Category: Saved Web Pages – Audio Posts

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.

Charles McGonigal, former special agent in charge of the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York, leaves court, Monday, Jan. 23, 2023, in New York. The former high-ranking FBI counterintelligence official has been indicted on charges he helped a Russian oligarch, … Charles McGonigal, former special agent in … more >

“[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.

Click to Read More and View Comments

Click to Hide

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.

Meticulous. Reticent. Clever, but never showy about it. Ever the watcher.

It was 1989. The young Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was a KGB officer in the then-East German city of Dresden, and it was one of history’s pivotal moments.

The Berlin Wall had fallen. The repressive government of one of the Soviet Union’s most prized satellite states was collapsing, a prelude to the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. itself. The reunification of East and West Germany was just months away.

East Berliners get help from West Berliners as they climb the Berlin Wall early in the morning Nov. 10, 1989, after people started to dismantle the barrier.

Putin’s five-year sojourn in Dresden, which abruptly ended in 1990, has come under renewed scrutiny as the 70-year-old Russian president prosecutes an increasingly brutal and bloody war in Ukraine — a neighboring sovereign state that for the last 16 months has fiercely resisted a total Russian takeover.

Against that backdrop, analysts point to the lingering legacy of Putin’s Dresden years: His determination never to allow domestic dissent to turn to a tidal surge like the one he witnessed. The realization that even a powerful elite wielding a ruthless police apparatus could suddenly find itself vulnerable. His grievance-laced dreams of a Russian empire greater than the one that slipped away before his eyes.

“It was an important time in his life,” said Douglas Selvage, a historian who works at the main Berlin archive of the Stasi, the onetime East German secret police. “It probably contributed to his sense of how everything could fall apart.”

But Selvage also said the Dresden interlude had been romanticized and mythologized — not least by Russian media, abetted by Putin himself.

“A lot of legends,” Selvage said, “have grown out of that time.”

::

The villa at #4 Angelika Street, in a suburban district overlooking the River Elbe, housed the KGB’s Dresden headquarters. Today, surrounded by a wall and garden, it’s an office building owned by a German foundation; visitors are not welcome.

The villa that housed the KGB headquarters in the eastern German city of Dresden. Vladimir Putin worked there from 1985 to 1990.

The opposite is true at the former Dresden Stasi headquarters, less than 100 yards away across a busy thoroughfare. The complex is now a museum and memorial to Stasi victims, with dank cellblocks and labyrinthine corridors carefully preserved, together with artifacts like paintings and poetry depicting the suffering of detainees.

“Putin would have been in and out of here all the time,” said Christine Buecher, who organizes events at the museum. “Those kinds of comings and goings were very much normal.”

In addition to attending meetings and ceremonial events, Putin probably would have frequented a Stasi canteen in the building, adjacent to a second-story cellblock. A typewritten menu from the late 1980s, kept by the museum, features comfort food like liverwurst and sauerkraut, or a Russian salad for 77 pfennigs — around 50 cents, if the East German currency had been convertible, which it was not.

In 2018, the discovery of a Stasi identity card issued to Putin caused a media sensation in Germany. It was found in the Dresden archives of the Ministry for State Security, as it was formally known. But there’s no evidence Putin was ever a Stasi operative, said historian Selvage.

Instead, he said, the card was probably issued because Putin and his colleagues were granted routine access to Stasi facilities that honeycombed Dresden. The two agencies had a sometimes-overlapping workload — trying, for example, to recruit international students at Dresden’s Technical University as informants.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, greets Lazar Matveev, the former head of the KGB intelligence group in Dresden, on his 90th birthday in 2017 on the outskirts of Moscow.

Like workers everywhere, Putin could appreciate a short commute. He and his family — Lyudmila, the wife he later divorced, and two small daughters, now grown — lived in a large multistory apartment complex a few minutes from the Angelika Street villa, reached via a parkland path.

It was a comfortable lifestyle for the young family, compared with the living standards of ordinary East Germans — though a Russian-language memoir later quoted Lyudmila as observing that Stasi employees, numerous among the neighbors, were usually assigned the bigger and nicer units.

When Putin and his family decamped from Dresden for the last time, they took with them, according to multiple accounts, a symbol of suburban plenty: a used washing machine, given to them by German friends.

