A former senior FBI official has been charged with violating US sanctions on Russia by taking "underhand" payments from a Russian oligarch.

Charles McGonigal, who led the FBI's counterintelligence division in New York from 2016 to 2018, was arrested on Saturday and is accused of working with a former Soviet diplomat turned Russian translator on behalf of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire.

Meanwhile, an article in "Insajder" reveals that the former official was connected to Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama.

Two sources told Insider that McGonigal was close to Edi Rama, who has served as Albania's prime minister since 2013. According to an email reviewed by Insider, McGonigal used his official FBI email account to attempt to arrange a meeting between Rama and an American firm the prime minister was considering hiring for an anti-corruption initiative.

The head of government has publicly admitted that he has a close friend with former FBI official Charles McGonigal.

"The FBI's counterterrorism chief has been and is my friend, there is no discussion. If he has an issue of his own with justice in the US, it is his issue. Let justice in the US speak. Justice is not done, the guilty are not brought to justice and accusations are not made in this kind of religion because it is terrible , " Rama wrote in September of last year.

McGonigal , 54, is accused of violating U.S. sanctions by trying to remove Deripaska from the sanctions list. McGonigal is one of the highest-ranking former FBI officials ever charged with a crime.

McGonigal and Shestakov are accused of receiving payments through shell companies and forging signatures to keep it a secret that Deripaska was paying them. Both face money laundering charges in addition to sanctions violation charges. Each of the four charges carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

"The FBI is committed to enforcing economic sanctions designed to protect the United States and our allies, particularly against the hostile activities of a foreign government and its actors. Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska wield malign global influence on behalf of the Kremlin and are linked to acts of bribery, extortion, and violence."

As alleged, Mr. McGonigal and Mr. Shestakov, both U.S. citizens, acted on behalf of Deripaska and fraudulently used a U.S. entity to ‘not disclose their activity in violation of U.S. sanctions. Once sanctions are imposed, they must be applied equally against all U.S. citizens to be effective. There are no exceptions for anyone, including a former FBI official like Mr. McGonigal,” FBI Acting Assistant Director Michael Driscoll said in a statement.

After leaving the FBI, McGonigal then worked for Deripaska through a law firm representing the Russian oil tycoon.

He earned at least $25,000 working as an “investigator” for the law firm on the Deripaska case, the indictment alleges.

McGonigal then worked directly for Deripaska, receiving an initial payment of $51,000 and then payments of $41,790 each month for three months from August 2021 to November 2021.

He told friends that he was working for “a rich Russian guy” and stressed that his work was legitimate. In conversations about Deripaska, he was often referred to by McGonigal and Shestakov as “the big guy” and “you-know-who.”

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C., opened a separate case Monday against McGonigal on charges that he received $225,000 in cash from an individual with business interests in Europe, whom McGonigal knew was an employee of a foreign intelligence service.

The nine-count indictment alleges that between August 2017 and September 2018, leading up to his retirement from the FBI's New York Office, McGonigal concealed from the bureau his relationship with the unidentified former foreign intelligence officer while traveling abroad with the individual. The individual is described as an Albanian national employed by a Chinese energy conglomerate.

The person later “served as an FBI source in a criminal investigation involving foreign political lobbying” over which McGonigal had an oversight role.

Deripaska, an aluminum tycoon, was among 20 Russians sanctioned in 2018 by the Treasury Department as punishment for the Russian government's "continued and increasingly malign activities around the world."

Deripaska, 55, has a fortune of $1.7 billion, according to the Forbes Billionaires List , although he had about $7 billion in 2018 – the same year the US imposed sanctions.

Meanwhile, an article in Fortune magazine states that McGonigal concealed from the FBI details of a visit he made to Albania in 2017, during which he received $225 from an intelligence official.

The article also mentions a meeting he had with Prime Minister Edi Rama.

“The Justice Department says McGonigal also concealed from the FBI key details of a 2017 trip he took to Albania with a former member of that country’s intelligence service, who had given him $225,000.

For example, prosecutors say he failed to identify the person as his travel companion or disclose that the accommodation for him would be free.

Once there, according to the Justice Department, he met with the prime minister of Albania and discouraged him from granting licenses to drill for oil fields in the country to Russian companies. McGonigal's Albanian contacts had a financial interest in those decisions, prosecutors say.

Insider article: 

A former high-level FBI agent who was involved in the investigation into the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia during the 2016 election has placed himself under the scrutiny of federal prosecutors over his ties to Russia and the governments other foreigners.

