this guy, track him, follow him. If he leaves Russia, grab him.” And that’s important because Robert Mueller, back in 2011 when he was FBI director, as we’ve talked about on this show, he gave a powerful speech, which is essentially the cliff notes of Gaslit Nation saying how the Russian mafia, the mafia of the 21st century is a bunch of blood money Western political operatives like Paul Manafort that go around pollinating corruption. It’s the fancy law firms, the fancy counting firms, the fancy PR firms. And that’s what it is today. It’s just money laundering, corruption, real estate, all of it. And the face of this global octopus is Mogilevich. And he’s going to be on the FBI 10 Most Wanted List until he is caught. Instead, Comey takes him off. Not only that, when the Feds, when the FBI knew that Russian hackers were inside the systems of the DNC—which is a 21st century version of Watergate, it’s a break-in just like Watergate was a break-in—the FBI agents were basically just calling up an intern, calling up the front desk of the DNC. They should have had all of their agents show up en masse saying, “We need to talk to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, her executives, everybody right now in a room.”

Andrea Chalupa (29:28):

They should have had a massive show of force to shut all of that down instead of being keystone cops. So what I’m saying is, as we say, they hide crimes behind scandal. They also hide their crimes as “Oops, just a little misogyny. That’s all it was.” It wasn’t. So Comey is a hundred percent complicit in this. And we all knew this in 2016-2017, that you could not trust the New York FBI. Even in 2015 we knew this. There was that whole story of Preet Bharara back in the day when he busted a ring of Russian intelligence recruiting local college girls to spy for them, sort of like a honey pot, like a Maria Butina, right? Maria Butina was a cute college girl that Russian intelligence had infiltrating the Republican Party, even getting in a romantic relationship with a Republican, singing Disney songs with him.

Andrea Chalupa (30:17):

And you can see this poor sap in the video really is convinced that this cute girl is in love with them. So Preet Bharara busted a ring of Maria Butinas working with Russian intelligence here in New York City. And around this time we had a big event in the Ukrainian Museum of New York City with Michael Weiss, Mouaz Moustafa, who we had on the show—both Michael and Mouaz we’ve had on the show, Mouaz represents the Syrian revolution—and myself and a filmmaker that had just returned from Ukraine named Damian Kolodiy, who had a bunch of video interviews with Ukrainian soldiers in the military hospital talking about their eyewitness accounts of fighting Russian soldiers. This was significant because at the time Russia was hiding behind their propaganda that they were not invading Ukraine back in 2014-2015 and the Western press was falling for it by calling the Russian invasion of Ukraine “Russian backed proxies,  Russian backed mercenaries, a civil war.” That’s disinformation.

Andrea Chalupa (31:14):

Russia’s invasion began in 2014. And so we had this big event drawing attention to this. It was sort of like a lot of heavy hitters, standing room only, packed. It was promoted on the Huffington Post and the whole message was, How do we get through to Susan Rice? How do we get through to Obama to wake them up to give the support to Ukraine that it desperately needs back then in 2015? The support it’s finally getting now, it needed back then to stop this war, and to send a strong message of accountability to Putin that would’ve contained his aggression, that could have potentially stopped what he did to us in 2016 with Trump. Anyway, at this event, you had a young college girl that was buzzing around us. She was staying with us. When everybody else left and it was just the speakers, she was hanging around.

Andrea Chalupa (31:56):

She got Michael Weiss’s phone number. Then she came to me and she said, “I have a plan on how to end the war in Ukraine quickly and bring prosperity to Ukraine. Who do you have that you can connect me to to talk about my plan?” At first, I’m like, “Oh, that’s pretty ambitious.” And so I asked her, “Do you know so-and-so from Hromadske TV?” Hromadske being the core of Ukraine’s revolution. She’s like, “No, what’s Hromadske TV?” And I’m like, “Oh, do you know so-and-so from Euromaidan Press, Euromaidan PR?” She’s like, “No, what’s that?” You’re telling me, young college girl with a Russian accent who looks Russian, who I’m assuming is Russian, you don’t know any of the powerhouses of Ukraine’s resistance against corruption and against the Russian invasion? You don’t know any of these things?

Andrea Chalupa (32:42):

And I leaned over to Michael Weiss across the bar and I said, “Hey Michael, that girl you just gave your phone number to? She has no idea what Hromadske TV is.” And Michael, because he studies Russian intelligence, knew exactly what I was talking about. So I had to grab her cell phone, pretend to be drunk, and put my own cell phone in it and delete his number and give the phone back. And so I got her name, I wrote it down, I Googled it, and I found a Google profile of her that looked straight out of The Americans, hair pulled back, gray collared shirt, a description of her saying, “I like coffee and beaches.” You know how they are. They don’t need to put much effort into it. And the idiots forgot the girl’s original name in her Google page account.

Andrea Chalupa (33:24):

It was in the URL. So I googled that, a totally different name, not just like a changed last name because she got married, but an entirely different name in the Google URL. And I found all of these anti Ukrainian comments that she had left on Wall Street Journal and other places. So that’s how Russian intelligence would’ve found her and recruited her. And so I collected all the information and I’d never had done this before because I don’t really know to trust the feds. I’ve studied enough about American history to know not to trust the FBI. I just thought, Hey, you know, Preet Bharara just busted a Russian spy ring using these young college girls and we had this really weird young Russian college girl sniffing around, trying to collect intel, trying to map us.

Andrea Chalupa (34:04):

And so I called the New York FBI and I talked to some guy with a thick New York accent who was treating me like I was calling in a UFO sighting. He’s like, “Nah, that’s nothing. Nah, that’s nothing.” I’m like, well, can I email it to you? Don’t you wanna… He’s like “Ah, nah.” But I still emailed it to some general email account that I found and I never heard back. This was late spring 2015 or so. So that was like one story I’ve had with the New York FBI. We always knew they were bad news. We always knew they were infiltrated. We saw what they were doing in 2016. We saw Giuliani who, one of his claims to fame was pushing out the Italian mafia to make room for the Russian mafia, and he was gleeful on TV saying, “We have something up our sleeves. We’re gonna get Hillary.” And then they did.

Rudy Giuliani (34:48):

And I think he’s got a surprise or two that you’re gonna hear about in the next two days. I mean, I mean, I’m talking about some… Pretty big surprise.

Host: Oh yeah, I heard you say that this morning. What do you mean?

Rudy Giuliani:

You’ll see [laughs] We’re not gonna go down and we’re certainly not gonna stop fighting. We’ve got a couple things up for us to leave that should turn this around.

[end audio clip]

Andrea Chalupa (35:07):

And they created that whole thing that Comey fell for willfully. Or I don’t think Comey fell for it

Sarah Kendzior (35:13):

He was in on it.

Andrea Chalupa (35:13):

He was in on it.

Sarah Kendzior (35:14):

He was a hired hand.

Andrea Chalupa (35:15):

Mmhmm. . And during this time, I have a friend in the Russian opposition who had to get political asylum here who was always telling me, “Watch out for the New York FBI. One of their translators is Russian intelligence.”

Sarah Kendzior (35:27):

And is that the translator?

Andrea Chalupa (35:29):

I assume it is. I mean, he was always saying there’s a translator embedded with the New York FBI.

Sarah Kendzior (35:33):

That might have been another indictee yesterday. Yeah, Sergey Shestakov, a former Russian diplomat and translator. He was arrested along with McGonigal in New York on the sanctions and money laundering violations. So maybe that is who you heard about all the way back in 2016.

Andrea Chalupa (35:54):

What’s really interesting… So Comey letting one the 10 Most Wanted Russian Mafia boss Mogilevich, off the 10 Most Wanted List, letting him go… He’s back. Mogilevich is back. Last April when we took a break for my maternity leave, we missed this story. We didn’t talk about it. Mogilevich is back on being massively wanted by the FBI in April, 2022.

