Indicted Russia-aiding FBI agent overwhelmed with 'all this money' and 'power players': mistress

Travis Gettys
February 08, 2023



Charles McGonigal Photo: AFP


The mistress of an indicted FBI agent this week spilled secrets about his use of a burner phone, mysterious contacts, envelope exchanges at upscale restaurants and a baggie full of cash.

Allison Guerriero was in a relationship with former FBI official Charles McGonigal when he was the bureau's special agent in charge of the New York field office's counterintelligence division, and she told Insider in a lengthy interview that he was lured by the lavish perks that came with his perch in a world inhabited by spies and oligarchs.

"He was out of his element here," Guerriero said. "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."

An indictment alleges that McGonigal used his authority to aide Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska reverse U.S. sanctions with the help of Sergey Shestakov, a former Soviet diplomat-turned-court translator who Guerriero saw hand McGonigal envelopes three or four times from mid-2017 to late 2018.

READ MORE: Kevin McCarthy chides Republicans for taking Biden's 'bait' by heckling him at SOTU

"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 more sinister, and the FBI is still trying to unravel how far back his entanglement goes with the sanctioned oligarch.

"What McGonigal and all these other chuckleheads don't understand is that for the Deripaskas of the world, this is like shopping at Walmart," said a Washington insider with decades of experience in international finance. "They laugh at how cheap Americans are to buy."

The right, including Donald Trump, say McGonigal improperly influenced the Russia probe into the former president, while some on the left believe he helped tip the election toward Trump in 2016, but the FBI insists it's a simple corruption case with no bearing on politics.

"We're the ones who put him in handcuffs," a senior FBI official told Insider.

Friends and neighbors describe McGonigal as an ordinary executive-level FBI agent, a centrist Republican who read The Economist and occasionally watched Fox News, but Guerriero said he told her he didn't vote in 2016 because he didn't like either candidate, and while he also boasted about playing on Trump's luxury golf courses he also seemed to disdain Trump's promise to "drain the swamp."

There's currently no evidence that McGonigal conducted espionage, but an FBI source confirmed an investigation remained ongoing, and Guerriero can't provide much in the way of a motive for her former lover's alleged crimes.

"He said he needed to make more money," she said. "He had two kids to put through college."



https://www.rawstory.com/charles-mcgonigal-fbi-2659388079/

 

Exclusive: British intel caught FBI spy chief secretly meeting a Russian in London

Mattathias Schwartz
Thu, February 16, 2023 at 3:00 AM MST



Charles McGonigal, former special agent in charge of the FBI's counterintelligence division in New York, arrives at a federal courthouse in Manhattan on Feb. 9.John Minchillo/AP

• An FBI spy chief's secret meeting with a Russian contact was detected by UK officials.
  
  
• Charles McGonigal, the ex-FBI official, is charged with taking money from Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska.
  
  
• McGonigal should have realized that the London meeting would be noticed, one source said.
  

In 2018, Charles McGonigal, the FBI's former New York spy chief, traveled to London where he met with a Russian contact who was under surveillance by British authorities, two US intelligence sources told Insider.

The British were alarmed enough by the meeting to alert the FBI's legal attaché, who was stationed at the US Embassy. The FBI then used the surreptitious meeting as part of their basis to open an investigation into McGonigal, one of the two sources said.



The two sources, both former officials in the US intelligence community, did not specify the identity of the Russian who McGonigal met with.

McGonigal, the former head of the FBI's counterintelligence division in New York, stands accused of taking money from Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch, in violation of US sanctions, in exchange for investigating one of Deripaska's Russian rivals. McGonigal "traveled to meet Deripaska and others at Deripaska's residence in London, and in Vienna," according to one of the federal indictments lodged last month. The indictments do not say precisely when those alleged meetings took place, or how prosecutors came to believe they occurred.

"Your sources sound well-informed," said a third source, who worked for the US intelligence community in 2018 and was aware of communications between British intelligence officials and the US Embassy in London. They declined to confirm or deny that the meeting occurred.

During his years in New York, McGonigal oversaw 150 FBI agents tasked with shadowing foreign operatives and turning them into spies for the US. He would have had intimate knowledge of surveillance penetration in world capitals, which makes the London meeting all the more mystifying.

"What the fuck was he thinking?" said a fourth source, who said they had reason to believe that the meeting "apparently did occur," but declined to confirm it. Years of experience running counterintelligence, the fourth source said, should have clued in McGonigal to the possibility that the London encounter would attract notice.

