About Recently Arrested Charles McGonigal, former FBI Official for New York field office... [View all]

[Joinfortmill]

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-23-2023
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American


'On Saturday, authorities from the Department of Justice arrested Charles McGonigal...McGonigal worked for the FBI from 1996 to 2018...Director James Comey named McGonigal the head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York field office...McGonigal supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs...Charges against McGonigal—stem from his connection to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin (and)...Paul Manafort...convicted...of crimes associated with his ties to Russia. McGonigal is charged with violating sanctions by taking money from Deripaska to investigate one of his rivals, and with money laundering... of hiding multiple cash payments from a foreign intelligence official and of trying to get the sanctions on Deripaska removed.

While there is a lot we still don’t know, we do know that in 2018, Comey told Congress he worried that officials in the FBI’s New York field office had given Trump ally Rudy Giuliani sensitive information in the last days of the 2016 election, after Giuliani had said so in front of television cameras. We know that Comey told investigators that he released news of the reopened investigation of Clinton’s emails—against Department of Justice policy—out of concern that “people in New York” would leak that information. Former acting attorney general Sally Yates was clearer. She told the inspector general that Comey and other FBI officials “felt confident that the New York Field Office would leak it and that it would come out regardless of whether he advised Congress or not.”'

We also know that after McGonigal left the FBI, he went to work for Brookfield Properties, the multibillion-dollar real-estate company in New York that handled the bailout of Jared Kushner’s 666 Fifth Avenue by a $1.1 billion, 99-year lease—all paid up front—thanks to the Qatar Investment Authority...None of those things is currently on the table in the indictments, and they might not turn out to be significant. But my guess is that this case will continue to develop.