Sarah Kendzior (36:16):

Oh, no, I saw that. Their little announcement on Twitter. That’s as much as they did. They were like, “Oh, look who we found again. We’ve realized they existed.” And then people are like, “Oh, good, they’re cracking down.” And I was like, “Really? [laughs] Let’s see. Let’s see a year from now.” So here we are nearly a year from now and Mogilevich roams free.

Andrea Chalupa (36:36):

He roams spree. But why he is so important, why Deripaska is so important, is because these guys—Putin’s oligarchs, Putin’s wallets—they go around pollinating his corruption, running all of these illicit industries. Corruption is an industry; prostitution, human trafficking, war profiteering, all of it. They’re also the Russian military industrial complex. Deripaska has companies that are manufacturing and producing for the Russian Army. And maybe that is in part why we’re finally seeing a reaction to them, we’re finally seeing somebody like McGonigal getting caught. Deripaska, for instance, under Trump in 2020, he flew his girlfriend to Los Angeles to give birth to their child. He had her set up in an apartment in Beverly Hills with five nannies and a housekeeper. And they tried the same thing again under Biden and got stopped. Then the girlfriend and Deripaska got sanctioned.

Andrea Chalupa (37:32):

The lawyers that helped them do this were indicted and so on. So we’re seeing sort of a big pushback that I think it’s fair to say is in result to the war, Russia’s massive invasion. We’re at war. We have no choice but to finally do something. The US did not want this war. The US in fact was trying to pull out of Afghanistan quickly and pivot towards China and figure out some strong policy to counter China. The last thing they wanted was to have to prop up Ukraine in a war. In fact, they were trying to train Ukraine for gorilla warfare because they expected Ukraine to fall. And when Ukraine didn’t, when Zelensky refused to flee the country, and when Ukrainians started winning the hearts and minds of the world with all of these viral videos and these viral statements of defiance, the US had no choice but to defend Ukraine and, and get all the allies together and strengthen NATO.

Andrea Chalupa (38:28):

And it’s been this big push ever since and as a result, you’re seeing more clamping down on Putin’s oligarchs who are essential to the war effort. Now, the UK is falling short on this. You have right now Prigozhin who is one of the nastiest of the oligarchs. He, of course, runs Wagner Group, the private military force which is named after Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer, for a reason—because these are actual Nazis that we’re fighting against. Russia invaded Ukraine at 4:00 AM just like the Nazis did. When the invasion was launched, the Ukrainians were like, Oh my God, this is what Hitler did to us and now Putin’s doing it to us. And one of the forces they’re invading with is Wagner. Prigozhin has just brought a case against a fantastic journalist that we all know, especially if you’ve been listening to the show for a long time, Elliot Higgins of Bellingcat, trying to go after him and all these other things. And he’s so far being allowed to do it in the UK. So that’s part of the problem. You still have all of these pig troughs of corruption that these oligarchs are feeding on in the US and the UK and we just have to put a stop to it. I’ve got a million things to say about this. I feel like I could just keep going.

Sarah Kendzior (39:38):

I just wanna break in. We’ll go back and forth. We’ll do Russia corruption and US corruption because yeah, in the UK, you know, we saw this with their libel rulings, these attempts to suppress information about Kremlin operations, about Russian mafia activity. They did it to Carole Cadwalladr, they did it to Catherine Belton. I just want to note, as we’ve always said on this show, these operations go hand in hand. And Trump’s election, as Andrea once said, was the merger of the Russian mafia in the West and the Russian mafia in the East. And there’s another key figure in our government who I think we need to introduce to this discussion and that’s Mitch McConnell, who is in a business partnership—or at least a relationship—with Deripaska. He has had Deripaska investing in aluminum plants in Kentucky despite Deripaska being sanctioned by the US government.

Sarah Kendzior (40:34):

And then here’s where things get interesting. So you’ve got McGonigal hired, while he’s working illegally with Deripaska in 2016. In 2017, the Trump administration has their kayfabe WWE feud with Comey, fires him. People mistakenly think Comey is a hero but then of course it brings up the question of who’s going to be the new director of the FBI. And Mitch McConnell had a suggestion. Mitch McConnell wanted Merrick Garland to be the head of the FBI and Mitch McConnell asked Trump to appoint Merrick Garland. Why did Mitch McConnell want this? Well, he thought that Garland was somebody who could keep the FBI’s secrets, including this illicit relationship with the Kremlin, with organized crime and with figures like Deripaska—at least that is my assumption. That’s what logic dictates here. Of course, Trump rejected this idea and instead appointed Christopher Wray, who is another corrupt FBI lackey. He went on to allow an attempted coup, allow a violent attack on the capitol.

Sarah Kendzior (41:45):

None of the organizers of that have been held accountable because of two people; Merrick Garland and Christopher Weay, both of whom remain in the Biden administration. Biden, of course, then asked, you know, appointed Garland as AG and did not fire Wray. He left him there despite this absolutely horrifying tenure. So folks need to ask some questions about why Joe Biden has the exact people that McConnell and others in the GOP wanted holding the most powerful criminal justice positions in the United States. Maybe that explains why Biden is always going on about how great Mitch McConnell is, you know? Reaching across the aisle to people who slap democracy in the face. I don’t know. It’s an interesting story.

Andrea Chalupa (42:36):

What’s weird is that when Biden first comes in, he does what we ask him to do in one of our early tapings of 2021: He declares the Kremlin a national security threat. Then he launches his big old task force against transnational organized crime, but we haven’t really heard much about that. And this whole investigation into the FBI was coming out of Los Angeles and other places far removed from the New York office, which is tainted as we’ve said. It’s an extension of Giuliani, basically. And as a result, as we keep saying, the crimes keep happening without accountability. For instance, in 2016: Trump, Manafort, Russiagate. In 2020, you had Giuliani being the Manafort because Manafort was in prison.

Sarah Kendzior:Still criming, but in prison.

Everyone — whether from a left, right, or frothy perspective — has seized on the arrest of former FBI Special Agent in Charge Charles McGonigal to assume he was responsible for something they don’t like about the Russian investigation: the leaks (attributed to but not exclusively from SDNY) about the Clinton Foundation investigation; the problems on the Carter Page applications and vetting of the Steele dossier; the tanking of the Alfa Bank allegations; some later sabotage of the Mueller investigation.

There’s no reason to believe he was primarily responsible for most of that, and good reason to believe he was not. But he was in a place where he could have tampered in other really serious cases. So I want to lay out what his timeline is, with some comment on how it intersects with key investigations.

Here’s an excerpt from the bio sent out with the October 4, 2016 announcement of his promotion to SAC in NY Field Office.

FBI Director James B. Comey has named Charles McGonigal as the special agent in charge of the Counterintelligence Division for the New York Field Office. Mr. McGonigal most recently served as the section chief of the Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section at FBI Headquarters.

[snip]

In 2014, Mr. McGonigal was promoted to assistant special agent in charge of the Baltimore Field Office’s cyber, counterintelligence, counterespionage, and counterproliferation programs.

[snip]

McGonigal will assume this new role at the end of October.

This 2016 promotion would have put him in New York too late to be a key 2016 leaker; the damage to Hillary had already been done by the time he would have arrived in New York.

He should have had a role in the Alfa Bank investigation, which included both a cyber and a counterintelligence component, though the latter was in Chicago. But his name did not show up (in unredacted form, anyway) in the Michael Sussmann files. Plus, we know what bolloxed that investigation: two cyber agents, Nate Batty and Scott Hellman, who decided the anomaly was nothing even before they had looked at all the data, then kept telling the counterintelligence investigators that too.

McGonigal was in the loop on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. He had a hand in forwarding the tip from the Australians to DC headquarters. And he was in the vicinity of the Carter Page investigation after it got moved back to New York in January 2017 (in which context he shows up in communications with Jennifer Boone). But at least per the Horowitz Report, he wasn’t a key player.