Insider was able to determine the year but not the month of the meeting. The fourth source noted that regardless of whether the meeting occurred before or after McGonigal retired from the FBI in September 2018, it suggested a serious and extended relationship. "A meeting like this doesn't just happen on a Tuesday," they said, noting that whomever McGonigal met with, they were important enough to be under surveillance by the British and merit alerting the US Embassy. "There's a long lead time."

The FBI's national press office and its New York field office both declined to comment.

Neither the State Department, an attorney representing McGonigal, the United Kingdom's Home Office, nor the United Kingdom's Foreign Office immediately responded to requests for comment sent late on Wednesday.

Ruben Bunyatyan, a spokesperson for Deripaska, declined to comment on any alleged meetings between Deripaska and McGonigal, and denied claims made by the Treasury Department and others that Deripaska is close to the Kremlin, and that he is an oligarch. "To insinuate some sort of special links or treatment is simply wrong," Bunyatyan said, by email. Deripaska "had ordinary links," he continued, "just as any other industrialist of his scale would have in any country around the world."

In 2014, the FBI tried to recruit Deripaska as an informant. McGonigal had investigated Russian operatives earlier in his career, but it is unclear whether he was involved with the FBI's Deripaska recruitment effort. He was stationed in Washington at that time.

The McGonigal indictments state that in 2018, McGonigal had access to a classified list of Russian oligarchs who were under consideration for US sanctions due to their "close ties to the Kremlin." The Treasury Department sanctioned Deripaska in April 2018. In 2021, the FBI raided two homes linked to Deripaska in Washington and New York. Then, last year, Deripaska himself was indicted for having violated the 2018 sanctions when he allegedly arranged for his girlfriend to travel to the US so she could give birth in a US hospital and obtain US citizenship for her newborn child.

The McGonigal investigation was first reported by Insider in September. Subsequent reporting detailed first-hand accounts of McGonigal's extramarital relationship, a bag of cash in his Brooklyn apartment, and manila envelopes McGonigal received at dinners from a former Soviet diplomat.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-british-authorities-surveilled-fbi-100000007.html

 

Getting closer to the top

 

Ex-chief of FBI’s NYC counterintelligence division pleads guilty to helping sanctioned Russian oligarch find dirt on enemies
Molly Crane-Newman, New York Daily News
Tue, August 15, 2023 at 7:36 PM MDT·3 min read
1



Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images North America/TNS
NEW YORK — Former chief of the FBI’s New York City counterintelligence division Charlie McGonigal pleaded guilty in Manhattan Tuesday to helping a sanctioned Russian oligarch find dirt on his enemies after his retirement.

The former special agent in charge, who retired from the FBI in 2018 after a two-decade career that included Russian foreign counterintelligence work and investigating oligarchs, was arrested in January on charges in New York and Washington, D.C., alleging he worked for Russian President Vladimir Putin associate and aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska after his retirement.

The feds said McGonigal attempted to remove Deripaska’s sanctions and probed one of his Russian rivals in exchange for secret payments. Deripaska was featured in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s election interference report.

Per the terms of his plea agreement, McGonigal was permitted to cop to one count of conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law the U.S. uses to sanction foreign countries. He faced five counts upon his arrest.


The veteran special agent, his voice cracking, asked U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rearden if he could stand in court to admit to his crimes between spring to November 2021, for which he said he was “deeply remorseful.”

“They’re my words in totality, your honor,” he said.

“About three years after my retirement from the FBI, while I was living in Manhattan, I agreed with another party to collect open source derogatory information about a Russian oligarch named Vladimir Potanin,” on Deripaska’s behalf, McGonigal said.

“I knew Deripaska had been put on a sanctions list by the U.S. government,” he said. “I understood that the work I was collecting would provide some benefit to Deripaska,” and ultimately would be used to get Potanin — a former first deputy of Russia last year estimated to be the country’s richest man with a net worth of $23.7 billion — on the U.S. sanctions list.

The disgraced FBI chief said he received $17,500 laundered through two corporations not registered to him “to make it difficult to attribute the source of the payments to Deripaska.”

“I take full responsibility as my actions were never intended to hurt the United States, the FBI and my family and friends,” McGonigal said.

Manhattan Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebecca Dell said had McGonigal proceeded to trial, prosecutors would have presented evidence of his contract with Deripaska and a trove of photographic evidence and banking records.

