Charles McGonigal and the October Surprise 2016 - Audio Review (1 Hour 45 min.) of the Selected Articles - 12.16.23 - INVESTIGATE THE INVESTIGATORS!
-James Kallstrom, the de facto FBI chief at the time, his protege Charles McGonigal, and others (Giuliani? Erik Prince? Who else?), entering the CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY, orchestrated the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal and insertion of emails into his laptop, thus manufacturing the… pic.twitter.com/1vWTFKMkjN
— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) December 16, 2023
Audio Review of the Selected Articles
In the course of writing two books on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the same question occurred to me again and again: How is it possible that I knew all sorts of stuff about Donald Trump, and the FBI didn’t seem to have a clue? Or if they did, why weren’t they doing anything with it?
Charles McGonigal and the October Surprise 2016
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In the course of writing two books on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the same question occurred to me again and again: How is it possible that I knew all sorts of stuff about Donald Trump, and the FBI didn’t seem to have a clue? Or if they did, why weren’t they doing anything with it?
Specifically, I knew that:
- Starting in 1980, an alleged “spotter agent” for the KGB began cultivating Trump as a new asset for Soviet intelligence.
- The Russian mafia laundered millions of dollars through Donald Trump’s real estate by purchasing condos in all-cash transactions through anonymous corporations that did not disclose real ownership.
- Trump Tower was a home away from home for Vyacheslav Ivankov, one of the most brutal leaders of the Russian mafia, and at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the mafia held the deeds to, lived in, or ran alleged criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties.
- Trump was some $4 billion in debt when the Russians came to bail him out via the Bayrock Group, a real estate firm that was largely staffed, owned, and financed by Soviet émigrés who had ties to Russian intelligence and/or organized crime.
Much of my material came from FBI documents. A lot came from open-source databases. It made no sense. There was an astounding amount of data on the public record. The FBI had launched enormous investigations of the Russian mafia in the 1980s. They had staked out a New York electronics store that was a haven for KGB officers. They knew that’s where the Trump Organization bought hundreds of TV sets. They had their eyes on Ivankov and other Russian mobsters who were denizens of Trump’s casinos and bought and sold his condos through shell companies. They had to know that Trump laundered money for and provided a base of operations for the Russian mafia, which was, after all, a de facto state actor tied to Russian intelligence. They had to know that the Russians repeatedly bailed Trump out when he was bankrupt. They had to know that Russia owned him.
I’m well aware of the strict secrecy that accompanies ongoing investigations as a matter of procedure. But once the Mueller Report was finally released, it became crystal clear that Robert Mueller’s investigation dealt only with criminal matters, not counterintelligence. Trump had been thoroughly compromised by Russia and was a grave threat to national security. But the FBI wasn’t doing anything about it!
One reason for that may have been that on far too many occasions, FBI men in sensitive positions ended up on the take from the very people they were supposed to be investigating. And on January 23, a bomb dropped: We learned that the latest of these is Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York, who ended up working for billionaire oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a major target in the Trump Russia investigation. McGonigal was indicted in Manhattan on charges of money laundering, violating U.S. sanctions, and other counts relating to his alleged ties to Deripaska. He was also indicted in Washington, where he was accused of concealing $225,000 he allegedly received from a New Jersey man employed long ago by Albanian intelligence.
McGonigal has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
McGonigal’s troubles began in late 2018, after his wife found out about his girlfriend, Allison Guerriero, who did not know that he was still married. “I was shocked,” Guerriero said, in an interview with Mattathias Schwartz for Business Insider. “I was very much in love with him, and I was so hurt.”
A few months later, Guerriero wrote an angry email about McGonigal to the man who had introduced them as a couple—William Sweeney, who just happened to be assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York City office. On a number of occasions, Guerriero had seen McGonigal leave huge amounts of cash around the house. At first, she thought it must be “buy money” for a sting operation or some other FBI procedure. Then she became suspicious. Among other things, she told Sweeney to look into McGonigal’s dealings in Albania, where McGonigal had traveled extensively and participated in transactions that later appeared in his indictments.
McGonigal had a stellar resume, including working on the Chelsea Manning–WikiLeaks investigation and on Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the bureau’s probe into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia.* Though he was not assigned to that operation when he moved to New York, running FBI counterintelligence in New York is a very special, highly sensitive position that affords unquestioned access to a spectacular array of international elites as well as highly sought-after information.
Similarly, Oleg Deripaska is not just another oligarch. Having emerged victorious from the brutal Aluminum Wars as a vital functionary of the Kremlin, he played a key role in financing Putin’s efforts to take over Ukraine from within via a political operation directed by Paul Manafort that put Putin surrogate Viktor Yanukovych in the Ukraine presidency in 2010. Manafort is alleged to have funneled $75 million into offshore accounts in return for his efforts.
What could be more perfect? Having installed a Putin surrogate in the Ukrainian presidency, in 2016, Manafort repeated that feat on a much bigger stage, as campaign manager guiding Trump into the White House. As Yale professor Timothy Snyder, a close observer of Ukraine, points out, “Russia was backing Trump in much the way that it had once backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.”
Which brings us back to McGonigal. After assuming his new job in October 2016, just a month before the election, he would have been in a position to undermine the bureau’s investigation into Deripaska and Manafort and to sabotage those investigations with disinformation. Similarly, he would have been in a position to leak the information about Anthony Weiner’s laptop that led to the reopening of the FBI probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails 11 days before the election. Finally, he was in a position to have been a source behind the false exculpatory news published by The New York Times on October 31, 2016, a week before the election, with the headline that seemed give to Trump a clean bill of health: “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.”
Of course, McGonigal wasn’t the only FBI official who went over to the dark side. In 1997, four years after he had retired and returned to private practice, FBI Director William Sessions traveled to Moscow and alerted the world to the horrifying dangers of the brutal Russian mafia. A decade later, however, Sessions had no qualms about taking on as a client Ukrainian-born Semion Mogilevich, the so-called “Brainy Don” behind the Russian mafia, whom the FBI had put on its “Ten Most Wanted” list.
Sessions’s successor as FBI director, Louis Freeh, followed a similar path. His pro-Putin benefactor was Prevezon Holdings, the giant real estate firm that won international attention in 2008 when Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky investigated a tax fraud case involving Prevezon. For his efforts on behalf of Bill Browder’s Hermitage Capital Management, Magnitsky was arrested, imprisoned, assaulted repeatedly, and beaten to death.
As FBI director, Freeh had warned that Russian organized crime posed a grave threat to the United States that far transcended mere criminality. It is not clear how much he was paid by Prevezon after he switched sides, but Freeh later bought a $9.38 million mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, just a 10-minute drive from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.
Then there was the late James Kallstrom, who ran the FBI’s New York office in the mid-’90s and oversaw successful investigations into both the Italian Mafia and later the Russian mob. Kallstrom had developed close friendships with two key players in the Trump-Russia saga. He worked closely with then–U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudy Giuliani in the investigation of the Cosa Nostra network that led to the famed Mafia Commission Trial of 1985–1986. Going even further back, Kallstrom had also been friends with Donald Trump since around 1973, when Kallstrom was putting together a Trump-funded parade in New York to honor Vietnam veterans.
“We just got to be friends,” said Kallstrom in a 2020 interview as the Trump reelection campaign was gearing up. (The interview was done for a 2020 documentary by David Carr-Brown about Trump and the FBI called An American Affair: Donald Trump and the FBI.)
“I went to a few dinners with him, we talked quite often. He was very, very supportive of the bureau. We lose an agent, or somebody gets shot up, he was always there to pay for the food or whatever it took.”
According to The New York Times, Kallstrom had founded the Marine Corps–Law Enforcement Foundation, a nonprofit that got more than $1.3 million from Trump, a strikingly generous offering from the usually parsimonious real estate magnate. Under Kallstrom’s aegis, the New York office became known as Trumpland. “I would say we were associates who liked each other,” Kallstrom added in the film. “He [Trump] would call me periodically and try to boost my morale, and then I’d call him when he was in the news and try to boost his morale. But he’s basically a very, very good person and with a big heart that does a lot of things, 90 percent of which nobody knows about. I mean, we stay in touch even today.”
But Trump being Trump, loyalty and generosity came with strings attached. “He [Trump] cultivated FBI people,” says Jeff Stein, editor of the intelligence newsletter SpyTalk, in An American Affair. “And that’s well-known behavior by people who swim in dangerous waters. They want to have a get-out-of-jail card, and that get-out-of-jail is having friendships or being a good source for the FBI.”
Kallstrom insisted that Trump was not an FBI informant, but another agent told Stein that Trump was known within the bureau as a “hip pocket” source—that is, someone who was not officially a source and therefore not in the FBI’s files.
Nevertheless, Trump appears to have gotten exactly what he sought. As it happens, Kallstrom worked closely with McGonigal and cultivated friendships not just with Trump but also with Rudy Giuliani. Together, they are suspected of being party to an internal campaign just before the 2016 election that spurred FBI Director James Comey to publicly announce he was reopening his investigation into Clinton’s emails.
Ultimately, of course, America found out that none of Hillary’s emails were classified. The Times story on the subject was misleading at best. The “reopened” investigation was short-lived and appeared to reflect the wishful thinking of the pro-Trump leaker in the bureau, whether it was McGonigal or someone else. Likewise, the Times headline declaring “no link” between Trump and Russia seemed to reflect wishful thinking on the parts of Kallstrom, Giuliani, and McGonigal—not reality.