Because McGonigal was tangential to the above matters — including the successful effort, aided by Sussmann and Rodney Joffe — to kill the early NYT story on the Alfa Bank allegations, he’s probably not the most important player in the October 2016 NYT story every Democrat hates (though his expertise could have made him a source for several of the journalists involved).

He likely was involved in coordination in the early parts of the investigation into the DNC hack (which was investigated in Pittsburgh and San Francisco), including a decision not to open an investigation on Roger Stone, and there were steps not taken in those early days that probably should have been. Perhaps McGonigal is to blame for the fact that, when Jeannie Rhee asked for a briefing on the investigation into the hack-and-leak in 2017, nothing had been done. Ultimately, it did get done though. He was no longer in a position to interfere with the investigation during the key part of it in 2018 (though he likely knew important details about it).

One thing that’s absolutely certain, though: He was in a position to sabotage investigations into Oleg Deripaska, and with him, Paul Manafort. And he would have greatly facilitated Deripaska’s campaign to undermine the Russian investigation with disinformation, which continued beyond 2018. Just as one measure of timing, Deripaska’s column in the Daily Caller was at the beginning of the time when Shestkov was reaching out to McGonigal.

The materials on the SDNY indictment pertaining to Deripaska make it clear that he had accessed sanctions packages pertaining to Deripaska before he left the FBI in 2018.

As SAC, McGonigal supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs, including Deripaska. Among other things, in 2018, McGONIGAL, while acting as SAC, received and reviewed a then-classified list of Russian oligarchs with close ties to the Kremlin who would be considered for sanctions to be imposed as a result of Russia’s 2014 conflict with Ukraine.

He appears to have leaked that information with the daughter of Agent 1 (believed to be Yevgenyi Fokin).

An NYPD Sergeant assigned to brief Agent-1’s daughter subsequently reported the event to the NYPD and FBI, because, among other reasons, Agent-1’s daughter claimed to have an unusually close relationship to “an FBI agent” who had given her access to confidential FBI files, and it was unusual for a college student to receive such special treatment from the NYPD and FBI.

It seems likely, then, Manafort got visibility onto what the FBI knew about him. And he got it around the same time Konstantin Kilimnik was included in a conspiracy indictment with Paul Manafort in June 2018. He almost certainly got it before the Mueller investigation was over, which hypothetically could have influenced or facilitated Manafort’s effort to thwart DOJ’s investigation.

I have reason to suspect that people associated with McGonigal, if not he himself, have seeded disinformation about Deripaska-related investigations.

McGonigal’s tie to Deripaska and the trajectory of his career would have put him in a position to tamper in other investigations. As noted above, he moved from Baltimore (overseeing matters involving the NSA during years when the materials that would be leaked as part of the Shadow Brokers operation were stolen), to a cyber/CI role in DC, to NYC. The overt acts described in his two indictments (SDNY, DC) only start in 2017, which would suggest he may not have sold out until then.

Except there’s a problem with that: The first overt act in the DC indictment is him asking for money. So it’s not clear when he got started.

August 2017: McGonigal first asks Albanian for money.

September 7, 2017: McGonigal travels to Albania.

October 5, 2017: McGonigal receives $80,000 in a parked car from the Albanian.

November 18, 2017: McGonigal conducts an interview in Vienna with the Albanian acting as translator; the FBI has no record of the interview. Then McGonigal flies to Albania and discusses business with the same witness.

November 25, 2017: McGonigal predicates an investigation into the lobbyist for a rival Albanian politician.

February 28, 2018: McGonigal formally opens investigation into rival Albanian relying on witnesses whose expenses were paid by his source.

March 4, 2018: McGonigal dines with Prime Minister of Albania.

April 27, 2018: McGonigal pitched by two people in Germany to get involved in Bosnian affairs, facilitates an introduction to US Ambassador to UN.

June to August 2018: McGonigal sets up arrangement whereby Bosnian-tied pharma company would pay Albanian $500K to broker UN ties.

Spring-Summer 2018: At Sergey Shestakov’s request, McGonigal sets up Deripaska’s agent’s daughter with an NYPD internship.

September 2018: McGonigal retires from the FBI.

There are a number of key investigations, including some in which Deripaska had tangential interest, on which McGonigal would have had complete visibility. Their compromise would present a grave threat to the country.

They’re not the ones left, right, and frothers are most concerned about though.

Given how DOJ has charged these two indictments (and given the charges they have yet to file), I suspect they will try to get McGonigal to plead to one side and cooperate in the other — in part to unpack everything he did before and after he left the FBI. But even if they do, they’re not going to tell us what he was up to.

The arrest of Charles McGonigal, chief of the FBI counterintelligence division in New York from October 2016 until his retirement in 2018, reopens festering questions about the troubled election that put Donald Trump in the White House. Among the crimes charged against McGonigal in two lengthy federal indictments is a secret financial relationship with Oleg Deripaska — a Russian oligarch close to dictator Vladimir Putin and associated with Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, himself convicted of crimes and pardoned.

During his FBI career, McGonigal oversaw investigations of Deripaska and other oligarchs suspected of various crimes, including espionage. Now the exposure of his illegal connection with Deripaska may provide fresh insights into Trump’s tainted victory.

On Oct. 4, 2016, a month before Election Day, FBI director James Comey appointed McGonigal as special agent in charge of the FBI counterintelligence division in New York City, an exceptionally influential job that he took over at an extraordinarily sensitive moment. The bureau already had open investigations of both Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her Republican adversary Trump. The Clinton investigation concerned “her emails,” of course, and the Trump investigation involved his campaign’s Russian connections.

What followed McGonigal’s sudden ascent to power in the New York FBI office were two seemingly separate incidents, occurring days before the election, that had a fateful impact. On Oct. 28, Comey sent a letter to the Congress publicly announcing that the bureau had resumed its investigation of Clinton due to the discovery of a laptop owned by former Rep. Anthony Weiner, whose spouse Huma Abedin was a top Clinton aide.

Months earlier the Justice Department months had cleared Clinton of any crime, but Comey violated Justice Department guidelines in accusing her of being neglectful about classified information, though it was later revealed that her emails contained no classified documents. (That means zero, zilch, nada, none, nothing.) But then Comey was driven to examine Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop.

Comey’s announcement stopped the Clinton campaign’s forward momentum and almost certainly cost her the election — even though the FBI director acknowledged on Nov. 2, days before the election, that nearly all of the data on the Weiner laptop duplicated emails the FBI already had seen. None contained any damaging information. Just as Clinton was severely damaged among swing suburban voters, Trump’s base voters were galvanized.

While Comey’s broadside against Clinton stunned the nation, perhaps nobody should have been shocked. Trump crony Rudolph Giuliani —who for decades maintained a close relationship with Republican-leaning officials in the New York FBI office as the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York — had repeatedly hinted on Fox News in the weeks before the election that the bureau was sitting on a “big surprise” that would vault his candidate to victory.

Meanwhile, on Oct. 31, 2016, The New York Times published a front-page story on that other FBI investigation, known internally as Crossfire Hurricane, which unlike her emails had gotten no public attention (and inspired no leaks). The headline was declarative and conclusive: “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” That false story, exonerating Trump of Kremlin connections that we now know were extensive and incriminating, was pushed by Trump operatives and agents and clearly originated in the New York FBI counterintelligence division — which had played a key role in the beginning of Crossfire Hurricane. It quoted anonymous “law enforcement sources,” which did not mean a local police lieutenant.

Before he moved on to other positions at FBI headquarters, McGonigal’s career had begun in New York, where he worked closely with James Kallstrom — the right-wing ideologue who headed the New York office for decades. A bosom buddy of Giuliani and Trump, Kallstrom is suspected of leading the pressure campaign that induced Comey to reopen the Clinton investigation. The explicit threat of leaks by agents and former agents like Kallstrom, who reportedly hated Clinton, spurred Comey’s disastrous decision and his public announcement, which again violated department policy against election interference.