Dell said investigators had messages between October and November 2021 showing McGonigal and his conspirators negotiating for him to obtain electronic files revealing hidden assets valued at $500 million — for a fat fee of $650,000 to $3 million.

Prosecutors would have presented testimony about a meeting between McGonigal, his co-conspirator, former Soviet diplomat Sergey Shestakov, and an agent for Deripaska in Manhattan, Dell said.

“Economic sanctions are a critical component of our national security policy,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge James Smith said. “They must be fully and fairly applied to effectively limit the resources of those who threaten to harm the United States and our global allies.”

The charges against McGonigal in D.C. are outstanding. In that case, he’s accused of concealing a fruitful relationship with an Albanian intelligence official during his time at the bureau who allegedly paid him $225,000, and other foreign officials.

McGonigal’s sentencing is set for Dec. 14. He faces up to five years in prison.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-chief-fbi-nyc-counterintelligence-013600549.html

 

Biden’s Justice Department is burying its big FBI corruption scandal (msn.com)

Biden’s Justice Department is burying its big FBI corruption scandal
Story by John Schindler •3h

The FBI is grappling with a seemingly endless cycle of money laundering schemes that law enforcement officials say they’re scrambling to slow through a combination of prosecution and public awareness. Beyond the run-of-the-mill plots, officials say, is a particularly concerning trend involving “money mules.” These are people who, unwittingly or not, use their own bank accounts to move money for criminals for purposes they think are legitimate or even noble.© Provided by Washington Examiner
In recent years, Republicans have gradually lost faith in the FBI's nonpartisan integrity. This week brings more reasons to doubt the FBI’s ability to police itself.

Enter the plea deal granted to Charles McGonigal, the rogue senior agent whose last assignment before retiring in 2018 was serving as the counterintelligence boss of the bureau's powerful New York Field Office.

WRAY LIED ABOUT NOT TARGETING CATHOLICS

In a Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, the disgraced McGonigal pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired to violate international sanctions on a notorious Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, and committed money laundering. Although these are serious charges and McGonigal faces up to five years in prison, nobody expects his sentence, which will be handed down towards the end of this year, to be that severe since he reached a plea deal with the Department of Justice, admitting his guilt.

Nevertheless, the bureau’s image is severely tarnished here. Part of McGonigal’s job as a counterspy boss with the FBI was investigating Kremlin-connected Russian oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska! The fact that McGonigal was also involved, at least to a degree, with the FBI’s infamous investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in 2016, Operation CROSSFIRE HURRICANE, has led many Republicans to smell a rat. It looks like President Joe Biden’s Justice Department is giving McGonigal a pass to avoid unpleasant revelations about FBI dirty dealings which might emerge in any trial. The full story is even worse.

The Russian side of the McGonigal scandal is the tame one. Although the media never paid it sufficient attention, the accused is facing more federal charges stemming from McGonigal’s taking $225,000 from a former Albanian intelligence officer in 2017, when the accused was still an FBI official. This is fundamentally a Balkan spy-meets-corruption scandal, and that wasn’t addressed by McGonigal’s guilty plea this week.

The Balkan angle here is unpleasant and raises disturbing questions. As the New York Times put it gently this week, the accused "befriended the prime minister of Albania, Edi Rama, and used his position to drum up foreign business for his associates, according to the indictment filed against him in Washington. On one occasion, McGonigal opened an FBI investigation into a lobbyist for the Albanian prime minister’s main political rival."

The truth, as The Examiner reported on multiple occasions, is considerably more troubling than that. In exchange for cash, McGonigal became the "heavy" for Rama and his Socialist government, threatening their political rivals and shaking down Albanian oligarchs for cash in exchange for protection from U.S. sanctions. This was a secret, mafia-like extortion ring run by a top FBI official, which netted tens of millions of dollars, according to multiple sources. Such underworld tactics are hardly unexpected since, during the decadelong rule of Rama and his Socialists, little Albania has become Europe’s epicenter for the global illegal narcotics trade, with the tacit support of the Biden State Department.

Although what’s termed "the McGonigal affair" in Albania is widely discussed there, this shocking story has made little impression in Western media. That may have something to do with the fact that Rama and his allies are able to quash European media stories which report on their corruption and connections to international organized crime.

Officially, the Balkan portion of the McGonigal scandal remains an open case with the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., and no plea bargain has yet been reached. However, McGonigal’s attorney stated during a recent court hearing that he expects the Albania-related charges to also be resolved without going to trial, according to ABC News.