But the damage had already been done. When voters cast their ballots on November 8, they thought that the FBI had given Trump a clean bill of health but was still investigating Hillary. McGonigal and company may well have made the difference in tipping the election to Trump.
So in the end, the FBI failed miserably at documenting Trump’s four-decade relationship with the Russian mafia and Russian intelligence, and all the financial transactions between them. The bureau failed miserably when it came to assessing how the former president might be compromised.
As Adam Schiff, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told The Washington Post in 2019, “Just as a reminder, this all began as an FBI counterintelligence investigation into whether people around then-candidate Trump were acting as witting or unwitting agents of a foreign power. So it began as a counterintelligence investigation, not as a criminal investigation.”
Which is a vital distinction. “It may not be a crime for a candidate for president to seek to make money from a hostile foreign power during an election and mislead the country about it,” Schiff added. “But the counterintelligence concerns go beyond mere violation of criminal law.
“They’re at one time not necessarily a criminal activity and at the same time potentially far more serious than criminal activity because you have the capacity to warp U.S. policy owing to some form of compromise.”
In other words, as the KGB and its successor agencies know all too well, intelligence operations are designed to operate within the law while exploiting the latitude afforded by lax regulations and lax enforcement.
A serious counterintelligence investigation, then, would presumably have asked how the KGB began its relationship with Trump and whether Trump had been compromised first by the Soviets and later by Russia. It would have asked how deeply Trump was indebted to the Russian mafia, because he had made a fortune by at the very least turning a blind eye as former Soviet officials laundered millions of dollars through his real estate. How much business had he done with operatives of Russian intelligence and/or the Russian mafia? Did Russia have kompromat on Trump? Was he a Russian asset? How far back did his relationship go? How much did he make laundering money for them? What about other members of his family, the Trump administration and campaign, other politicians?
All unanswered questions, leading to perhaps the biggest question of all: If the FBI won’t ask those questions, who will? It will be interesting to see whether they are answered when McGonigal come to trial or, perhaps, if he is the string that, when pulled, will unravel all sorts of unimaginable secrets.
* This article has been updated.
We are on the edge of a spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration, our national security, and ourselves.
On 23 January, we learned that a former FBI special agent, Charles McGonigal, was arrested on charges involving taking money to serve foreign interests. One accusation is that in 2017 he took $225,000 from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. Another charge is that McGonigal took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after McGonigal’s 2018 retirement from the FBI. Deripaska, a hugely wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, "Putin's favorite industrialist," was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had investigated in 2016. Deripaska has been under American sanctions since 2018. Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor, of Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
The reporting on this so far seems to miss the larger implications. One of them is that Trump’s historical position looks far cloudier. In 2016, Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) was a former employee of a Russian oligarch (Deripaska), and owed money to that same Russian oligarch. And the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was charged with investigating the Trump campaign's Russian connections then went to work (according to the indictment) for that very same Russian oligarch (Deripaska). This is obviously very bad for Trump personally. But it is also very bad for FBI New York, for the FBI generally, and for the United States of America.
Another is that we must revisit the Russian influence operation on Trump’s behalf in 2016, and the strangely weak American response. Moscow’s goal was to move minds and institutions such that Hillary Clinton would lose and Donald Trump would win. We might like to think that any FBI special agent would resist, oppose, or at least be immune to such an operation. Now we are reliably informed that a trusted FBI actor, one who was responsible for dealing with just this sort of operation, was corrupt. And again, the issue is not just the particular person. If someone as important as McGonigal could take money from foreigners while on the job at FBI New York, and then go to work for a sanctioned Russian oligarch he was once investigating, what is at stake, at a bare minimum, is the culture of the FBI's New York office. The larger issue is the health of our national discussions of politics and the integrity of our election process.
For me personally, McGonigal's arrest brought back an unsettling memory. In 2016, McGonigal was in charge of cyber counter-intelligence for the FBI, and was put in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. That April, I broke the story of the connection between Trump's campaign and Putin's regime, on the basis of Russian open sources. At the time, almost no one wanted to take this connection seriously. American journalists wanted an American source, but the people who had experienced similar Russian operations were in Russia, Ukraine, or Estonia. Too few people took Trump seriously; too few people took Russia seriously; too few people took cyber seriously; the Venn diagram overlap of people who took all three seriously felt very small. Yet there was also specific, nagging worry that my own country was not only unprepared, but something worse. After I wrote that piece and another, I heard intimations that something was odd about the FBI office in New York. This was no secret at the time. One did not need to be close to such matters to get that drift. And given that FBI New York was the office dealing with cyber counterintelligence, this was worrying
.
The reason I was thinking about Trump and Putin back in 2016 was a pattern that I had noticed in eastern Europe, which is my area of expertise. Between 2010 and 2013, Russia sought to control Ukraine using the same methods which were on display in 2016 in its influence operation in the United States: social media, money, and a pliable candidate for head of state. When that failed, Russia had invaded Ukraine, under the cover of some very successful influence operations. (If you find that you do not remember the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, it is very possibly because you were caught in the froth of Russian propaganda, spread through the internet, targeted to vulnerabilities.) The success of that propaganda encouraged Russia to intervene in the United States, using the same methods and institutions. This is what I was working on in 2016, when a similar operation was clearly underway in the United States.
To this observer of Ukraine, it was apparent that Russia was backing Trump in much the way that it had once backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, in the hopes of soft control. Trump and Yanukovych were similar figures: nihilistic, venal, seeking power to make or shield money. This made them vulnerably eager partners for Putin. And they had the same chief advisor: the American political consultant Paul Manafort. Russian soft control of Trump did not require endless personal meetings between the two principals. It just required mutual understanding, which was abundantly on display during the Trump presidency: think of the meeting between Putin and Trump in Helsinki in 2018, when the American president said that he trusted the Russian one and the Russian president said that he had supported the American one as a candidate. The acknowledgement of mutual debts was obvious already in 2016: Russian media talked up Trump, and Trump talked up Putin.
During Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, the rapprochement between Trump and Putin could be effected through intermediaries. An obvious intermediary was Paul Manafort: first he worked for the Russian oligarch Deripaska as a consultant to teach the Kremlin how to influence Americans. Then he worked for Russia's man in Ukraine Yanukovych, helping to get him elected. Finally Manafort worked for Trump, in the same capacity. You might remember Manafort's ties to Russia as revealed by the press in 2016. He (and Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr.) met with Russians in June 2016 in Trump Tower. Manafort had to resign as Trump's campaign manager that August after it become public he had received $12.7 million in cash while he was working Yanukovych and had not reported it.
By 2016, when he was Trump's campaign manager, Manafort owed Deripaska millions of dollars. At the end of their political collaboration, they had entered into a murky investment, at the end of which Deripaska was pursuing Manafort in court. Manafort acknowledged the debt to Deripaska, in the sense that he treated his work for Trump as a way to pay it off. As Trump's campaign manager, and as Deripaska's debtor, Manafort wrote to offer Deripaska "private briefings" on Trump's campaign. Through an intermediary, Manafort sent the Russians data from the Trump campaign, including campaign polling data about Americans that would be useful for influence operations. Manafort was asked to communicate a Russian plan for the partition of Ukraine to Trump. Manafort was hoping to pay Deripaska back in a currency other than money -- in Manafort's own words, "to get whole." (These and other details are in Road to Unfreedom.)
Thinking our way back to 2016, keeping in mind Russia's pattern of seeking soft control, recalling what we know now, let's now reconsider how the FBI treated the Trump-Putin connection that year. After Trump became president, he and some other Republicans claimed that the FBI had overreached by carrying out any sort of investigation at all. Now that McGonigal has been arrested, Trump has claimed that this somehow helps his case. Common sense suggests the opposite. The man who was supposed to investigate Russian support of Trump then took money from a Russian oligarch close to Putin, who was at one remove from the Trump campaign at the time? That is not at all a constellation that supports Trump's version of events. If the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was investigating Trump's connection to Russia was on the payroll of the Russian oligarch (Deripaska) to whom Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) owed millions of dollars and provided information, that does not look good for Trump. It looks hideous —but not just for Trump.
Anne Applebaum once put the question the right way: why didn't the FBI investigate Trump’s connections to Putin much earlier? In retrospect, it seems as though the FBI investigation of Trump’s campaign and its Russian connections in 2016 was not only late, but weirdly understated. Known as "Cross-Fire Hurricane," it defined the issue of Russian influence narrowly, as a matter of personal contact between Trump campaign officials and Russians. Meanwhile, as that investigation was going on, Russia was in the middle of a major social media campaign which, according to the leading scholar of presidential communications, made it possible for Trump to be elected. And that larger influence campaign was not investigated by the FBI, let alone countered.
If anything, it looks as though the New York office of the FBI, wittingly or unwittingly, rather pushed in the same direction than resisted Russia’s pro-Trump influence operation. As no doubt everyone remembers, Russia was able to phish for emails from institutions and people around Clinton, and used some of them, out of context, to create harmful fictional narratives about her. Simultaneously, there was a concern about Clinton's use of a private email server. In the popular mind, these two issues blurred together, with Trump's help. Trump asked the Russians to break into Clinton's email account, which they immediately tried to do. Nothing about Clinton's emails proved to be of interest. The FBI closed an investigation in July 2016, saying that there was no basis for criminal charges against Clinton.