Damning as those facts may seem, they only get us so far. There is much more to learn before we can understand the full story of 2016. The scrupulously nonpartisan presidential historian Michael Beschloss asked this week whether McGonigal’s indictment will lead us closer to the truth. Will the prosecution of McGonigal reveal the details of his relationship with Deripaska, whom he had once investigated before becoming his corrupt stooge? Will Comey provide a full and honest accounting of what happened in the New York FBI office before the election? Will the New York Times examine — and disclose — how that misleading story about Trump and Russia appeared on its front page? Who briefed the Times for that bogus story?

With Trump seeking to return to the White House, the answers to those questions do not merely reckon with the past but are critical to democracy’s future. The malign conspirators who first brought that would-be tyrant to power, both foreign and domestic, are still at large.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: TayebMEZAHDIA at Pixabay

Allison Guerriero still remembers the day her ex-boyfriend, Charlie McGonigal, bought a second phone.

The FBI had just ordered its staff to delete WhatsApp from their bureau-issued phones, and McGonigal was panicking. No longer could he, one of the FBI’s top New York dons, send encrypted messages to whomever he was texting with. That was a problem. Guerriero didn’t know exactly what McGonigal was using WhatsApp for — he never used it to communicate with her — but he was on there a lot.

So McGonigal went out and bought a second iPhone to use on the side. He used it almost exclusively for WhatsApp. He took the two phones with him everywhere.

Guerriero would tease McGonigal about it. “What are you, a drug dealer now? With a burner phone?” she said. But she never found out who McGonigal was messaging.

“He said he needed the iPhone to contact his sources,” Guerriero said. “For some reason he couldn’t do it through his FBI phone.”

At the time, Guerriero thought she was McGonigal’s biggest secret. The two of them would often spend the night at his one-room garden apartment in Brooklyn’s tony Park Slope neighborhood. He still had a family back in suburban Maryland, but he’d been spending almost all his time in New York City since October 2016, when he was promoted to head up counterintelligence at the FBI’s field office. McGonigal had promised Guerriero his marriage would soon be over.

The iPhone wasn’t the only curious thing she saw during her time with McGonigal. There were the sealed envelopes he’d be handed when they had dinner with a friend of his, an older man named Sergey Shestakov.

Shestakov had once been a senior Soviet diplomat in New York, stationed at the United Nations. Guerriero wasn’t sure exactly how they had met, but she said the two acted like they had known each other for years. Shestakov was a naturalized US citizen who worked as an interpreter for the federal courts.  

Guerriero and McGonigal would sometimes join Shestakov and his wife at pro hockey games. They would party with a group in a private box. Guerriero didn’t know whose box it was, or who was picking up the bill. She never saw McGonigal pay.

On other nights, Shestakov would take McGonigal and Guerriero out to dinner. The two men would make small talk about traffic and the weather. Shestakov would ask McGonigal about his kids. Then, Guerriero said, in the middle of the dinner, Shestakov would casually hand McGonigal a manila envelope.

It happened three or four times while Guerriero and McGonigal dated, from mid-2017 to late 2018. The envelopes always passed from Shestakov to McGonigal, not the other way around. And Shestakov, Guerriero recalls, would always pick up the bill.

What was inside the envelopes? Guerriero never saw. “I just assumed that it was something Sergey had translated from Russian in court,” she said. “Or something from a source. It could have been totally legitimate.”

Or it could have been something else. McGonigal is now facing two federal indictments. He is charged with lying to the FBI on his official paperwork and illicitly taking money to work for Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch. The indictments are the culmination of a grand-jury investigation that Insider exclusively reported on last year, and they lay out breathtaking allegations of subterfuge and corruption. Prosecutors accuse McGonigal of cultivating a relationship with Deripaska while still working for the FBI, by doing a favor for the daughter of one of Deripaska’s subordinates. “McGonigal traveled to meet Deripaska and others at Deripaska’s residence in London, and in Vienna,” one indictment says, though it does not specify when. Shestakov is said to have introduced McGonigal to Deripaska’s circle. He is also alleged to have violated US sanctions by partnering with McGonigal on a project to investigate one of Deripaska’s rivals, a contract that paid $41,790 a month. In Albania and elsewhere, McGonigal is accused of engaging in the classic Beltway exchange of cash for favors, leaning on his relationships with US officials and the Albanian prime minister to deliver the results his patrons wanted. Much of this under-the-table lobbying activity, the government says, occurred while he was still at the FBI.

Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska has been allegedly linked to Vladimir Putin, Paul Manafort, and Russian influence operations in other countries. Prosecutors say he hired Charlie McGonigal, one of the FBI agents who had worked on the bureau’s Trump-Russia investigation, to do research on a rival. Olga Maltseva/AFP/Getty Images

But the question of what McGonigal was accepting in a manila envelope from a former Soviet diplomat raises concerns that go beyond the indictments and is one of the strangest twists yet in the unfolding scandal. The FBI is racing to discover how deep the alleged deceits by an ex-agent who’d held one of its most sensitive posts might run. Was McGonigal working for the Russians while he was still running the bureau’s New York counterintelligence efforts? Or did the FBI succeed in putting a stop to Deripaska’s courtship of McGonigal while it was still in its early stages?

“The access you get in that job is extraordinary,” one senior law-enforcement insider said. “It’s almost bottomless. If you’re running FBI counterintelligence in New York, you can get your hands on almost anything you want — and you don’t always have to make excuses for why you’re asking for it.”

The Trump-aligned right has used the McGonigal allegations as ammunition for its campaign to discredit the dossier-wielding, Mar-a-Lago-raiding FBI. Prominent voices on the left have theorized that McGonigal was a double agent, paid off by the Russians to throw the FBI off the Trump-Russia trail. Still others speculate that McGonigal just got greedy, as top-level officials sometimes do, accepting cash in return for favors and access and being just a little sloppier about it than most. 

But to write McGonigal off as a case of greed and not espionage is to misunderstand how foreign influence works. It doesn’t have to be greed or espionage. It can be both.

New York City, the senior law-enforcement insider said, is “a global center for espionage and counterespionage.” “You have visits from foreign business elites,” they added. “You have the United Nations. You have ethnic populations.”

On this contested urban terrain, where foreign intelligence services quietly battle to surveil, recruit, and control, McGonigal was America’s head defensive coach. But a former FBI executive said that under almost no circumstances would an FBI official of McGonigal’s rank be the one to go out on the field and play the game himself. As the special agent in charge of the New York field office’s counterintelligence division, McGonigal had roughly 150 agents to manage. He was in charge of people who were in charge of other people who were in charge of squads of agents who did the block-and-tackle work of tracking and flipping players for the other teams. McGonigal was supposed to be sitting at his desk in lower Manhattan, calling the plays.

Guerriero was unaware of such bureaucratic intricacies. She figured McGonigal was a hands-on agent, just like the ones you see in the movies. He was often out at night “running an op,” as he’d put it. That might explain the envelopes from Shestakov, as well as the plastic bag full of cash she saw one night on the floor by the futon at McGonigal’s apartment in Brooklyn. McGonigal said he’d won it betting on a baseball game. Guerriero was skeptical, but she figured it was “buy money” for a sting operation, or a payoff for an informant. It was all part of McGonigal’s work.

So was the time he spent hanging out with a mysterious man named Agron, whom Guerriero never met.