It sure looks like the fix is in. "Nobody wants to go there. It’s easier for everybody to bury the McGonigal mess," a veteran Eastern European intelligence hand in Washington told me this week. Although the McGonigal scandal isn’t a partisan matter on its face, since the rogue G-man commenced his international corruption during former President Donald Trump’s tenure and continued it into the current administration, we can safely bet that the Biden White House has no interest in discussing why it’s been so eager to support Rama and his corrupt government, even in Albanian domestic politics.

The only hope for the truth to come out is for Congress to take an interest in McGonigal’s dirty Balkan deals. Although some House Republicans have quietly asked questions about this affair, there are so many current House investigations into Biden-related scandals that the McGonigal affair gets lost in the maze of corruption inquiries. That’s unfortunate because the full account of McGonigal’s Albanian antics is a shocking story that would rock Washington far beyond just the FBI.

 

AH!
Shooter thinks he's finally gotten the meaning in one of anon's posts!

Lets see, shall we?;

When all else fails, attack the messenger but no matter what, ignore the message.​

So anon, how'd Shooter do? Did he translate your meaning well enough?

 

The illusion of truth never dies around here. Just keep telling the already proven lies over and over and over again hoping someone will believe them. Or maybe its even a self defense mechanism to keep telling the same lies and conspiracy theories to keep reality at bay.

 

Hey American Hater, did you see this?
Illusion of truth?
You bet it is.
​

Ex-FBI agent pleads guilty to concealing $225K loan from former Albanian official - ABC News (go.com)

Ex-FBI agent pleads guilty to concealing $225K loan from former Albanian official
A former high-ranking FBI counterintelligence official has pleaded guilty to concealing at least $225,000 in cash that he allegedly received from a former Albanian intelligence official while working for the agency

ByThe Associated Press
September 22, 2023, 2:21 PM

WASHINGTON -- A former high-ranking FBI counterintelligence official pleaded guilty on Friday to concealing at least $225,000 in cash that he allegedly received from a former Albanian intelligence official while working for the agency.

Charles McGonigal, 55, was the special agent in charge of the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York from 2016 to 2018, when he retired.

The charge to which he pleaded guilty — concealment of material facts — carries a maximum prison sentence of five years. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington, D.C., is scheduled to sentence McGonigal on Feb. 16, 2024.

The indictment for the Washington case does not characterize the payment to McGonigal as a bribe, but federal prosecutors say he was required to report it. The payment created a conflict of interest between McGonigal’s FBI duties and his private financial interests, the indictment said.

In August, McGonigal pleaded guilty in New York to a separate charge that he conspired to violate sanctions on Russia by going to work for a Russian oligarch whom he had investigated.

An indictment unsealed in January accused McGonigal of working with a former Soviet diplomat-turned-interpreter on behalf of Russian billionaire industrialist Oleg Deripaska. McGonigal accepted over $17,000 to help Deripaska collect derogatory information about another Russian oligarch who was a business competitor.

Deripaska has been under U.S. sanctions since 2018 for reasons related to Russia’s occupation of Crimea. McGonigal also was charged with working to have Deripaska’s sanctions lifted.

McGonigal is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 14 for his conviction in the New York case.

McGonigal was arrested in January after arriving at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport

In the Washington case, McGonigal agreed with prosecutors that he failed to report the $225,000 loan, his travel in Europe with the person who lent him the money or his contacts with foreign nationals during the trips, including the prime minister of Albania.


McGonigal hasn't repaid the money that he borrowed, a prosecutor said.

During Friday's hearing, McGonigal told the judge that he borrowed the money to help him launch a security consulting business after he retired from the FBI. He also apologized to the agency.

“This is not a situation I wanted to be in or to put them through,” he said.

 

Ex-FBI Counterintelligence Chief Gets 50-Months Behind Bars

Charles McGonigal, the former FBI counterintelligence chief in New York City, was sentenced to over four years in prison after pleading guilty to violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in August. McGonigal allegedly performed favors for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska–an ally of Vladimir Putin–in violation of U.S. sanctions. McGonigal was arrested at NYC’s John F. Kennedy Airport in January. He was also fined $40,000 and faces further sentencing in February after pleading guilty to hiding gifts from an ex-Albanian intelligence employee.

Read it at The Washington Post


https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-s...thoroughly-vetted-this-time?ref=home?ref=home