Then, weirdly, FBI director James Comey announced on 28 October 2016, just ten days before the election, that the investigation into Clinton's emails had been reopened. This created a huge brouhaha that (as polls showed) harmed Clinton and helped Trump. The investigation was closed again after only eight days, on 6 November, with no charges against Clinton. But that was just two days before the election, and the damage was done. As I recall it, in the fury of those last forty-eight hours, no one noticed Comey's second announcement, closing the investigation and clearing Clinton. I was canvassing at the time, and the people I spoke to were still quite excited about the emails. Why would the FBI publicly reveal an investigation on a hot issue involving a presidential candidate right before an election? It now appears that Comey made the public announcement because of an illicit kind of pressure from special agents in the FBI New York office. Comey believed that they would leak the investigation if he did not announce it.
In office, Trump knew that Russia had worked to get him elected, but the standard of guilt was placed so high that he could defend himself by saying that he personally had not colluded. The Mueller Report, which I still don't believe many people have actually read, demonstrated that there was a multidimensional Russian influence campaign on behalf of Trump. The Trump administration countered by claiming that there was no evidence that Trump personally had been in contact with Putin personally. That defense was certainly misleading; but it was available in part because of the narrow scope of FBI investigations in 2016.
To be fair, FBI, along with Homeland Security, did investigate cyber. But this was after the election when it could make no difference; and in the report, cyber was defined narrowly, limited to phishing and the breach of systems. These are important issues, but they were not the main issue. What the phishing and breach of systems enabled was the main issue: a social media campaign that exploited emotions, including misogyny, to mobilize and demobilize voters.
Russia used the raw email in specific operations on Trump's behalf, for example by rescuing him from the Access Hollywood tapes scandal. Right after it emerged that Trump advocated sexual assault, Russia released a fictional scandal connecting Clinton to the abuse of children. That allowed Trump's followers to believe that whatever he did, she was worse; and the scandal was blunted. It verges on inconceivable that McGonigal was unaware of Russia's 2016 influence campaign on behalf of Trump. He knew the players; he is now alleged to have been employed by one of them. Even I was aware of the Russia's 2016 influence campaign. It became one of the subjects of my book Road to Unfreedom, which I finished the following year.
The Russian influence campaign was an issue for American counterintelligence. It is worth pausing to understand why, since it helps us to see the centrality of McGonigal and the meaning of this scandal. Intelligence is about trying to understand. Counterintelligence is about making that hard for others. Branching out from counterintelligence are the more exotic operations designed to make an enemy not only misunderstand the situation, but also act on the basis of misunderstandings, against the enemy's own interests. Such operations, which have been a Russian (or Soviet) specialty for more than a century, go under the name of "provocation," or "active measures," or "maskirovka." It is the task of counterintelligence to understand active measures, and prevent them from working. The Russian influence operation on behalf of Trump was an active measure that the United States failed to halt. The cyber element, the use of social media, is what McGonigal personally, with his background and in his position, should have been making everyone aware of. In 2016, McGonigal was section chief of the FBI's Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section. That October, he was put in charge of the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI's New York office.
And it was just then, in October 2016, that matters began to spin out of control. There were two moments, late in the presidential campaign, that decided the matter for Donald Trump. The first was when Russian rescued him from the Access Hollywood scandal (7 October). The second was FBI director James Comey's public announcement that he was reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails (28 October). The reason Comey made that public announcement at that highly sensitive time, ten days before the election, was not that he believed the public needed to know, nor that the matter was likely of great consequence. On his account, it was that he believed that FBI New York office was going to leak it anyway. Rudolph Giuliani had apparently already been the beneficiary of leaks; claimed to know in advance of what he called a "surprise" that would help Donald Trump, namely Comey's public announcement of the email investigation.
It looked at the time like Comey had been played by people in FBI New York who wanted Trump to win. Comey has now confirmed this, although his word choice might be different. And I did wonder, back then, if those special agents in New York, in turn, were being played. It was no secret at the time that FBI special agents in New York did not like Hillary Clinton. Making emotional commitments public is asking to be exploited. For people working in counterintelligence, this is a particularly unwise thing to do. The nature of working in counterintelligence is that, if you are not very good, you will find yourself in the vortex of someone else's active measure. Someone else will take advantage of your known vulnerabilities - your misogyny, perhaps, or your hatred of a specific female politician, or your entirely unjustified belief that a male politician is a patriotic messiah -- and get you to do something that feels like your own decision.
Now that we are informed that a central figure in the New York FBI office was willing to take money from foreign actors while on the job, this line of analysis bears some reconsideration. Objectively, FBI New York was acting in concert with Russia, ignoring or defining narrowly Russia's actions, and helping deliver the one-two punch to Clinton in October that very likely saved Trump. When people act in the interest of a foreign power, it is sometimes for money, it is sometimes because the foreign power knows something about them, it is sometimes for ideals, and it is sometimes for no conscious motive at all -- what one thinks of as one's own motives have been curated, manipulated, and directed. It seems quite possible -- I raise it as a hypothesis that reasonable people would consider -- that some mixture of these factors was at work at FBI New York in 2016.
All of these pieces of recent history must hang together in one way or another, and the fresh and shocking revelation of McGonigal's arrest is a chance for us to try to see how. Again, if these allegations are true, they will soon be surrounded by other heretofore unknown facts, which should lead us to consider the problem of election integrity in a general way. As of right now, the circumstantial evidence suggests that we consider the possibility that the FBI's reporting work in 2016, which resulted in a framing of the issue which was convenient for Trump and Russia, might have had something to do with the fact (per the indictments) that one of its lead agents was willing to take money from foreign actors while on the job. In connection with the leaks from FBI New York late in the 2016 campaign, which had the obvious effect of harming Clinton and helping Trump, McGonigal's arrest also demands a broader rethink of the scale of the 2016 disaster. How much was FBI New York, wittingly and unwittingly, caught up in a Russian active measure?
The charges have not been proven. If they are, it would be a bit surprising if the two offenses with which McGonigal is now charged were isolated events. There is a certain danger, apparently, in seeing them this way, and letting bygones be bygones. A U.S. attorney presenting the case said that McGonigal "should have known better"; that is the kind of thing one says when a child gets a bellyache after eating too much cotton candy at the county fair; it hardly seems to correspond to the gravity of the situation.
Failing to understand the Russian threat in the 2010s was a prelude to failing to understand the Russian threat in 2020s. And today Americans who support Russia in its war of atrocity tend to be members of the Trump family or people closely aligned with Trump, such as Giuliani. The people who helped Trump then take part in the war on Ukraine now. Consider one of the main architects of Russia's 2016 campaign to support Trump, Yevgeny Prigozhin. In 2016, his relevant position was as the head of the Internet Research Agency; they were the very people who (for example) helped spread the story about Clinton that rescued Trump from the Access Hollywood scandal. Without the Internet Research Agency covering his back, Trump would have had a much harder time in the 2016 election. Today, during the war in Ukraine, Prigozhin is now better known as the owner of Wagner, sending tens of thousands of Russian prisoners to kill and die.
The implications of the arrest go further. McGonigal had authority in sensitive investigations where the specific concern was that there was an American giving away other Americans to foreign governments. Untangling what that means will require a concern for the United States that goes beyond party loyalty. Unfortunately, some key political figures seem to be reacting to the news in the opposite spirit: suppressing the past, thereby destabilizing the future. Immediately after the McGonigal story broke, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy ejected Adam Schiff from the House intelligence committee, in a grand exhibition of indifference to national security. A veteran of that committee, Schiff has has taken the time to learn about Russia. It is grotesque to exclude him at this particular moment, in the middle of a war, and at the beginning of a spy scandal
McCarthy's recent move against Schiff also recalls 2016, sadly. Much as I did, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had an inkling, back then, that something was wrong with Trump and Russia. He expressed his view that June that Donald Trump was the Republican most likely to be taking money from Vladimir Putin. This showed a fine political instinct, sadly unmatched by any ethical follow-through. McCarthy did not share his suspicion with his constituents, nor do anything to follow through. He made the remark it in a conversation with other Republican House members, who did not disagree with him, and who apparently came to the conclusion the the risk of an embarrassment to their party was more important than American national security. Republicans in the Senate, sadly, took a similar view. They deliberately marginalized a CIA investigation that did address the Russian influence campaign for Trump. In September 2016, Mitch McConnell made it clear to the Obama administration that the CIA's findings would be treated as political if they were discussed in public. The Obama administration bowed to this pressure.
The Russian operation to get Trump elected in 2016 was real. We are still living under the specter of 2016, and we are closer to the beginning of the process or learning about it than we are to the end. Denying that it happened, or acting as though it did not happen, makes the United States vulnerable to Russian influence operations that are still ongoing, sometimes organized by the same people. It is easy to forget about 2016, and human to want to do so. But democracy is about learning from mistakes, and this arrest makes it very clear that we still have much to learn.
26 January 2023
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.
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.
“[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.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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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.
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.
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.
A onetime colleague of accused FBI turncoat Charles McGonigal says the former top counterintelligence official was an “egotistical narcissist” who frequently “screamed at subordinates,” resented the successes of underlings and may well have been part of an anti-Hillary Clinton clique in the New York office who helped pressure FBI Director James Comey to reopen the bureau’s investigation of her wayward emails only days before the 2016 election.
“His peers thought highly of him, and his managers did,” said the decorated former FBI agent, asking for anonymity in order to speak freely about the indictment that has rocked the close knit world of counterintelligence. “But a lot of people that worked for him couldn't stand him because he was such a dickhead. He just treated people really bad.”
“With Charlie, it was just ego and ambition,” he maintained.