Agron Neza had immigrated to New Jersey from Albania, where, one indictment says, “he had been an employee of an Albanian intelligence agency several decades earlier.” A federal indictment against McGonigal says Neza gave him $225,000 in cash, including an $80,000 payment that coincided with the date when Guerriero says she saw the bag full of bundled bills in McGonigal’s apartment. Neza, who is identified in an indictment only as Person A, has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

McGonigal and Shestakov are alleged to have been part of an effort by Deripaska to reverse sanctions imposed in 2018 by the Treasury Department, which found that Deripaska had acted as an agent of the Kremlin. Deripaska’s name appears in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report 63 times. A bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Deripaska conducted “influence operations” and that he took direction on some of those operations from the Russian government. 

“The notion that Mr. Deripaska is some proxy for the Russian state is a blatant lie,” Ruben Bunyatyan, a spokesperson for Deripaska, told Insider by email. Deripaska, he said, “never hired Mr. McGonigal (or Mr. Shestakov) for either business or personal purposes.” Bunyatyan did not respond to the question of whether Deripaska and McGonigal had ever met.

Attorneys representing McGonigal and Shestakov did not respond to requests to comment. “I do not have any comment,” Neza told Insider. The FBI declined to comment.

McGonigal’s early career as special agent in New York gave him exposure to some storied cases. He investigated the crash of TWA Flight 800, the “illegals program” that rounded up Russian sleeper agents, and the September 11 attacks. In Washington, he ran the FBI’s WikiLeaks task force that tracked down and convicted Chelsea Manning, as well as a joint CIA-FBI secret task force dedicated to hunting for Chinese moles inside US intelligence agencies. In New York, he was beginning to establish himself on the foreign-policy luncheon circuit, appearing on panels about Russian election meddling and links between Russia’s intelligence agencies and its oligarchs, like the one he now stands accused of going to work for. 

“In a 22-year career with the FBI, I had, uh, quite the opportunity to work with — and against, in some situations — the FSB,” McGonigal said in a remote panel hosted by the Atlantic Council in October 2020. He described the FSB as Russia’s “preeminent security service” and said its ties to oligarchs made it “an agency for hire.”

The number of big investigations McGonigal was involved with, combined with the lack of clarity around how far back his relationship with Deripaska might go, is part of the reason his indictment is a nightmare for the FBI. While the indictments do not allege that McGonigal was disloyal while he was still at the FBI, McGonigal’s lifestyle could have made him an appealing target for recruitment.

In a storied FBI career, McGonigal investigated terrorist threats, organized crime, Russian sleeper agents, Chinese moles and WikiLeaks. When he was charged with taking illicit money from a Russian oligarch, his colleagues were shocked. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

For someone with McGonigal’s level of access, having an extramarital affair is not a private matter. It is exactly the kind of vulnerability that McGonigal’s foreign counterparts, the people he was supposed to be working against, might pounce on and exploit.

“People having extramarital relationships are typically involved in some kind of deception,” said Michael German, a former FBI special agent who is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The FBI polygraphs job applicants to uncover exactly that kind of personal foible in order to disqualify them from becoming the lowest-level agent in the office.” 

The McGonigal case is already a bad look for those charged with protecting US secrets; there is a chance it could get much worse. McGonigal was not charged with espionage, and although there is currently no evidence that McGonigal committed espionage, an FBI source told Insider that the investigation is ongoing. A second person familiar with the investigation said the FBI’s counterintelligence division appeared confident that the McGonigal case is about corruption and nothing more. The fact that prosecutors agreed to release McGonigal on a $500,000 bond also suggests the government doesn’t think he engaged in espionage, which would make him a flight risk.

But ruling out the worst-case scenario — that McGonigal was sharing US secrets with his foreign contacts — could take months or years. And Guerriero’s recollections — the bag of cash, the late nights, the mysterious friends, the free meals, the second phone — only raise more concerns about the scale of the fallout from McGonigal’s double life.

Charles Franklin McGonigal Jr. was born in a suburb of Cleveland, one of four children from a working-class family. Guerriero remembers him confiding in her about his rough childhood. His parents, he told her, were alcoholics. When McGonigal was still very young, his parents would sometimes fight with such intensity that he had to leave, jump on his bike, and venture out to try to find some friends.

Life got easier in high school. His parents stayed together. His father got a better job. Finally there was enough money. McGonigal stayed in Ohio and got a degree in business administration. He married Pamela Fox in the mid-1990s.

After stints in New York and Cleveland, McGonigal was posted to Washington, DC. The McGonigals put down roots in suburban Maryland. They bought a middle-class house in a middle-class neighborhood. They sent their kids to public schools. At the FBI, McGonigal racked up a string of big cases and promotions. His colleagues saw a side of McGonigal that Guerriero did not see. He was ambitious and driven.

“Charlie would just scream at many of his subordinates,” recalls Pete Lapp, who reported to McGonigal at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. Lapp, who retired in 2020, said McGonigal played favorites and engaged in “kiss up, kick down” behavior as he scaled the FBI’s ladder. Lapp remembers trying to organize an after-work happy hour; McGonigal ordered him to cancel it. “I was trying to boost morale,” Lapp said. “He saw it as a risk to his career.”

Tracy Walder, a former special agent at the Los Angeles bureau who sometimes interacted with McGonigal, agreed that he could sometimes be difficult. But in her view, his behavior was not so unusual. “It’s the FBI,” she said. “What do you expect? We don’t hold hands and sing kumbaya. People are going to yell sometimes.”

McGonigal was out of his element in New York. He wasn’t prepared for all this money, all these power players. He should have stayed in his cute little suburb, mowing his lawn.

McGonigal worked hard to win the promotions that lifted him to the pinnacle of the bureau hierarchy. In New York, he was welcomed into a select circle of New York law-enforcement dons who dined out at Sparks, Peter Luger, and, in the old days, Elaine’s. One steakhouse on the circuit had a framed photo of McGonigal hanging on the wall. 

Those restaurant tables were connected to a darker, more mysterious world inhabited by the spies and oligarchs who gather in the shadows of New York to do business, trade secrets, and purchase loyalties. It was McGonigal’s job to dominate this world, to be the head shark in one of the world’s murkiest and most dangerous tanks.

“He was out of his element here,” Guerriero said of their year together in New York. “He wasn’t prepared for all this money, all these power players. He should have stayed in his cute little suburb, mowing his lawn, playing his softball games.”

That view is harsh, but it is largely shared by Aneta Georgievska-Shine, a lecturer at the University of Maryland who was one of McGonigal’s suburban neighbors. “He was modest,” she told Insider. “They were Catholic, middle-class people who lived in a nice little house. Nothing fancy or ostentatious. Part of me feels sorry for him. He didn’t strike us as an evil person. I wonder what happened to Charlie, what happened to this guy when he moved to New York.”

McGonigal’s Maryland neighbors and New York colleagues found him to be smart and likable. “He was charming, laid-back, and erudite,” one New York acquaintance said. “There was nothing to suggest that he wasn’t the consummate professional.” But in New York, the rapid immersion in a new world of money and power seems to have overwhelmed his middle-class sensibilities. The transformation began on his regular commute from Maryland up to New York, where, according to Guerriero, McGonigal would park his minivan at a New Jersey State Police barracks and get into his “G-car” or government car: a black Ford Explorer. Like many FBI special agents, McGonigal had a placard on the front window that let him park wherever he wanted.

The minivan-Explorer changeover was more than material. With his new job, McGonigal’s stock in the law-enforcement world was high, and the Big Apple quickly got its hooks into him. He augmented his Brooks Brothers wardrobe with a couple of silk Hermès ties. He sometimes sported two tiny replicas of the iconic “We Are Happy to Serve You” Greek coffee cup as his cuff links. He golfed. He went out with friends to Sparks, where he’d order his steak well done. He’d come back from late nights out and tell Guerriero he had been with Agron. Who was Agron? She knew better than to ask.

McGonigal returned home to see his wife and two children once or twice a month. Georgievska-Shine remembers asking McGonigal’s wife at the grocery store how he was doing. She says Pamela used the importance of her husband’s New York City job to explain his long absences.