In an odd historic echo, invading Russian troops have so often looted washing machines from Ukrainian homes in occupied cities and towns that the household appliance quickly became a wartime meme — an emblem, to Ukrainians, of a foe that was terrifying and destructive, yet also somehow faintly ridiculous.

People living now in Putin’s old apartment complex take in stride the historic connection to a onetime nest of spies, and the notoriety that was to accrue to the onetime tenant.

A photo displayed at a former prison and office of the East German Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, in Dresden, shows Vladimir Putin among senior Soviet and East German military and security officers.

“Putin? He was the next block over!” called out a man who was leaning out his second-story window and washing it. Asked his thoughts about the Russian leader, he paused, shook his head and pulled the window firmly shut.

::

Was Putin some kind of super-spy, or more of a paper-pushing bureaucrat?

Over the years, German news reports, and some biographies, attributed various daring feats of espionage to the future Russian president. But some recent depictions are more in line with “The Office” than “The Americans” — tedious, repetitive workplace tasks as opposed to gripping espionage drama.

The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel this month published a deep-dive investigation casting doubt on accounts that Putin was assigned covert activities such as arming and advising the militant Red Army Faction across the border in West Germany.

“The literature is full of speculation about Hollywood-like special missions in which Putin is alleged to have been involved,” the article said. “Even today, there is no convincing evidence for these stories.”

The magazine even undercut one of the most widely repeated stories about Putin’s time in Dresden — his alleged personal confrontation with a small group of demonstrators who approached the villa on Dec. 5, 1989, after a crowd had stormed the Stasi headquarters.

Der Spiegel said there was no proof he was even there that night — but observers often cite the overrunning of the nearby Stasi building in explaining Putin’s visceral response even to peaceful demonstrations, such as Ukrainians’ pro-democracy protests in 2014.

While versions of tumultuous events in Dresden grow more contested with passing years, character studies of Putin drawn from contemporaries’ recollections tend to be more consistent. They paint a portrait of a young officer who was rarely the center of attention, but always kept careful track of those around him: a quick study, but a person who shrouded his capabilities. The one at the edge of the picture frame.

Putin biographer Masha Gessen called Putin “the man without a face,” alluding not only to his resolutely nondescript quality, but his canniness in using it to conceal sharp-edged ambition and deep-seated venality.

Gessen wrote that Putin was disappointed with a humdrum posting in Dresden, considered a backwater, but that then and later, his colorlessness served him well. Years afterward, as he ascended Russia’s political ranks, the lack of a distinctive public persona gave him another key advantage: the ability to craft an image of his own choosing.

Putin’s most prominent domestic critic, the imprisoned Alexei Navalny, said the seeds of cronyism and corruption were planted in Dresden, where Putin rubbed shoulders with figures who were later to become part of the Russian financial elite that propped him up politically. They included Sergei Chemezov, who went on to head Russia’s arms export agency, and Nikolai Tokarev, who would become chief of the Russian pipeline company Transneft.

“Putin failed to get rich or further his career in Dresden,” Navalny, who nearly died in a 2020 poisoning blamed on the Kremlin, said the following year in an investigative video. “But here he met people who became his main ‘wallets.’”

In Dresden, Putin defined his “life principles,” Navalny said: “First, always say one thing and do another — lies and hypocrisy are the most effective methods. Second, corruption is the basis of trust: Your closest friends are those who have been stealing and cheating alongside you for many years. And third, there is no such thing as too much money.”

For long after, Dresden would remain a touchstone. On a 2006 visit described as a homecoming of sorts, Putin dropped into a local cafe and viewed a landmark cathedral that had been wrecked in the Allied bombing of 1945, now newly rebuilt.

Such a visit, of course, would be impossible today. After the Russian president was indicted in March for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, Germany said he would be arrested if he set foot in the country.

::

As a teenage apprentice in Dresden, the Berlin-based artist Markus Draper, now 54, often passed by the house on Angelika Street. The pale-yellow villa came to loom large in his imagination.