If true, such a personality defect could help unlock the mystery of why such a high ranking and successful FBI official would risk falling under the spell of foreign agents. The news of McGonigal’s arrest certainly stunned a former top FBI official who in 2010 put McGonigal in charge of a “very sensitive” project (that he would not name because of security constraints). The New York Times reported years later, in 2018, that he’d been assigned back then to lead an FBI-CIA task force looking into the loss of CIA spies in China. Former agency officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee was arrested, but a complete answer to all the losses remains unsolved. In 2016, McGonigal was named Special Agent in Charge of the Counterintelligence Division for the New York Field Office.
The former FBI official says there was no reason not to promote McGonigal. “I did my own homework and checked on Charlie, who also was at the Washington Field Office, and everybody said, yeah, he is your guy,” he told SpyTalk. If there were complaints about McGonigal’s management style, they never bubbled up to him, he said. He recalled McGonigal as “extremely professional and businesslike.”
McGonigal was charged Monday in two separate corruption cases involving illegal cash receipts and money laundering —the first for allegedly taking secret payments of more than $225,000 from a former Albanian intelligence agent on behalf of a political party there, the other for trying to get Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska removed from U.S. sanctions. In that scheme, according to the Justice Department, McGonigal was paid $25,000 monthly via an account held by a former Russian diplomat who worked as an interpreter for the U.S. government named Sergey Shestakov.
McGonigal pleaded not guilty in New York Monday and had nothing to say as he exited the courthouse with his attorney.
Before his retirement in 2018, McGonigal had been in charge of investigating Deripaska, a billionaire crony of Vladimir Putin who has been implicated in several criminal acts over the years, including playing a role in covert Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.
The FBI’s New York office (officially, a division) was “Trumpland,” the source said. Per FBI tradition, McGonigal didn’t wear his politics, if any, on his sleeve, in Washington. But when he landed in New York on Oct. 4, 2016 he was suddenly thrust into an environment where a number of agents openly expressed their disdain for the Clintons and Democrats in general.
McGonigal was a New Yorker through and through. At the start of his career 20 years earlier, McGonigal had worked on the investigation into the TWA Flight 800 crash headed by the boss of the New York office, James Kallstrom, who was close to both then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the flamboyant real estate developer and tabloid newspaper staple Trump. In the last weeks of the 2016 campaign, Giuliani, a Trump adviser and lawyer, repeatedly went on Fox News hinting that the FBI was sitting on a “big surprise” regarding Hillary Clinton that would propel Trump to victory. That turned out to be the FBI’s discovery of the former secretary of state’s emails on the laptop of her close adviser Huma Abedin, whose husband Anthony Weiner used it to send lewd pictures of himself to underage women. On Sept. 21, just two days after the FBI had taken possession of the infamous “Steele Dossier” on connections between Trump and the Russians , the London tabloid Daily Mail had run a front-page "exclusive" on Weiner’s emails with a 15-year-old girl. FBI Director James Comey, fearing that he could be accused of covering for Clinton, announced that he was re-opening the bureau’s email investigation, a heavy blow to her campaign.
McGonigal would’ve had a front row seat—at least—on all these developments, as well as the troubled surveillance warrants on Trump foreign policy aide Carter Page and information received from an Australian diplomat that another Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, had bragged about the Russians having “dirt” on Clinton.
Maybe McGonigal even touched the balls in play. The topics are already getting renewed —and overheated—according to the former FBI official—attention from right wing media as a result of the FBI man’s arrest.
“When he got to New York, he had a piece of the Carter Page case as a high level SAC,” he said. But just “briefly.”
“This stuff that's out there about how he ran Crossfire Hurricane,” code name for the FBI’s investigation into links between Trump’s associates and the Russians and whether Moscow interfered in the campaign, is wrong, the former official said. ”No, he didn't touch it. That's all bullshit. Carter page, yes, because he was a boss in New York for a period.” But only that.
“The other thing that is interesting, and this is worth looking at,” the former official continued, “is he was one of—there were many, but he was one of— the original people to say to the bureau, ‘Hey, this guy George Papadopoulos told the Australian ambassador in London that the Russians had dirt on Hillary.’ Now that, arguably, was one of the factors that caused headquarters to open the original early CI case on whether Russia was messing with the election…Now why, why did Charlie have knowledge of George Papadopoulos talking to this? I, I have no freaking idea. And somebody I'm sure is looking at that,” the former official said.
Tip of an Iceberg
“I think there's more to this,” says McGonigal’s former colleague “He's involved in all that. I think somebody's gotta really look at what his role was and all that. Now, was he a decision-maker? No, but he was the SAC [for counterintelligence] in New York…”
In a provocative thread of tweets Monday night, the eminent presidential historian Michael Bechloss drew a dotted line between McGonigal’s arrival in New York, the Clinton leaks and the odd (and inaccurate) New York Times story only days before the election that was headlined, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.”
Quoting anonymous “law enforcement sources,” the Times reported that “none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.” It added that “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.”
Had McGonigal leaked to the tabloid and/orGiuliani? He was ambitious to a fault, his former colleague told SpyTalk. He might have done it to please his anti-Clinton bosses and Giuliani.
“I wouldn't put it past Charlie to have been one of those sources,” he said. And as the office’s counterintelligence boss, he would have been an authoritative source to reporters on both the Weiner laptop issue and “Russiagate.”
“I would not doubt that Charlie played a role in” the leaks, the source maintained. “Wouldn't surprise me. It just wouldn't surprise me.”
Together, the stories originating in the New York FBI went viral across in social media, where they were pushed by Russian bots and effectively doomed Clinton’s campaign.
The Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, was outraged by the FBI’s “double standard.” He fired off a letter to Comey saying “it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government—a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity.” But “you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information” about the Russian subversion (which would be affirmed after the election in a U.S. intelligence report.
Incalculable Losses
McGonigal has not been charged with espionage, but intelligence sources are shivering at the prospect that he could be found to have leaked secrets to Russia, China or others.
“If the SAC for counterintelligence in New York went bad, truly bad, meaning espionage, the losses would be almost insurmountable,” said a former top FBI official, asking for anonymity to discuss such a sensitive matter. “If I had to pick the top four or five roles in the FBI to be recruited by a foreign service, that would be the worst case scenario…”
Like other senior intelligence agency veterans, former career CIA case officer Douglas London said it was impossible to say what McGonigal was really up to from the bare bones Justice Department announcements. Based on “absolutely nothing but my speculation and instinct,” London said that, “in working as a lobbyist for Deripaska and the Albanians, respectively, McGonigal might have been commercially recruited under a false flag business pretext or otherwise run in cooperation with the Russians, who would have worked over time to get the FBI agent to divulge his counterintelligence knowledge.” London added that, “it would have been an amazingly amateurish mistake for a guy with his experience, perhaps believing he could spy ‘in plain sight’ based on the business pretext.” Whatever, London said he was “hoping [McGonigal] had not spilled everything,” particularly the names of Russians or other foreign nationals working as spies for the FBI or CIA.
Other odd facets of McGonigal’s post-FBI work stood out to intelligence veterans. As a former chief of counterintelligence, McGonigal “could name his job in the corporate sector,” as the former official put it, fielding offers in the $200,000 range to head up a company’s security operation. But McGonigal, perhaps feeling slighted by failing to land one of the top three slots in the FBI, such as special agent in charge of New York, Los Angeles or the Washington Field Office, might’ve dismissed that as chicken feed.
“It's almost like, ‘I'll beat all of you,’” the former official said. Instead, McGonigal took gigs from Deripaska and the Albanians—and God knows who else—paying him $75,000 a month. Plus international travel. The FBI arrested McGonigal after he stepped off a plane returning from a trip to Sri Lanka. Where else did he go? Who else might he have been working for? How might he have been compromised?
The security world uses an acronym, MICE, to sum up the principal motivations behind officials who turn coat. It stands for “Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego.” For Cold War Soviets, a principal drive was hatred of the communist system. Today, in places like Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea, it’s systematic corruption and repression. Postwar Americans, on the other hand, spied for money, or were compromised by hostile services, or both. But in either case, personal animus—resentment toward bosses or colleagues—has almost always been a key factor.
What was McGonigal thinking? Consorting with the likes of Deripaska was the incredibly reckless act of a person who must have thought himself untouchable—or driven by private demons, fellow former spies speculate.
“It’s not sure if it was ‘just' a corrupt end of his career [heading] into retirement, or [whether he was] a true spy who committed espionage,” said a former senior CIA operations official, who cautioned that he was merely speculating as an outside observer. “Also, he seems to have played fast and loose [with his illicit associations] so I’d be surprised if warning signs of corruption were not out there” long before an investigation was opened on him. “Regardless, it’s pretty shocking,” he said.
McGonigal always thought he was “the smartest guy in the room,” his former colleague averred. “And I think you can see that in the charges. There's an underlying theme there of ambition and just thinking you're smarter than everybody else.
“I mean, how do you think you're gonna get away with this—unless there's a narcissism there and [him thinking], ‘I can beat the FBI. I'm smarter than them. And I'm untouchable.’
Trump Clinton
By Charlie Gerow
The term "October surprise" has been part of American political lingo for at least half a century.
Republican strategist Charlie Gerow (PennLive file)
The phrase refers to a last-minute occurrence that potentially changes the course of the presidential election.
"October surprise" was a major item of discussion in 1968 when Hubert Humphrey faced off against Richard Nixon and George Wallace.
The Vietnam war was at its height with more than half a million American soldiers in the war zone and more than 30,000 already killed.
Lyndon Johnson was the sitting president. He had dropped out of the race earlier in the year and paved the way for his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, to capture the Democratic nomination.
Johnson believed that he was about to achieve a major breakthrough in peace talks with the North Vietnamese.
Any peace treaty would have benefitted Humphrey. But the deal never materialized, with some conspiracy theorists asserting that Nixon and the Republicans had sabotaged the talks.