After McGonigal’s double life was revealed in January, he became the latest screen upon which a divided country could project its partisan fantasies. Many on the right, including Donald Trump, have tried to use McGonigal to discredit the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s Russia ties. On the left, there has been speculation that McGonigal was responsible for a series of leaks that boosted Trump’s chances in 2016. There is evidence to suggest that the FBI director James Comey’s preelection announcements about the Hillary Clinton email investigation were motivated, at least in part, by fears that the FBI’s New York field office would step forward with more leaks if he did nothing. And within the FBI, the New York field office is known for doing what it wants, sometimes even in defiance of orders from headquarters.

Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian, has gone further, floating the unlikely possibility that McGonigal was used by pro-Russia interests to sabotage FBI investigations in ways that could once again call the legitimacy of Trump’s victory into question. The FBI, meanwhile, appears to be pushing back on the idea that the McGonigal case is anything bigger than a case of one corrupt individual. “It’s the FBI that initiated this investigation, it’s the FBI and our agents that painstakingly and methodically put the case together against him, and it’s the FBI that arrested him,” Chris Wray, the FBI director, said at a news conference last week. “We’re the ones who put him in handcuffs,” a senior FBI official told Insider. The FBI’s position seems to be that while it got McGonigal’s training and vetting wrong, it can still be trusted to handle the cleanup.

For the Deripaskas of the world, this is like shopping at Walmart. They laugh at how cheap Americans are to buy.

If the allegations in the indictments are true, it’s possible that Russian interests were still cultivating McGonigal, gradually pushing his limits. To the extent that the FBI can demonstrate that it nipped this process in the bud, it deserves credit. Three sources familiar with the investigation told Insider that the bureau had already been looking into McGonigal by November 2019, which is when Guerriero says she wrote an angry email to William Sweeney, McGonigal’s boss. According to Guerriero, that email, which Insider was unable to obtain or confirm, told Sweeney to look into McGonigal’s Albania work and his personal life. Guerriero acknowledged that she later harassed McGonigal’s family members in apparent violation of a court order, which led to her arrest and a separate restraining order. A 2019 police report filed by McGonigal’s wife said that McGonigal and Guerriero “had a relationship” and that Guerriero repeatedly emailed and called her despite her asking Guerriero to stop.

Given the raging intensity of US politics, it’s not a surprise that some have tried to use McGonigal to prove partisan bias within the FBI. But the notion that McGonigal was knowingly carrying out a covert political agenda is not supported by the facts. To friends and neighbors, he came off as an ordinary executive-level FBI agent — a centrist Republican who drove neighborhood kids to school events in his minivan. A neighbor saw copies of The Economist around his house in Maryland. In New York, Guerriero occasionally saw him watching Fox News. When Trump fired his nemesis Comey, McGonigal said publicly that Comey was “one of the most loved leaders that we’ve had in a number of years,” though later, after Comey began leaking his notes about his meetings with Trump, McGonigal told Guerriero, “I wish he would just shut up.” He told her he did not vote in the 2016 election because he did not like either candidate. One day Guerriero would hear him bragging about playing on one of Trump’s luxury golf courses; on another he would talk with bitter sarcasm about Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp.”

An indifference to politics seems to have been one area in which McGonigal was the model of an FBI professional. If he had no ax to grind, could his motive for the conduct alleged in the indictments have been money? Was McGonigal a greedy white-collar professional who got in too deep?

And if the allegations in the indictments are true, did McGonigal even know he was doing anything out of the ordinary? Or was he another working stiff who saw old colleagues pass through the revolving door to make three times their old government salaries, paid out by the same bad guys they had spent their careers investigating? Perhaps McGonigal’s salary from his post-FBI job as a vice president of Brookfield Properties wasn’t enough to support a girlfriend and a family and have a bit left over for those Hermès ties.

“He said he needed to make more money,” Guerriero told Insider. “He had two kids to put through college.”

A Washington insider with decades of experience in international finance said that the issue raised by the McGonigal case is bigger than the FBI. The revolving-door problem, they said, poses major risks to the entire federal government.

“What McGonigal and all these other chuckleheads don’t understand is that for the Deripaskas of the world, this is like shopping at Walmart,” they said. “They laugh at how cheap Americans are to buy.”

There was one thing McGonigal did that struck Guerriero as weird at the time. It involved vodka.

He had just picked her up in the G-car at her father’s house in New Jersey. They were headed to the Park Slope apartment. On their way to Brooklyn, they planned to stop at the Short Hills Mall. In a few days McGonigal would be flying to Vienna for some meetings. It was cold in Vienna. McGonigal needed to buy a winter coat.

A few days earlier, McGonigal had asked Guerriero to join him for the trip. An all-expenses-paid vacation, he said, would help take her mind off pressing health issues. She had a cancer diagnosis and a double mastectomy scheduled in a few weeks.

McGonigal did not say that Agron would be coming along and that someone else would be paying for their flights and hotels. Guerriero would learn about that later, from the indictments.

That night, driving in the G-car, Guerriero found McGonigal to be quiet, a bundle of nervous energy. On their way to the mall, Guerriero asked him to make a quick stop at a strip mall. She had to pick up a print job at Staples. She went in, picked it up, and returned to the car, where McGonigal was waiting.

“I ran into the liquor store,” she recalled him saying. He took out a tiny bottle of vodka, the size that’s offered on airplanes, and took a sip. Then he screwed the top back on, dropped the bottle in the cupholder, and pulled out into traffic.

Guerriero was surprised. McGonigal liked to have a drink — martinis, sometimes the better part of a bottle of wine with dinner — but rarely to excess and never while driving.

“What are you doing?” she shouted. “You can’t drink and drive in a G-car!” 

“It’s fine,” McGonigal replied. “I’ve had a long day. I needed something to calm my nerves.” By the time they got to the mall, he had finished it off.

Guerriero did not know it at the time, but McGonigal had good reason to be nervous. The Vienna trip would be a mix of official and personal business. The indictments indicate the personal side had not been disclosed, as is required, on the advance paperwork McGonigal filed with the FBI. McGonigal, the indictments say, had not informed the FBI that someone else was paying his way or that he would be having off-the-books meetings to drum up private business, even as he continued to hold down his job at the bureau.

Guerriero still doesn’t understand why McGonigal invited her to Vienna. Maybe he wanted someone he trusted to come along for the ride.

But she said no.

“I can’t go to Vienna,” Guerriero told him. “I got too much shit to do. I don’t even have a valid passport. Mine’s expired.”

Now he was alone.

Update: February 8, 2023 — This story has been updated to remove an assertion that Deripaska’s charity did not respond to questions; as the story noted, a spokesperson for Deripaska did provide comment. The story has also been updated to reflect the spokesperson’s additional claim that Deripaska never hired McGonigal or Shestakov.

Mattathias Schwartz is a senior correspondent at Insider and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. He can be reached at mschwartz@insider.com and schwartz79@protonmail.com.

“[McGonigal] may have knowledge of or have participated in political activities to damage then-candidate Hillary Clinton and help then-candidate Donald Trump,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island Democrat, wrote in a letter in February to Attorney General Merrick Garland. 

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, demanded that Mr. Garland brief lawmakers about Mr. McGonigal’s involvement in the Trump-Russia investigation.

In a separate letter to Mr. Garland, Mr. Durbin noted that FBI Director James B. Comey named Mr. McGonigal as a special agent in charge just weeks before the bureau announced in October 2016 that there was no clear link between Mr. Trump and Russia.

“The committee remains in the dark about the true extent to which Mr. McGonigal’s alleged misconduct may have impacted these highly sensitive matters,” Mr. Durbin wrote.

The theories also have been promoted by far-left podcaster Keith Olbermann and in liberal publications, including The New Republic. 

