Day: December 16, 2023

“[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.

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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. 

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.

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.

Show Notes

[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.

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.

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.

Trump Clinton

By Charlie Gerow

The term “October surprise” has been part of American political lingo for at least half a century.

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.

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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.’