A dozen years later Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were locked in an increasingly close contest.
Republicans feared that Carter would somehow manage to get the 52 American who'd been held hostage by the Iranians freed on the eve of the election, thus catapulting Carter to hero status and denying Reagan the presidency.
It never happened. Reagan won in a landslide, at least in part due to the view that Carter had been weak and inept in handling the hostage crisis. On the day Reagan was inaugurated the Americans came home.
Every four years there's talk in the media and among the political chatter class about the possibility of an October surprise.
In 1992, when incumbent George H.W. Bush was defeated by Bill Clinton, some Republicans saw the indictment of Reagan's Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, just days before the election as deliberately timed by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh to hurt Bush.
In 2000, his son, George W. Bush had drunk driving charges brought against him decades earlier publicly revealed for the first time just days before the November 7 election.
Although the phrase has generally been used to describe news events deliberately timed to influence the election, sometimes these events occur spontaneously or without human intervention.
In 2012 President Obama's handling of Hurricane Sandy and especially laudatory comments from political rivals like Governor Chris Christie helped him get past Mitt Romney.
It's no surprise that, before either party has officially nominated their candidate, there's already speculation about an October surprise in 2016.
This has been a year of more surprises than any cycle should allow, so it's a pretty safe bet that there will be a few unforeseen occurrences late in the campaign.
Will there be an additional terrorist attack in the days leading up to the election? Will some other international incident boil over into American electoral politics?
Will there be a stock market crash like the one in 2008 or some other major economic upheaval? How will the candidates respond and how will voters react to their responses?
If there were a foreign policy crisis would it be more likely to tip the scales towards Hillary Clinton, who promotes her foreign policy experience as a major distinction between herself and Mr. Trump?
If there's a domestic economic upheaval will it inure to Trump's benefit given that most Americans currently view him as better able to handle the economy?
Current survey data suggests that a foreign policy crisis that didn't involve terrorism would advantage Clinton.
The June 23 Wall Street Journal poll gives her a whopping 54-30 lead over Trump on who would be better able to handle foreign policy. However, a terrorist inspired or led incident would help Trump who is seen as tougher on terrorism by most Americans. When asked who would better handle terrorism and national security, Trump had a 44-39 margin.
If the economy were in upheaval Trump would hold a significant advantage as the Wall Street Journal survey suggests that Trump is viewed as better able to handle economic affairs by a wide 47-37 percent lead.
Any of those scenarios is possible, and some sort of "surprise" is likely given the course of this election year.
The most likely "surprise" (and maybe no surprise at all) would be yet another revelation about Hillary Clinton that would highlight her already mounting trouble with the electorate on the issues of trustworthiness and integrity.
The possibilities are boundless; certainly the last has not been heard about the several public scandals that continue to haunt her and there's always the chance that something not already discussed comes rolling out of her closet.
For the Trump campaign there has to be concern about revelations in the ongoing fraud trial over Trump University.
While the matter won't get to trial before Election Day, there will no doubt be additional depositions and evidence leaking out and floating around.
The more probable "surprise" will be some spontaneous utterance by Trump himself that proves to be the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back."
While some argue that his litany of offensive remarks haven't seemed to hurt him all that badly thus far, there is a cumulative effect that hasn't yet been fully realized. There's an equilibrium point or tipping point that Trump hasn't yet reached and needs to do all he can to avoid.
In a year already chock full of surprises, expect at least one in October.
Of course, the timing of revelations like this is always an issue (such as in this case, the fact it awaited the transition to a new party in control of the House), but the arrest of perhaps the most consequential person at the FBI, Charlie McGonigal, for ostensible espionage on behalf of a hostile foreign power, the Russians he was supposed to be in charge of stopping, is shaping up to be perhaps the story of the century.
Hardly mentioned for this aspect in the coverage of his arrest this week is the extensive documentation via Twitter by highly-credible Presidential historian Michael Beschloss. It is drawing major attention for its amazing claim of the central role of McGonigal, acting as an insider Russian agent, to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Namely, if Beschloss is to be believed (and there is no reason not to), McGonigal’s elevation to a critical slot at the highest level of the FBI just weeks before the November 2016 election was pivotal in the last-minute decision by FBI Director James Comey to announce the relaunch of his investigation into Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails that threw her otherwise certain election in favor of GOP candidate Donald Trump at the proverbial 11th hour.
Comey’s inexplicable decision marked one of the most egregious cases of an intelligence agency’s intervention into a presidential election in history, one which subjected the nation and the world into its greatest crisis ever in the form of the four years of chaos the was the Trump presidency and that still represents the nation’s biggest threat to its democracy since the Civil War.
Beschloss has not minced his words in this. The arrest of McGonigal for acting as the agent of a hostile foreign power at the top of the FBI is the stuff of perhaps the most remarkable espionage case ever, one which, if true, has altered the course of history in favor of Russia’s Vladimir Putin against the strategic interests of the U.S. It has been documented that Trump was Russia’s chosen agent of influence at the top of the U.S. government since 1987, and what he has done to weaken the Western Alliance as the American president has been perhaps irreversible, much less how he disenfranchised the American public since he was declared the winner of the presidential election in November 2016 despite coming up almost three million votes short in the popular vote, and continually insisting he won the 2020 election despite coming up over seven million votes short.
Perhaps this explains the historical essay that appeared in this Monday’s Washington Post that argued strangely that America’s strategic disadvantages since the 1930s only made it stronger. Are we supposed to believe that being wounded by McGonigal’s treachery only strengthened the U.S., notwithstanding the impact of Trump’s presidency?
No, the McGonigal arrest is hopefully only the first step in the Justice Department’s revelations about how Putin’s counterintelligence operations in the U.S. have brought our nation so close to ruin in a sequence of events that have damaged us and that remain far from over. The sabotage of the American national interest was greater than anything the Rosenbergs did in the 1940s that led to their capital punishment.
Curiously, this has now just begun to come to light just weeks after the Democrats had to relinquish power in the House to weaken their ability to bring the full consequences of this to the American public.
Beschloff tweeted that, as is entirely relevant, Trump attorney Rudy Guliani “boasted late in Fall 2016 presidential campaign about the contacts with the FBI’s New York field office and later said publicly that (FBI) director James Comey had responded to ‘pressure of a group of FBI agents.’”
In the final days of the 2016 campaign, Trump surrogate Giuliani said publicly that “help is on the way” for Trump. “He’s got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about,” Giuliani said.
McGonigal resigned from the FBI in 2018 after his damage was done and he faced internal audits that were beginning to show over $200,000 in unaccounted for funds to him.
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
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 former FBI official busted Monday for allegedly taking illegal foreign payments played a key role in the bureau’s controversial “Russiagate” probe of former President Donald Trump — and a “defensive briefing” of ex-rival Hillary Clinton’s lawyers.
Charles “Charlie” McGonigal, 54, was among the first FBI officials to learn that Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat that Russia had “political dirt” on Clinton.
FBI Deputy Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa told Senate Judiciary Committee staffers in 2020 that he got a July 2016 email from McGonigal which “contained essentially that reporting, which then served as the basis for the opening of the case.”
The FBI investigation, dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane,” led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller and a 22-month, $32 million probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and potential ties to associates of Trump, now 76.
Shortly before Mueller was appointed, McGonigal also sent a message to an FBI colleague that discussed how agents were interviewing another Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.
“Our Team is currently talking to CP re Russia,” McGonigal wrote on March 16, 2017, according to Justice Department records released by Senate Republicans.
The 54-year-old was one of the first FBI officials to learn about a Trump adviser saying Russia had “political dirt” on Clinton.AP
Mueller was appointed to lead the probe.Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Clinton ran against Trump during the 2016 presidential election.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesAt the time, McGonigal had recently been promoted to special agent in charge of the FBI’s New York Counterintelligence Division after serving as chief of the Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section in Washington, DC.
Page was wiretapped by the FBI in 2016 based on an application under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that asserted he “has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government” — a claim Page has denied.
The application — which also cited claims from the discredited anti-Trump “Steele dossier” — was granted and renewed three times, leading the Justice Department’s inspector general to issue a scathing 2019 report that called it a “clear abuse of the FISA process.”
In 2020, former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty to falsifying an email tied to the final FISA application to monitor Page and was sentenced to one year of probation.
McGonigal’s name is also first on a list of FBI officials who received an Oct. 22, 2015, memo about a “classified defensive briefing” given to lawyers for Clinton’s presidential campaign about attempts by an unidentified foreign government to influence the candidate through “lobbying efforts and campaign contributions.”
McGonigal served as a special agent in charge of the FBI’s New York Counterintelligence Division.Stefan Jeremiah for NY Post
McGonigal originally joined the FBI back in 1996.Stefan Jeremiah for NY Post
Papadopoulos told a diplomat that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.REUTERS/Carlo Allegri/File PhotoThat document was made public in 2020 by then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who said it showed “a clear double standard by the Department of Justice and FBI when it came to the Trump and Clinton campaigns in 2016.”
“When it came to the Trump campaign, there were four counterintelligence investigations opened against Trump campaign associates,” Graham said at the time. “Not one time was President Trump defensively briefed about the FBI’s concerns.”
In his 2019 report, Mueller wrote that his investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
But the report also outlined 11 potential instances of obstruction by Trump, who Mueller testified in 2019 “was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed.”
[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.
[audio clip]
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.
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.
Charles McGonigal, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York from 2016 to 2018, is accused in an indictment unsealed Monday of working with a former Soviet diplomat-turned-Russian interpreter on behalf of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire.