Thomas J. Baker, a 33-year veteran of the bureau who also worked as an FBI investigator, called the Democrats’ accusations “a real stretch.” He said the claims underscore the FBI’s difficulty in shaking off accusations of political taint from both sides.

“Everything with the bureau has become so political that the public and politicians have lost confidence in it, willing to suspect anything from the bureau and believe the worst,” he said. 

The conspiracy theory gained traction among the left after Mr. McGonigal was criminally charged last month. He is accused of illegally taking money from a former Albanian intelligence official and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who has been sanctioned by the U.S.

Prosecutors say Mr. McGonigal broke the law by accepting money from Mr. Deripaska in exchange for investigating a rival oligarch and removing him from the sanctions list. 

All told, Mr. McGonigal is charged with money laundering, violating U.S. sanctions and conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions.

 

The indictment unsealed in Washington said Mr. McGonigal, while working for the bureau, took $225,000 in secret cash payments from a person who once served with Albanian intelligence. At the official’s request, Mr. McGonigal opened a criminal investigation into foreign lobbying in which the former Albanian intelligence employee was a confidential informant.

 

Prosecutors also have accused Mr. McGonigal of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from Mr. Deripaska and forging signatures to keep those payments secret.

 

It is those ties to Mr. Deripaska that have sparked theories that Mr. McGonigal was working at the behest of Moscow to elect and protect Mr. Trump. No evidence has ever emerged that Mr. Trump is a Russian asset, and special counsel Robert Mueller concluded in 2019 that his campaign did not collude with Russia.

Alleged sabotage of Clinton campaign 

As the first part of the conspiracy theory goes, Mr. McGonigal would have been in a position to leak information about the laptop of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner. He was being investigated for unrelated accusations of sexting with a minor. He eventually pleaded guilty and received a 21-month prison term.

 

Just weeks before the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Comey promoted Mr. McGonigal as special agent in charge of the New York field office’s counterintelligence division.

Democrats say that would have put him in a position to leak information about Mr. Weiner’s laptop, which was found to contain classified information from Mrs. Clinton’s private email server. Mr. Weiner’s then-wife, Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aide, had forwarded “hundreds of thousands of emails, some of which contained classified information” to him, according to Senate testimony from Mr. Comey. 

The discovery of the classified materials prompted Mr. Comey to reopen the FBI investigation into Mrs. Clinton just days ahead of the election. Some Democrats say the development handed Mr. Trump a surprise victory.

 

In Mr. Whitehouse’s letter to the attorney general, he notes that Mr. McGonigal was in the New York office when Trump ally Rudolph W. Giuliani announced that “big surprises” about Mrs. Clinton would be forthcoming and hinted that it would come from the FBI’s New York field office.

 

An FBI press release dated Oct. 4, 2016, raises questions about whether Mr. McGonigal was even in the New York field office at the time of Mr. Giuliani’s announcement.

The press release says Mr. McGonigal, who was working in the bureau’s Washington field office, would assume his New York role at the end of October. That could have put him in New York after Mr. Giuliani made his claims in October 2016. 

In 2021, the Justice Department’s inspector general said it did not find any evidence that the FBI agents improperly tipped off Mr. Guiliani about the Clinton investigation.

Crossfire Hurricane role 

The second part of the conspiracy theory alleges that Mr. McGonigal put his thumb on the scales of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation to keep Mr. Trump and his allies in the clear.

Mr. McGonigal was involved in Crossfire Hurricane. He forwarded a tip in the case and played a role in the investigation into Trump campaign aide Carter Page, according to a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general. A top Justice Department official told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020 that Mr. McGonigal was instrumental in launching the Russia collusion investigation.

Mr. Deripaska, who was paying Mr. McGonigal, also had a tight relationship with Paul Manafort, who briefly served as Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman. 

Mr. Manafort is accused of passing secret campaign information to Konstantin Kilimnik, a suspected Russian intelligence officer who worked for Mr. Deripaska.

A 2020 report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that Mr. Manafort implemented influence operations in Ukraine on behalf of Mr. Deripaska from 2004 to 2009.

In 2018, Mr. Mueller indicted Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kilimnik on conspiracy charges, witness tampering and obstruction of justice. Mr. Manafort was convicted of financial crimes, and Mr. Kilimnik remains just out of the reach of U.S. law enforcement. 

Given his role in Crossfire Hurricane, Mr. McGonigal would have been in a position to sabotage at least a portion of the investigation with disinformation, Democrats say.

 

“Mr. McGonigal oversaw many sensitive counterintelligence investigations, including investigations involving individuals he has now been accused of working to benefit. Mr. Deripaska was central to Paul Manafort’s ties to Russia,” Mr. Durbin wrote to Mr. Garland.

No public evidence has emerged that Mr. McGonigal worked to undermine the Russia collusion investigation. A comprehensive Justice Department inspector general’s report on the Russia probe barely mentions him.

Republicans are quick to point out that Mr. Deripaska also has ties with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored an unverified, salacious dossier claiming Mr. Trump conspired with Russia to win the 2016 election. Most of Mr. Steele’s dossier has since been debunked. 

It’s unclear why Mr. McGonigal would work to undermine an investigation he was key in opening. In September 2020, FBI Deputy Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he received an email from Mr. McGonigal about former campaign figure George Papadopoulos that “served as basis for the opening of the case.”

The investigation was handed off to Mr. Mueller’s team in 2017, and Mr. McGonigal left the FBI in 2018 before the probe was finished.

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If you haven’t heard the name “Charles McGonigal” before, that’s how it’s supposed to be. Top FBI officials in Counterintelligence aren’t supposed to make the news and become household names.

But yesterday, McGonigal was indicted by grand juries in New York and Washington D.C. and arrested for secretly working for Russian oligarch and close Putin ally Oleg Deripaska, and for taking money from an Albanian intelligence agent.

McGonigal is charged with violating economic sanctions, money laundering and conspiracy.

It’s hard to overstate how damaging this arrest is to the already tainted reputation of the FBI. Los Angeles Times legal columnist Harry Litman noted the arrest has left the FBI community “completely stunned” and wondering “if they can get to a guy like McGonigal, whom can’t they get to?”

And as NBC Investigations analyst Tom Winters put it, “Taking a big picture and the totality of all of this, this is somebody whose job was to investigate Oleg Deripaska” and now “he’s a potential foreign agent.”

But beyond the shock of the arrest, things get way murkier when you rewind the clock, especially knowing what we now do about McGonigal’s willingness to do Deripaska’s bidding.

Much as I hate to reopen questions around the 2016 election, McGonigal’s arrest and the revelations about his later ties to the Russian oligarch require it. And I can see how Hillary Clinton might be left with an inescapable “I knew it” feeling.

Let’s dive into why.

McGonigal was in a position to do serious harm to Clinton in 2016.

McGonigal was no run-of-the-mill FBI agent. He was the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office’s counterintelligence division—in other words, the official who was supposed to be investigating the Russians, not crawling into bed with them, even if it happened after he left the FBI.

His willingness to accept illegal employment from Deripaska calls his integrity, patriotism, and motives while acting as FBI division head directly into question.

The timing of his initial appointment is also causing raised eyebrows, now that we know what we know. On October 4, 2016, a month before the presidential election between Clinton and Donald Trump, then FBI Director James Comey appointed McGonigal to that key counterintelligence position in the New York office.

It’s important to point out here that around the time of the 2016 election, that particular field office really had it out for Hillary Clinton. Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch spoke candidly about the animosity of that office toward Clinton when she was interviewed by investigators looking into Comey’s actions while FBI director.

Comey had told Lynch that it had become clear that “there is a cadre of senior people in New York who have a deep and visceral hatred of Secretary Clinton,” and that “it was surprising to him or stunning to him.” Comey said that “it was hard to manage because these were agents that were very, very senior.”

