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Charles McGonigal, a former top counterintelligence official at the FBI who had been lauded for his work investigating Russian oligarchs, has pleaded guilty to working on behalf of a Russian oligarch.
We had a hint this was coming. Last week, news outlets reported that McGonigal, who’s also facing federal charges in Washington, D.C., was preparing to plead out in New York.
Damian Williams, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a news release Tuesday:
After his tenure as a high-level FBI official who supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs, Charles McGonigal has now admitted that he agreed to evade U.S. sanctions by providing services to one of those oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska. This office will continue to hold to account those who violate U.S. sanctions for their own financial benefit.
The news release outlines McGonigal’s crimes, saying he violated U.S. sanctions in 2021 when he took money from Deripaska to investigate a rival Russian oligarch and that he conspired to commit money laundering by trying to conceal that Deripaska was behind the payments.
While McGonigal’s indictment in New York alleged that he committed crimes after retiring from the FBI in 2018, the charges in Washington allege that he accepted $225,000 in cash from a former Albanian intelligence agent while he was still with the FBI. McGonigal has pleaded not guilty in that case, but his attorney recently said there’s a “decent chance” that the case will be resolved without going to trial, meaning it’s possible McGonigal also enters a plea deal in Washington.
Aside from the obvious intrigue surrounding a former FBI official being on the take for a Russian agent, McGonigal’s plea is all the more interesting because of his role in the federal government's probe of Russia’s links to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
As Craig Unger wrote for The New Republic earlier this year: “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.”
On Monday, a New York Times feature on McGonigal summarized his role in the Trump-Russia probe:
By early 2016, Mr. McGonigal was running the bureau’s Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section in Washington, where agents analyzed Russian and Chinese hacking and other foreign intelligence activities.
In that senior position, Mr. McGonigal became aware of the initial criminal referral that led to the investigation known as Crossfire Hurricane — an inquiry into whether Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and associates were coordinating with Russia.
That October, then-director James B. Comey appointed Mr. McGonigal special agent in charge of counterintelligence in New York, overseeing hundreds of agents and support staff. It was a return to where Mr. McGonigal had gotten his start, but in a vastly more important role.
Deripaska, a known ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is referenced heavily in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on links between the Trump campaign and Russia. The report alleged former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort offered to brief Deripaska and share the campaign’s internal polling data in order to resolve a multimillion-dollar legal dispute with the oligarch.
Deripaska has denied the allegations. But he has been sanctioned by the U.S. government nonetheless, and he has been indicted in the Southern District of New York for allegedly attempting to evade those sanctions.
McGonigal has now admitted to a cozy relationship with one of the most controversial figures at the center of U.S. geopolitics. And his guilty plea only increases the concern over how deep and damaging that relationship might have been to our national security.