McGonigal, who had supervised investigations of Russian oligarchs, including Deripaska, before retiring in 2018, allegedly worked to have Deripaska’s sanctions lifted in 2019 and took money from him in 2021 to investigate a rival oligarch.
McGonigal, 54, and the interpreter, Sergey Shestakov, 69, were arrested Saturday. McGonigal was taken into custody after landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport. They are scheduled to appear in court in Manhattan on Monday. Both are being held at a federal jail in Brooklyn.
McGonigal and Shestakov are charged with violating and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, conspiring to commit money laundering and money laundering. Shestakov is also charged with making material misstatements to the FBI.
McGonigal was separately charged in federal court in Washington, D.C. with concealing $225,000 in payments he received from an outside source with whom he traveled to Europe.
McGonigal was required to report to the FBI contacts with foreign officials, but prosecutors allege that he hid that from his employer as he pursued business and foreign travel that created a conflict of interest with his law enforcement duties.
The U.S. Treasury Department added Deripaska to its sanctions list in 2018 for purported ties to the Russian government and Russia’s energy sector amid Russia’s ongoing threats to Ukraine.
In September, federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged Deripaska and three associates with conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions by plotting to ensure his child was born in the United States.
Messages seeking comment were left for lawyers for McGonigal and Shestakov. Lawyers for Deripaska did not immediately return an email seeking comment Monday.
The New York indictment alleges that McGonigal was introduced by Shestakov in 2018 to a former Soviet diplomat who functioned as an agent for Deripaska. That person is not identified in court papers but the Justice Department says he was “rumored in public media reports to be a Russian intelligence officer.”
According to the indictment, Shestakov asked McGonigal for his help in getting the daughter of Deripaska’s agent an internship with the New York Police Department. McGonigal agreed, prosecutors say, and told a police department contact that, “I have interest in her father for a number of reasons.”
The Justice Department says McGonigal also hid from the FBI key details of a 2017 trip he took to Albania with a former member of that country’s intelligence service who had given him the $225,000.
For instance, prosecutors say, he failed to identify the person as his traveling companion or reveal that housing for him would be free.
Once there, according to the Justice Department, he met with Albania’s prime minister and discouraged him from awarding oil field drilling licenses in the country to Russian front companies. McGonigal’s Albanian contacts had a financial interest in those decisions, prosecutors say.
News that a senior FBI official Charles McGonigal has been indicted for taking payments from sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and then trying to conceal those payments, raises deeply disturbing questions about the investigations he oversaw as head of counterintelligence at the FBI’s New York Field Office during the tumultuous 2016 presidential election,
The case, which is still unfolding, has particularly concerned the former British intelligence officer and Russia expert, Christopher Steele, author of the ‘Steele Dossier’ on Donald Trump and his Kremlin connections which was passed on to the FBI’s New York in the summer of 2016.
Steele told Byline Times that McGonigal had the opportunity to influence both “Trump-Russia and the (re-opened) Hillary Clinton email investigations in 2016, arguably two of the most politically consequential ones in US history.”
McGonigal, who has denied charges of money laundering and violating economic sanctions against Russia, was also a key figure in the FBI’s Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section prior to being tapped to lead the counterintelligence division at the FBI’s New York Field Office a few weeks before the end of the presidential campaign.
Within weeks of McGonigal’s promotion to the new position in early October, the New York Field Office took centre stage as part of a scandal involving alleged leaks that ultimately forced then-FBI Director James Comey to go public with information about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails barely over a week before Election Day — a decision that radically altered the course of the 2016 campaign and may have swung the election in Trump’s favour.
Although we don’t yet know whether or to what extent McGonigal may have been aware of or involved in these events, the allegation that one of the FBI’s most senior counterintelligence officials — who was tasked with overseeing some of the agency’s most sensitive and top-secret investigations — may have been secretly taking money from the Russian oligarchs he was supposed to have been investigating raises serious questions about his role in a series of events that, more than six years later, remains among the most pressing national security issues facing the United States.
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Having worked as section chief for the Cyber-Counterintelligence Co-ordination Section at FBI headquarters during the height of Russian hacking around the looming election, McGonigal was named by the FBI’s then director, James Comey, as special agent in charge of the Counterintelligence division for the New York Field Office on 4 October 2016.
A few weeks later, close Trump ally and former Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, started dropping hints on Fox News about information coming from the FBI field office. On 26 October, Rudy Giuliani told Fox News’s Martha MacCallum that Trump had “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next two days.”
“I’m talking about some pretty big surprise,” he added.
Giuliani went on to boast of his close friendships with retired FBI agents, and though he denied having a role in Comey’s Oct. 28 announcement and the events leading up to it, he also acknowledged that he had “heard about it” from contacts at the FBI.
“I did nothing to get it out, I had no role in it,” Giuliani said in a Fox & Friends interview on 4 November. “Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it…”
In addition to Giuliani, FBI agents from the NY Field Office also reportedly leaked information to GOP Rep. Devin Nunes. According to Nunes’ own telling, in late September 2016, “good FBI agents” revealed to him — and possibly other congressional Republicans — that they had discovered more of Clinton’s emails on Weiner’s laptop.
Three weeks after the appointment of McGonigal, and in the closing days of the 2016 presidential election, James Comey made the unprecedented decision of announcing that the FBI was reviewing new emails possibly related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server due to information from the New York field office. Comey made the announcement in a letter to Congress on October 28, 2016, saying that agents working on “an unrelated case” had turned up new emails and were investigating whether or not the material was significant.
A Republican congressman, Jason Chaffetz, leaked news of the letter and misrepresented its content, tweeting that the investigation into Clinton had been reopened. The unrelated case, it was later revealed, was the FBI’s investigation into disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner. While examining Weiner’s laptop, investigators discovered that his wife Huma Abedin — a top aide to Clinton — had also used the laptop, which contained emails between Abedin and Clinton.
Though the investigation concluded there had been no criminal wrongdoing on the part of Hillary Clinton, the amplification of critical stories about her emails dented her poll ratings, and to some, was the key final factor in the shock victory of Donald Trump. The nationwide swing in poll numbers of about 3 points against Clinton following the Oct. 28 announcement has been dubbed the “Comey effect,” and professional pollsters say this very well could have cost Clinton the election.
It has been widely reported that Comey made the now-infamous announcement because of political pressure, in part from FBI agents who were sympathetic to Trump. It was the FBI’s New York field office — the same field office where McGonigal had just been appointed to a top position — that was widely suspected of leaking the information about the Weiner laptop investigation that led to Comey’s October 28 announcement, resulting in the cascading series of events that may have swung the election in Trump’s favour.
Byline Times asked the FBI’s New York Field Office was asked whether they had any further information on whether leaks came from them, but did not reply. McGonigal’s lawyers were also approached for comment on these questions but had not replied by the time of publication.
Beyond the issue of potential leaks related to the Weiner laptop investigation, the indictment of the former head of counterintelligence poses troubling questions about the role of the FBI’s New York Office in the wider investigation into Russian interference in US elections.
On 31 October, just four days away from the 2016 Presidential Election and less than a month after McGonigal’s appointment, the New York Times published an article ‘Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia’. Unnamed FBI and intelligence officials were reported to have told the newspaper that “none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr Trump and the Russian government.”
The same officials also claimed there was no evidence of Putin or the Kremlin taking sides: “Even the hacking into Democratic emails… was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr Trump.”
Among some intelligence experts, who had already reported extensive evidence of Russian interference in the elections, this article was dubbed the ‘Halloween Surprise’ because it was premature and prejudicial. Over six years on, and following a report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and detailed investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the judgement appears partisan. It didn’t reflect the full extent of the investigation at the time, which, had it emerged on the eve of the election, might well have had as much an impact on Trump’s campaign as the emails did on Clinton’s
This differential treatment given to the Clinton and Trump investigations is further compounded by the fact that it was reportedly well-known among insiders that the FBI, and the NY Field Office in particular, had a deep-seated bias against Hillary Clinton. One FBI agent described the FBI as “Trumpland” in a 2016 interview with the Guardian newspaper, suggesting that anti-Clinton animosity may have driven the leaks that so severely damaged her reputation.
Byline Times approached both the New York Times and McGonigal’s lawyers for comment on the ‘Halloween Surprise’ but had received no reply by the time of publication.
For Christopher Steele, the former head of the Russia Desk for Britain’s secret intelligence service, MI6, from 2006 to 2009, the indictment of McGonigal raises questions about the FBI’s laxity in investigating potential Kremlin interference in US elections.
Steele left MI6 to form Orbis Business Intelligence in 2009 which then worked with authorities to expose corruption in FIFA, provided the US Department of State with regular reports on Russia and Ukraine, and specifically co-operated with the New York field office of the FBI for two years investigating Russian organised crime
In the summer of 2016, having been commissioned privately to investigate Donald Trump’s links to Russia, Steele was so alarmed by intelligence sources warning him of the Kremlin’s support for Trump, he passed on his dossier via an FBI contact to the New York field office where McGonigal worked. Though the dossier was never intended for publication, it was a summary of intelligence sources that clearly needed proper investigation.
According to an ABC News report, Steele’s intelligence dossier on Trump’s Russian links “sat for weeks in the FBI’s New York field office” during the summer of 2016 as the election campaign raged on, instead of being referred to the ongoing counterintelligence investigation undertaken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, code-named Crossfire Hurricane.
(Operation Crossfire Hurricane was started, completely independently from Steele’s dossier, on a tip-off that a Trump foreign policy aide, George Papadopolous, was openly boasting about his Russia embassy connections on a trip to London in March 2016, and suggesting Russian intelligence had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails”.)