Did those “very, very senior” agents include McGonigal? Legal and political observers have taken note of the timing of McGonigal‘s appointment, including historian Michael Beschloss, who observed that Comey made the appointment in late October of 2016, only “[t]hree weeks before his fateful announcement” that he was reopening the criminal case against Hillary Clinton.

Josh Marshall of the influential Talking Points Memo also couldn’t help but notice the timing, tweeting:

“Weird. McGonigal got put in charge of CI [Counterintelligence] at the NYC field office like almost to the day they reopened the Clinton emails case.”

Marshall called these circumstances “ironies,” and that’s the correct term because it’s highly unlikely that the case itself reopened because of McGonigal.

There simply wouldn’t have been time for him to make such an order. But two other major things happened shortly after that appointment that are worth highlighting.

Leaks out of the NY Office forced Comey’s hand.

If Comey had never gone public with the fact that his office had reopened the Clinton email investigation, there would have been no impact on her standing in the national election.

But leaks about the investigation were coming straight out of that New York office, and Comey later admitted that it was the leaks that required him to get ahead of the news.

As The Atlanticreported, Comey told investigators he believed partisan agents in New York might try to put their finger on the political scale:

“My worry was, I have to be careful that people in New York aren’t by virtue of political enthusiasm, trying to take action that will generate noise that will have an impact on the election.”

Former FBI counsel James Baker echoed that fear, specifically about a likely leak of the reopened investigation:

“We were quite confident that … somebody is going to leak this fact. That we have all these emails. That, if we don’t put out a letter, somebody is going to leak it.”

Rudy Giuliani, himself a former federal prosecutor, was openly hinting that he had inside information from the FBI’s New York office, telling Fox News a week before Comey’s disclosure to Congress that there was a “pretty big surprise” coming. (Giuliani later denied he had spoken to any FBI agents.)

In short, Comey felt compelled to get ahead of the leaks driven by partisan pressures from the New York Office. Was McGonigal among those partisans? Was he the source of the leak? And worse still, was he in any way influenced by foreign adversaries?

While there isn’t yet any evidence that McGonigal was compromised by the Russians at the time, his subsequent illegal behavior with Deripaska should raise big concerns.

After all, by the time he started illegally working on Deripaska’s behalf, it was well-established that Deripaska had worked with convicted Russian asset Paul Manafort, the “voluntary” head of the Trump campaign who also provided internal battleground state polling data to Russian intelligence.

McGonigal knew what kind of danger Deripaska presented to America when he accepted a job from him, but he chose money over loyalty to country.

Was McGonigal a source of disinformation?

On October 31, 2016, unnamed sources in FBI counterintelligence led The New York Times to publish a big story with the headline “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.”

It reported, rather maddeningly and incorrectly:

“Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.”

“And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.”

The identity of these “law enforcement officials” was left undisclosed, but the damage was done. Voters who had any doubts about Trump and his links to Russia now had nothing less than The New York Times assuring them that the FBI had found nothing despite months of investigation.

Historian Beschloss again took note of the timing of the Times article.

“This was 8 days before the Trump-Clinton election.”

“It was 27 days after Comey named McGonigal to head Counterintelligence for FBI’s New York Field Office.”

Could McGonigal have been one of the Times’ sources for this misleading reporting, and could he have falsely shaped the narrative here? It’s hard to be sure of anything, given what little we still know, and the Times isn’t likely to ever reveal its sources.

But it would be unwise to discount the possibility that the long hand of Russian money and influence may have played some role.

Political commentator Kaivan Shroff captured the cold fury of many upon connecting the dots:

“Just to be clear, when the New York Times reported that the FBI saw ‘no link between Trump and Russia’—a week before the 2016 election—the FBI agent who was just arrested over ties to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska was heading up the investigation.”

“Just an absolute scandal.”

When those in charge of our investigations and our security are themselves so readily compromised, public faith in our institutions takes a nosedive, and with good reason.

The arrest of McGonigal is an important step toward restoring integrity to the Department, but to get back there we will need a thorough and honest accounting of what damage McGonigal did while in his position, especially to the electoral chances of Hillary Clinton.

If the answer after a full inquiry is that he was not part of the cabal in the New York field office bent on bringing her down, then we should know that as well.

But right now it is more than understandable why mistrust and anger among Democrats runs deep, given the guy in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation in New York illegally went to work for the Russians and even may have played a significant part in Hillary Clinton’s narrow electoral defeat.

It was arguably the most consequential “October Surprise” in the history of American presidential elections. In the waning days of the 2016 race, with polls showing Hillary Clinton clinging to a lead over Donald Trump, two last-minute stories broke that rekindled on-the-fence voters’ ethical doubts about Democrat Clinton and quashed a budding scandal around her GOP rival.

Except the “October Surprise” was no surprise to one key player: Rudolph Giuliani, the ex-New York City mayor and Trump insider who later became the 45th president’s attorney. Late that month, Giuliani told Fox News that the trailing Republican nominee had “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.”

Just two days later, then-FBI Director James Comey revealed the bureau had reopened its probe into Clinton’s emails, based on the possible discovery of new communications on a laptop belonging to disgraced New York politico Anthony Weiner. The news jolted the campaign with a particularly strong boost from The New York Times, which devoted two-thirds of its front page to the story — and the notion it was a major blow to Clinton’s prospects.

The supposed bombshell — it turned out there was nothing incriminating or particularly new on the laptop — wasn’t the only FBI-related story that boosted Trump in the homestretch of the 2016 campaign. On Oct. 31, citing unnamed “intelligence sources,” The Times reported, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” That article defused a budding scandal about the GOP White House hopeful — at least until after Trump’s shock election on Nov. 8, 2016.

There are many reasons for Trump’s victory, but experts have argued the FBI disclosures were decisive. In 2017, polling guru Nate Silver argued that the Comey probe disclosure cost Clinton as many as 3-4 percentage points and at least 1 percentage point, which would have flipped Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and handed her the Electoral College.

Clearly, the wrong investigation was reopened.

The stunning corruption charges against a top FBI spymaster who assumed a key role in the bureau’s New York office just weeks before 2016′s “October Surprise” — an agent who by 2018 was known to be working for a Vladimir Putin-tied Russian oligarch — should cause America to rethink everything we think we know about the Trump-Russia scandal and how it really happened that Trump won that election.

The government allegations against the former G-man Charles McGonigal (also accused of taking a large foreign payment while still on the FBI payroll) and the outsize American influence of the sanctioned-and-later-indicted Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska — also tied to U.S. pols from Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell — should make us also look again at what was really up with the FBI in 2016.

How coordinated was the effort in that New York field office to pump up the ultimate nothingburger about Clinton’s emails while pooh-poohing the very real evidence of Russian interference on Trump’s behalf, and who were the agents behind it? What was the role, if any, of McGonigal and his international web of intrigue? Was the now-tainted McGonigal a source who told The New York Times that fateful October that Russia was not trying to help Trump win the election — before the U.S. intelligence community determined the exact opposite? If not McGonigal, just who was intentionally misleading America’s most influential news org, and why?

Why does it matter? The seemingly untouchable 45th president was in New Hampshire and South Carolina last weekend, campaigning to become the 47th. The man that critics call “Moscow Mitch” McConnell could return as majority leader in that same election. And Putin’s obsession with Ukraine — always a focus of his U.S. interference and Trump dealings — has become a war with dire global implications.

More importantly, this never-ending scandal has demolished our trust in so many institutions — an FBI that seems to have corrupted an election, a Justice Department that covered up those deeds instead of exposing them, and, yes, a New York Times that enabled several lies instead of exposing them.

Congress and Merrick Garland’s Justice Department can shine a true light on this giant mess, but there’s a reason I’m picking on The New York Times today. The Times can finally apologize for the sins of 2016, expose exactly what went wrong, and then reveal the rest so this kind of disaster never happens again. It owes it to American democracy.

Will Bunch is a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist. (c)2023 The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.