Charlie's Angles

The indictment of former FBI senior executive Charles McGonigal brings more questions than answers.

In Dirty Rubles, published in May of 2018, I argued that there were three primary reasons for Donald John Trump’s victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2016 election:

First, the so-called Comey letter, which re-focused the media’s attention on Hillary’s emails a week before Election Day—for no good reason, as it turned out. This reinforced the narrative of Hillary as crooked, secretive, untrustworthy, up to no good.

Second, the historically terrible article that ran in the New York Times on 31 October 2016: “Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” Here was the purported paper of record, just nine days before Election Day, proclaiming that Trump/Russia was bunk. Most major media outlets dropped the Russia story like a proverbial hot potato and did not pick it up again for months. Saturday Night Live gave more airtime to the red-flag Putin/Trump bromance than the news shows did.

Finally, but most importantly: Trump had help from Moscow.

Last week’s indictment of Charles McGonigal, who from 2016 until his retirement in 2018 was the special agent in charge of the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI’s New York Field Office, suggests that the three strands of Trump’s braid of victory overlap even more than we realized five years ago. Could Charlie McGonigal be the metaphorical barrette that ties all the loose ends together?

First, a caveat: the charges, per the DOJ press release, stem from McGonigal’s “receipt of $225,000 in cash from an individual who had business interests in Europe and who had been an employee of a foreign intelligence service, while McGonigal was serving as Special Agent in Charge of FBI counterintelligence efforts in the New York Office.” The alleged criminal activity took place “from August 2017, and continuing through and beyond his retirement from the FBI in September 2018.” That means that, at least as far as the indictment is concerned, McGonigal was not engaged in wrongdoing during the 2016 election campaign.

The temptation is to jump to conclusions here, and it is imperative that we not do so. As bad as this looks, we must avoid making assumptions.

Asking questions, however, is fair game. The big one is this: McGonigal was allegedly working for one of Putin’s closest cronies, the notorious oligarch Oleg Deripaska; exactly when did he decide this was okay?

Here are some others:

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Was McGonigal involved in the Anthony Weiner laptop op that ultimately gave Trump the election?

By Halloween 2016, McGonigal was an executive in the FBI’s New York field office. “Trumplandia,” as that station was dubbed, was the source of the pressure put on FBI director James Comey to make public the reopened investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. As I explain in Dirty Rubles:

On 2 October 2016, agents of the FBI’s New York field office seized a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, which had previously been confiscated by the NYPD in connection with his sexting-with-minors case. Comey wanted the laptop to be searched immediately for the alleged “missing” Hillary Clinton emails. But his order was ignored. Instead, Trumplandia agents sat on the laptop for weeks and did nothing with it. The closer it was to the election, they knew, the more explosive the laptop’s contents would be…whatever they were.

Then, in the waning days of October, rogue elements of the Bureau’s New York field office, through their mouthpiece at [the website] True Pundit, threatened to leak the “missing” emails supposedly found on the laptop. On 24 October 2016, FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe informed Comey that in his assessment, the True Pundit sources were “heavyweight”—whether the missing emails existed, he could not say; but there really were rogue FBI agents in the know leaking to True Pundit, so it was a possibility.

This was a bluff. In fact, the Trumplandia operators had no more idea of what was on the laptop than James Comey did. But the Director didn’t know that. Comey didn’t want to take the risk, and have legit missing emails leak. That would make it look like he was hiding something about Hillary Clinton that the American people needed to know. So he decided to get ahead of the story, to cover his ass. He wrote the letter to Congress that turned the election.

In short, Comey was coerced into sending the letter that turned the election. (He writes about the pressures in his book, A Higher Loyalty, and they are dramatized in the Billy Ray film The Comey Rule.)

Trump’s people didn’t need Hillary to actually be guilty. All they needed was the announcement of an investigation, and that was enough innuendo for the ruthless MAGA messengers to smear her and tank her campaign. (Trump pulled the same shit with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanding that Ukraine open an investigation into Joe Biden. Remember “I would like you to do us a favor, though?”)

The Weiner laptop was seized on 4 October 2016, two days after McGonigal was announced as special agent in charge of the Counterintelligence Division for the New York field office; per the FBI announcement, he formally began work there “at the end of October.” Prior to that, he was stationed in Washington, where he headed the Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination section.

Presumably, McGonigal spent the weeks between the announcement and his assumption of the New York role liaising with his new colleagues in “Trumplandia.” And I certainly hope the fucking counterintelligence chief was read in on all the funny business by the time Comey sent his fateful memo on 28 October. He must have known about this.

What part, if any, did McGonigal play in this drama?

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Was McGonigal a source for the New York Times?

To write their infamous “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia” article, journalists Eric Lichtblau and Steve Lee Myers talked to a number of unnamed sources in government. Was McGonigal among them? If so, how much influence did he have in shaping their erroneous conclusion?

This paragraph stands out:

But the focus in that case was on Mr. Manafort’s ties with a kleptocratic government in Ukraine — and whether he had declared the income in the United States — and not necessarily on any Russian influence over Mr. Trump’s campaign, one official said.

Was McGonigal that “one official?”

There is also this:

The investigation has treated it as a counterintelligence operation as much as a criminal one, though agents are also focusing on whether anyone in the United States was involved.

Counterintelligence was McGonigal’s bailiwick. Was he deliberately planting disinformation to the Times reporters? Or was he not involved with this at all?

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Will there be superseding indictments?

The FBI searched U.S. properties belonging to Deripaska last October; in November, they seized McGonigal’s phones. This is presumably how investigators learned that McGonigal “violated sanctions imposed by the United States on Oleg Deripaska,” as the unsealed indictment alleges.

Is this merely the DOJ’s initial salvo? Do they hope to get McGonigal to cooperate, so they can go after bigger fish? Or is this a one-off?

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Why did McGonigal go to the Dark Side?

It is not unprecedented for an FBI executive to work for the bad guys upon retirement. William Sessions, the former director of the Bureau, wound up representing Semion Mogilevich, the head of the Russian mob, after he was forced out of the job following ethics complaints. Perhaps this was how McGonigal rationalized working for “OVD.”

On the other hand, Sessions’s work for Mogilevich was not concurrent with his FBI tenure, and he was never charged with helping the “Brainy Don” violate U.S. sanctions. As the director in charge of the L.A. field office made clear last week, McGonigal “betrayed his solemn oath to the United States in exchange for personal gain and at the expense of our national security. A senior FBI executive at the time, McGonigal is alleged to have committed the very violations he swore to investigate while he purported to lead a workforce of FBI employees who spend their careers protecting secrets and holding foreign adversaries accountable.”

Why would he do such a thing?

Money is the obvious answer, and the one mentioned in the indictment. But McGonigal banked a measly $225,000 from his work for Deripaska—that’s less than the down payment Brett Kavanaugh plonked down for his Chevy Chase house. To Deripaska, that sum doesn’t even qualify as pocket change. Did McGonigal really sell out his country for kopeks on the ruble?

Was resentment the impetus for his betrayal? Did he get sick of watching all the Trump people get away with crimes and decide to line up with the rest of the pigs at the trough?

Or did all those years working in counterintelligence scramble his moral compass? If there’s one takeaway from all those Harry Potter books, it’s that the Dark Arts teacher is always the one who sells out for Voldemort.

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Photo credit: FBI.