According to a declassified House Intelligence Committee memo, “Steele’s reporting did not reach the counterintelligence team investigating Russia at FBI headquarters until mid-September 2016, more than seven weeks after the FBI opened its investigation.”
This lapse led to one of the key strategic failures of the Russia investigation: The failure to investigate potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in real-time.
By 2 October 2016, two days before McGonigal moved from cyber counterintelligence to head up the counter-intelligence division in New York, Steele was so alarmed by the lack of apparent action on Russian interference he met FBI agents in Rome and challenged them to go public. To Steele, this was a national security issue and the public needed to be alerted to the threat to the integrity of the presidential election.
However, the FBI officers in Rome explained to him how a specific piece of legislation, the Hatch Act, prevented them from announcing any investigation within 90 days of a federal election for fear of negatively influencing the vote. At this point, the Clinton-Trump Presidential showdown was barely a month away.
Steele accepted their explanation. But when FBI Director Comey announced a reinvestigation into the Clinton emails on 28 October, those Hatch Act principles were blatantly breached. After that, the relationship between Steele and the FBI broke down.
The McGonigal indictment shines a light on the FBI during one of the most contentious periods in recent US history, as Vladimir Putin was trying to cement his illegal invasion of eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014. Oleg Deripaska, through his business relationship with Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, was focused on changing US opposition to Russia’s encroachment on its neighbour.
Was there a pressure group within this section of the FBI, as Guiliani suggested, trying to sway the election? And for how long were they a problem? Did McGonigal or any of his colleagues know about the Steele dossier or were in any way involved in locking away during the crucial run-up to the Presidential election, thus preventing the Crossfire Hurricane team from investigating Russian interference in real-time – before the election? In other words, before it was too late.
The Yale historian and author Timothy Snyder has said that the indictment of McDonigal raises even bigger questions than Russian intervention in Trump’s election, and its connections to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “Sorting this out will require a concern for the United States that goes beyond party loyalty.”
Christopher Steele, who has had to endure years of legal cases and congressional grillings over the dossier he never intended to be published, agrees: “The arrest and indictment of former FBI counter-intelligence officer McGonigal appear to confirm ongoing suspicions and raises a raft of new questions.”
“These potentially concern the conduct of the Trump-Russia and (re-opened) Hillary Clinton email investigations in 2016, arguably two of the most politically consequential ones in US history. For that reason, all angles must be comprehensively investigated, mistakes learnt and those involved held fully accountable,” Steele told Byline Times.
Byline Times reached out to the FBI and McGonigal’s lawyers for a response to these questions, but neither had responded by the time of publication. McGonigal has entered a not-guilty plea.
The chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee is pressing the Department of Justice for details about a former FBI agent who was indicted for working for a sanctioned Russian oligarch and laundering the proceeds.
Charles F. McGonigal retired as special agent in charge of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York office in 2018. McGonigal allegedly began cooperating with an agent of aluminum baron Oleg Deripaska while he was still working for the FBI. Deripaska is under indictment for allegedly evading sanctions and obstructing justice.
Dick Durban raised urgent questions in his open letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. As Durban noted, McGonigal was promoted to special agent in charge just before the FBI’s October 2016 announcement that it saw no ties between Trump and Russia.
READ MORE: 'Corrupt, fixable and usable': Why Trump’s 'decades-old playbook' is finally losing its appeal
Durban is asking the questions that are on everyone’s mind:
Did McGonigal do anything to tip the scales of justice in favor of anyone he’s now linked to in the indictments? What roles did McGonigal play in the 2016 FBI’s Trump-Russia probe and the Mueller investigation? Is there any chance that McGonigal compromised sources, methods or evidence? How did one of the most elite counterintelligence operations not notice that one of its main guys was allegedly doing favors for a sanctioned Russian oligarch while he was still on the FBI payroll.
Deripaska’s history with the FBI is long and bizarre. The FBI has investigated Deripaska for links to Russian organized crime.
Nevertheless, 2007, the FBI colluded with Deripaska to spring a kidnapped CIA contractor from captivity in Iran. His name is Robert Levinson and he was an FBI agent before he went to work for the CIA.
Deripaska reportedly spent $25 million of his own money on the mission. You might wonder why the FBI needs a Russian oligarch’s money. The idealistic answer is that Iran is under economic sanctions, so Americans couldn’t legally spend money there. Realistically, it’s probably because some of that money went to bribe people the FBI regards as terrorists. Deripaska went along with this scheme because the FBI was supposed to make his US visa problems go away.
They didn’t.
And Levinson didn’t get to come home.
The US State Department had barred Deripaska from the country because of his alleged ties to Russian organized crime. Evidently, they were on the cusp of a deal to release Levinson when the mean-old State Department scuttled the visa scheme once and for all – possibly because they didn’t want to be in the debt of a man like Deripaska.
Undeterred, the FBI tried to enlist Deripaska’s help again in 2014, first as an informant on Russian organized crime and in 2016 as a source for their probe into the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Two months before Donald Trump was elected, FBI agents reportedly visited Deripaska in New York City and asked him whether the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia. Deripaska put on his best innocent face and insisted that the agents were making something out of nothing.
By this point, campaign manager Paul Manafort had been feeding sensitive campaign and polling data to Deripaska’s associate for months, information that made its way to Russian intelligence. It’s unclear how much impact Deripaska’s denial had on the FBI’s later announcement that it knew of no links between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Did the FBI’s attempts to recruit Deripaska ultimately result in Deripaska recruiting a top FBI agent? A recent story in the Times strongly implies as much, albeit without providing much in the way of supporting evidence.
Let’s hope that answers are forthcoming.
One morning in October 2017, Allison Guerriero noticed something unusual on the floor of her boyfriend's Park Slope, Brooklyn, apartment: a bag full of cash. There it was, lying next to his shoes, near the futon, the kind of bag that liquor stores give out. Inside were bundles of bills, big denominations bound up with rubber bands. It didn't seem like something he should be carrying around. After all, her boyfriend, Charles F. McGonigal, held one of the most senior and sensitive positions in the FBI.
"Where the fuck is this from?" she asked.
"Oh, you remember that baseball game?" McGonigal replied, according to Guerriero's recollection. "I made a bet and won."
McGonigal had two high-school-age children and a wife — or "ex-wife" as he sometimes referred to her — back at home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He would return there once or twice a month. But McGonigal had led Guerriero to believe that he was either divorced or soon would be. She didn't question his story, nor did she question the story about the bag full of cash.
A few days before, Guerriero had sat on the couch with McGonigal in the one-room garden sublet to watch McGonigal's Cleveland Indians beat the Yankees. Much later — after Guerriero's cancer diagnosis, their breakup, and McGonigal's retirement from the FBI — McGonigal would be indicted on suspicion of, among other things, accepting $225,000 in cash from a former employee of Albania's intelligence agency. That total includes one $80,000 chunk that was allegedly handed over in a parked car, outside a restaurant, on October 5, 2017. October 5 and 6 also happened to be the days when the Indians beat the Yankees in the first two games of the American League Division Series. Today, Guerriero no longer believes the bag of cash contained winnings from a sports bet.
One of McGonigal's attorneys, Seth DuCharme, declined to comment.
Guerriero was 44 when they met, a former substitute kindergarten teacher who volunteered for law-enforcement causes and was working as a contractor for a security company while living at home with her father. McGonigal, then 49 years old, had just started his new job at the FBI's New York office.
Guerriero says their affair lasted for a little more than a year. McGonigal's Brooklyn sublet may have been modest, but he lived large. He courted Guerriero at high-end restaurants. He would give her gifts of cash — $500 or $1,000 — for her birthday and for Christmas. He once joked about framing his divorce papers for her, as a Christmas gift, but those papers never materialized. He took her to watch New Jersey Devils hockey games in a private box. She recalls that McGonigal once gave a hundred-dollar bill to a panhandler on the street. "I'm a little better off than him. I can spare a hundred dollars," Guerriero remembers McGonigal saying, after she expressed astonishment.
That day in October wasn't the only time that Guerriero remembers McGonigal carrying large amounts of cash. After he brushed her curiosity aside, she tempered her suspicions. She told herself it was probably "buy money" for a sting operation, or a payoff for one of McGonigal's informants. She had dated federal law-enforcement officials before. She knew not to ask too many questions about work.
"Charlie McGonigal knew everybody in the national security and law-enforcement world," Guerriero said, in an interview with Insider. "He fooled them all. So why should I feel bad that he was able to deceive me?"
The dual indictments lodged against McGonigal earlier this week in New York and Washington, DC, 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. But Guerriero says that McGonigal's deceptions extended beyond his duties as a counterintelligence chief and into their personal life. Two sources who knew both McGonigal and Guerriero in New York told Insider that they believed Guerriero's account of the relationship, including her claim that McGonigal had led Guerriero to believe that he was effectively single. And Guerriero's father told Insider that McGonigal would regularly drive to his house, where Guerriero lived, to pick her up.
"I was deceived about it," Guerriero's father said. "He seemed to be a straight shooter. If I'd had known he was married, I would have said something."
Federal prosecutors charged McGonigal with money laundering and making false statements in his mandatory employee disclosures to the FBI. He was also charged with taking money from a representative of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who McGonigal had once himself investigated, in violation of US economic sanctions against Russia; the indictment alleges that Deripaska paid him to investigate a rival oligarch. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
McGonigal was not an ordinary FBI agent. He led the WikiLeaks investigation into Chelsea Manning as well as a search for a Chinese mole inside the CIA. While working at FBI headquarters in Washington, he played a role in opening the investigation into the Trump campaign's Russia contacts that was later dubbed Operation Crossfire Hurricane.