Earlier this year, a well-known Berlin gallery mounted an installation by Draper featuring a hyper-realistic diorama of the historic villa. A filmstrip-style backdrop cycles through images and events of the Cold War, culminating in Putin’s Dresden interlude. The artwork was galvanized by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but Draper had toyed for years with the idea of looking at the origins of the Soviet empire’s unraveling, and the lessons Putin drew from it.

German artist Markus Draper’s installation, titled “The House Near a Deep Forest,” shown in a Berlin gallery this year, painstakingly rendered the KGB villa in Dresden in miniature. Russian President Vladimir Putin worked at the villa from 1985 to 1990.

Draper called the KGB building a constant amid the Cold War intrigue that swirled around it and across the Soviet bloc. “To me,” he said, “it’s a kind of hinge, this house.”

Before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Draper had good reason to be nervous in the vicinity of Angelika Street. Still a teenager, he had begun to move in clandestine anti-government circles and was well aware of the long arm of the Stasi and the KGB.

“If I had been a little older, or the Wall had fallen later, I would almost certainly have gone to prison,” he said.

Draper’s installation, titled “The House Near a Deep Forest,” painstakingly rendered the KGB villa in miniature, surrounded by bare trees and seemingly snowy ground. Surreal elements encroach: a giant fox peers from behind the house, outsized rodents eye a hunk of raw meat in the yard.

An accompanying audio narrated by a fly on the wall — a nod, the artist said, to Putin likening anti-war Russians to annoying flying midges — is told in the manner of a dark fairy tale. But as with so many allegories, its meaning is many-layered.

Like many Germans who grew up in the former East, Draper expresses a measure of ambivalence about life in reunified Germany. Although happy to have escaped a lifetime in a police state, he is sometimes unsettled now, he said, by the casual cruelties and inequities of Western capitalism.

“Monsters are real, but created,” he said. “And history is a deep forest.”

::

If the future Russian president’s career and character were indelibly marked by his time in Dresden and witnessing East Germany’s fall, its aftermath may have helped foster some fundamental miscalculations on Putin’s part about Germany and the wider West as he prepared, decades later, to try to subdue Ukraine by force.

As his armies embarked on the full-scale invasion of February 2022, Putin seemingly believed that a transactional, pragmatic Germany would not meaningfully challenge him.

“Putin considered Germany too dependent on Russian energy, too weak militarily, and too business-minded to mount any significant resistance to his war,” analysts Liana Fix and Caroline Kapp wrote in a paper for the Council on Foreign Relations marking the war’s first anniversary. “He was wrong.”

And Germany, even more than other Western partners, for years misread the Russian leader, many analysts believe — thinking that his priority lay in reaping the economic benefits of cordial relations and that Putin would not act in a way to threaten those ties.

Putin’s rise to top leadership had come scarcely a decade after he and his family departed Dresden in 1990 for his native Leningrad, which was soon to revert to its pre-Communist name.

Photos of Russian President Vladimir Putin are displayed at a Dresden bar, Am Thor, in 2018.

In St. Petersburg — an old royal city like Dresden, and like it a baroque riverside jewel where behind-the-scenes political machinations sometimes rivaled the import of events in a drab capital — his alliances soon set his climb in motion.

He became an advisor to St. Petersburg’s mayor, climbing to the position of deputy mayor and head of a trade panel as billions of dollars were pouring into Russia from overseas. In 1996, he moved to Moscow and up the Kremlin ranks, and in 1998, then-President Boris Yeltsin appointed him head of the KGB’s domestic successor, the FSB. The next year, Yeltsin tapped him as prime minister, a way station to the presidency.

Amid Putin’s seeming desire for rapprochement with the West, though, there were menacing signs.

In 2001, the year after he assumed the Russian presidency, Putin addressed the German Bundestag, or parliament, in proficient German — the first such appearance by a Russian head of state.

Martin Aust, a professor of East European history and culture at the University of Bonn, recalled Putin’s conciliatory language about a common European home — but also a strident defense of the scorched-earth Russian military campaign in the breakaway republic of Chechnya, which now seems like an ominous prelude to the destruction of Ukrainian cities and the targeting of civilians.

“Everybody was so impressed by the Russian president speaking German that nobody wanted to really pay attention to other things he said,” said Aust.

“People heard what they wanted to hear,” he said. “And now we are paying the price.”