A former senior counterintelligence officer with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been arrested for alleged ties to a now-sanctioned Russian oligarch.
The New York Post featured the bombshell story on the cover under the headline, “FBI agent who probed fake ‘Russiagate’ Trump case arrested – for helping RUSSIAN oligarch.”
Acknowledging the obvious difficulties this development creates for the FBI, emblazoned above the headline, the New York Post wrote that this was the “Irony is Not Dead Edition.”
The agent, Charles McGonigal, retired in 2018 after participating in the FBI’s investigation of claims that former president Donald Trump had colluded with Russia during the 2016 national election.
While serving as the chief of cybercrimes at the FBI agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., McGonigal was reportedly among the first law enforcement officials to learn about intel surrounding the Trump campaign’s alleged connections to Russia.
This intelligence would later lead to a formal investigation of the now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion theory dubbed Operation Crossfire Hurricane. According to multiple reports, McGonigal was a key figure in the launch of this probe into Trump.
Now, in a four-count federal indictment, McGonigal is charged for allegedly violating United States sanctions on Russia by agreeing to provide services for Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire industrialist who amassed his incredible wealth by seizing control of formerly state-controlled assets after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Sergey Shestakov, a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who expatriated to the United States and later became a citizen, was also indicted alongside McGonigal.
According to the indictment secured by federal prosecutors, the pair actively worked to have Deripaska removed from the U.S. sanctions list.
“As public servants, they should have known better,” argued U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams.
“This Office will continue to prosecute those who violate U.S. sanctions enacted in response to Russian belligerence in Ukraine in order to line their own pockets,” Williams continued.
Each of the four primary counts against the two men carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison, while a lesser charge only brought against Shestakov for making false statements to investigators carries a maximum of five years.
“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,” wrote Mattathias Schwartz of Business Insider.
“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,” Schwartz continued.
Top brass in the FBI have condemned McGonigal by name in public.
“After sanctions are imposed, they must be enforced equally against all U.S. citizens in order to be successful,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge Michael Driscoll stated. “There are no exceptions for anyone, including a former FBI official like Mr. McGonigal.”
“Supporting a designated threat to the United States and our allies is a crime the FBI will continue to pursue aggressively,” Driscoll concluded.
McGonigal, for his part, has entered a plea of not guilty and awaits a trial date.