But it was McGonigal's final FBI job, special agent in charge of the counterintelligence division at the FBI's New York field office, that was his most important assignment at the bureau. It was his job to find enemy spies and recruit his own.
"New York City is a global center for espionage and counterespionage," says one senior law-enforcement insider who was closely familiar with the specifics of McGonigal's role. "You have visits from foreign business elites and politicians. You have the United Nations. You have ethnic populations. Who runs the pitches to recruit spies from all those other countries? The FBI. So the access you get in that job is extraordinary. It's almost bottomless. So 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 impact of the McGonigal indictments is still rippling out through the law-enforcement world. The charges accuse an official at the heart of the Trump-Russia investigation of secretly selling his own access, accepting bundles of cash in surreptitious meetings with someone who had ties to Albanian intelligence. McGonigal, a top-tier member of the city's law-enforcement community, a man who had fully integrated himself into a powerful circle of trust where favors get swapped and sensitive intelligence gets circulated, is accused of himself being on the take. If the indictments are correct, McGonigal was leading a dangerous double life, right under the noses of some of the sharpest cops in America.
But what might be most striking about the case against McGonigal is how cheaply he is alleged to have rented out his law-enforcement powers. One indictment suggests that for $225,000, McGonigal's associates got him to lobby the Albanian prime minister about the awarding of oil-field drilling licenses and then open an FBI investigation connected to a US citizen who had lobbied for one of the prime minister's political opponents. Arranging a meeting for an executive from a Bosnian pharmaceutical company with a US official at the United Nations was said to be a pricier item — $500,000, one indictment claims. It is unclear whether that money ever materialized.
In September 2018, McGonigal left the FBI to work as a vice president at Brookfield Properties, a multibillion-dollar real-estate company. His salary there was most likely higher than what he made inside the government, but it wasn't anywhere near the C-suite or oligarch-scale money that courses through New York's penthouse condos and boardrooms. One law-enforcement source estimated that McGonigal stood to make roughly $300,000 to $350,000 a year, including annual bonuses. "He said he needed to make more money," said Guerriero, who was still in the relationship with McGonigal when he left the FBI. "He had two kids to put through college."
The value that McGonigal is accused of providing — his access and his pull — are clear from the indictments. One of them alleges that he arranged for the daughter of a foreign contact, a college student, to get a VIP tour from the New York City Police Department. The indictment identifies that foreign contact as "Agent-1," an agent of the Russian oligarch Deripaska, former Russian diplomat, and rumored Russian intelligence officer. That description matches Evgeny Fokin, who works for En+, a Deripaska-owned energy company, and was already linked to McGonigal and an associate in a Foreign Agents Registration Act filing from November 2021.
Agent-1's identity remains unconfirmed. Neither Fokin nor En+ responded to requests for comment. A person familiar with the NYPD's arrangement said the daughter was a guest, not an intern. She didn't have independent access to police facilities, they said, and was given no work to do.
Guerriero recalls McGonigal using the FBI's resources for their relationship. Once, they had sex in an SUV that she understood to be federal government property. After she was found to have breast cancer, Guerriero recalls, McGonigal would occasionally send a junior agent in an FBI sedan to give her rides from New Jersey to her cousin's apartment in New York. Despite the ongoing deception about his marital status, McGonigal was "caring, loving, and concerned" during the period of her illness, she says.
In late 2018, McGonigal and Guerriero broke up. She remembers receiving an anonymous and hostile note in the mail. Soon after, McGonigal told her he was still married and had no plans to divorce his wife. "I was shocked," she said. "I was very much in love with him, and I was so hurt." She started drinking heavily to cope. A few months later, Guerriero, after a bout of drinking, dashed off an angry email to William Sweeney, who was in charge of the FBI's New York City bureau, and who, she recalls, had first introduced her to McGonigal. She remembers telling Sweeney in the email that he should look into their extramarital affair, and also McGonigal's dealings in Albania. McGonigal had already befriended Albania's prime minister and traveled to the country extensively, dealings that would appear later in one of his indictments. Guerriero told Insider that she had deleted the email.
Sweeney didn't reply to a request for comment made through Sweeney's current employer, Citigroup. Insider couldn't confirm that Guerriero had sent the email or that Sweeney had received it. Regardless, by November 2021, the FBI was looking into McGonigal. Two agents showed up at Guerriero's door, she says, showed her a picture of McGonigal with the Albanian prime minister, and interviewed her about their interactions. She also received a grand-jury subpoena requesting all of her communications with McGonigal as well as information about any "payments or gifts" he may have given her.
Guerriero acknowledges that the combination of her alcohol abuse and her health problems led to some extreme behavior, including her sending hostile emails to McGonigal's family, the contents of which she says she cannot recall. "I really did go overboard," she said. "I harassed them. I'm not going to deny that. I was horrible to them."
By her own account, Guerriero contacted one of McGonigal's children despite being prohibited from doing so by a court order, an incident that led to her spending the night in a New Jersey jail. The court order stemmed from a 2019 police report, obtained by Insider, that McGonigal's wife, Pamela, filed with the Montgomery County Police Department in Maryland. The report states that McGonigal and Guerriero "had a relationship" and that Guerriero had repeatedly harassed her with unwelcome emails and phone calls — including 20 calls in one day — despite her asking Guerriero to stop.
Guerriero confirmed that her contact with the McGonigal family led to a separate restraining order issued in New Jersey. "I am ashamed and embarrassed and sorry for my actions during the time that I was drinking," she said.
Guerriero's troubles worsened in early 2021, when she was badly burned during a fire at her father's house. She asked friends for help through a GoFundMe. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York City, whom she knew from law-enforcement circles, let her stay in a guest bedroom. Since then, Guerriero has been a frequent on-air caller for Giuliani's radio shows. She maintains that the 2020 election was marred by widespread voter fraud, a belief pushed by Giuliani that has been repeatedly debunked. "Whatever Giuliani says about the 2020 election is what I believe," she said. During her relationship with McGonigal, Guerriero says, they never talked about politics. "I thought he was apolitical," he said, "which is something I continue to believe."
The FBI declined to address the specifics of Guerriero's story. Instead, it sent a statement from Director Christopher Wray, who said the FBI holds employees to "the highest standard" and treats everyone equally, "even when it is one of our own." Insider spoke with three of McGonigal's former law-enforcement colleagues who expressed shock about the indictments. "It's heartbreaking," said one, who had worked alongside McGonigal at the FBI. "This is an incredible organization filled with truly dedicated men and women. This sets our image and reputation back."
Guerriero's father said his view of the FBI had already been tarnished by the way that McGonigal treated his daughter. "I've always had huge admiration for the FBI," he said. "I idealized the agents that I saw in the movies. I thought these people were gods, that they never did anything wrong. It was so disappointing." He did say, however, that McGonigal had called him after the relationship ended to apologize for his behavior, and that he had accepted McGonigal's apology.
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.
- Moroccan explorer visited Sri Lanka in 1344, made a pilgrimage to Adam’s Peak
- Sri Lankan Embassy launched Ibn Battuta Trail tourism program in Riyadh
COLOMBO: Sri Lanka is trying to attract Arab visitors by promoting the travels of the famed 14th-century explorer Ibn Battuta, Colombo’s envoy to Riyadh said on Saturday.
The famed Moroccan explorer’s ship arrived in the northwestern port of Puttalam from the Maldives in September 1344. At that time, Puttalam was under the rule of the king of Jaffna, who received him with honors.
He spent a few days there, entertaining the king who, as he recalled in his “Travels,” understood Persian and was interested in his voyages and stories about the rulers of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia whom he had met since starting his journeys in 1325.
Ibn Battuta then went on a pilgrimage to Adam’s Peak, a 2,243-meter tall conical sacred mountain located in central Sri Lanka, which is venerated by Muslims as the site of the footprint of the first man and prophet, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The king gave him a palanquin and sent men to accompany him.
From Adam’s Peak, he took a southern route to Dondra, a southern coastal town, which was a rich temple port town complex. It was destroyed by the Portuguese in the 16th century.
From Dondra, Ibn Battuta went to Galle and Colombo, and from there, he went back to Puttalam and sailed to the coast of Tamil Nadu.
Sri Lanka, whose economy is highly dependent on tourism, is now hoping to attract visitors from Arab countries by evoking the memory of his travels.
“It’s important to refresh the memories of this historic visit and project it among the Arabs,” P.M. Amza, ambassador of Sri Lanka to Saudi Arabia, told Arab News.
“Ibn Battuta is a celebrated traveler … We believe such a celebrated traveler’s connection with Sri Lanka will be of definite attraction to the tourism sector of Sri Lanka.”
Earlier this week, the embassy in Riyadh inaugurated the Ibn Battuta Trail as part of the Sri Lankan Foreign Affairs Ministry’s economic diplomacy program in the Kingdom.
The trail package follows the footsteps of the famed traveler to Adam’s Peak with highlights including cultural attractions, wildlife, nature, adventure activities, and cuisine.
Amza was hopeful that it would contribute to increasing arrivals of Saudi travelers, which have dropped since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We used to attract over 35,000 Saudi tourists to Sri Lanka annually before 2019 and it has significantly dropped since 2019,” he said.
“Now there is a renewed interest, and we would like them to explore Sri Lanka’s beauty, beaches, waterfalls, rich culture, hospitality, nature and adventure.”
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