Late last year, according to internal court documents obtained by Insider , U.S. attorneys secretly convened a grand jury that examined the conduct of Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI’s New York City field office. The Justice Department declined to comment on what the grand jury was investigating or whether it remained ongoing. But a witness subpoena obtained by Insider appears to indicate that the government was, in part, examining McGonigal’s business dealings with a top aide to Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire Russian oligarch who was at the center of allegations that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign to interfere in the 2016 election.

The subpoena, issued in November, seeks information about McGonigal and a shadowy consulting firm called Spectrum Risk Solutions. A week after the subpoena was issued, a Soviet-born immigrant named Sergey Shestakov said in a separate filing that McGonigal had helped him "facilitate" an introduction between Spectrum and Deripaska's aide. The filing also says McGonigal helped introduce the aide to Kobre & Kim, a New York law firm that specializes in representing clients who are being investigated for "fraud and misconduct." Shestakov, who has been identified in television panels as a former Soviet foreign ministry official and former chief of staff to the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, reported receiving $33,000 for referrals.

While it would not necessarily have been illegal for McGonigal to work on behalf of Deripaska, failure to disclose activities covered by the Foreign Agents Registration Act, such as lobbying and public relations, is punishable by a $250,000 fine and up to five years in prison . Deripaska was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2018 for acting as a Kremlin agent and has been accused of ordering the murder of a businessman. "If McGonigal gets involved in any way with Deripaska, that seems to me to be inappropriate, to put it politely," says Tim Weiner, author of "Enemies: The Story of the FBI."

Neither McGonigal nor those he is said to be involved with responded to requests for comment from The Insider. “This is not an area where we can make a statement at this time,” said a representative for Kobre & Kim.

It is not clear whether McGonigal is a target of the grand jury investigation, or merely a subject whose activities are somehow connected to it. And there is nothing in court documents or elsewhere to suggest that McGonigal behaved inappropriately during the FBI's investigation of the Trump campaign. But the materials sought in the subpoena raise questions about whether a top FBI agent may have tapped connections he made during his years of public service for private gain — a practice all too common among Washington insiders. And whatever McGonigal's actions, the fact that he is involved in a grand jury investigation is highly unusual. According to a former senior Justice Department official, who asked not to be identified, prosecutors almost never consider charges against someone this high in the FBI. "It's very rare that former FBI people, and certainly former senior FBI people, end up as grand jury targets," the official said.

McGonigal's federal scrutiny is particularly surprising given his work at the FBI. Before his retirement in 2018, McGonigal led the WikiLeaks investigation into Chelsea Manning, arrested Bill Clinton's national security adviser Sandy Berger for removing classified material from a National Archives reading room, and led the search for a Chinese agent within the CIA. In 2016, when reports surfaced that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee's email system, McGonigal was serving as chief of the cybercrimes section at FBI headquarters in Washington. In that capacity, he was one of the first officials to learn that a Trump campaign official had bragged that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton, sparking the investigation known as Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Later that year, FBI Director James Comey promoted McGonigal to oversee counterintelligence operations in New York.

According to the witness statement, prosecutors are also looking into whether McGonigal has ties to the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as any "payments or gifts" given to him by the governments of Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania.

Two sources told Insider that McGonigal was close to Edi Rama, who has served as prime minister of Albania since 2013. According to an email reviewed by Insider, McGonigal used his official FBI email account to attempted to arrange a meeting between Rama and an American firm the prime minister was considering hiring for an anti-corruption initiative. In the end, the FBI did not give McGonigal approval for the meeting, and it never took place.

A representative of Rama said that the prime minister's relationship with McGonigal was "an entirely private friendly relationship with no public interest." We have no idea about any grand jury and no US authorities have ever contacted us about it. There were never any signature meetings, gifts, payments, travel reimbursements before or after Mr. McGonigal left the job."

Since leaving the FBI, McGonigal has continued to trade his counterintelligence expertise. In 2020, months after his reported aide to Deripaska's aide, he appeared on a panel at the Atlantic Council, where he condemned the corruption of the Russian security services. "You're seeing an erosion in every rule of law that is associated with the FSB," he said. "It would be akin to having the FBI in the United States as a rogue element, acting at the behest of the highest bidder."

McGonigal's LinkedIn profile says he is the senior vice president of "global security and life safety" at Brookfield Properties, a multibillion-dollar real estate company in New York. But this information, apparently, is incorrect. "Charlie McGonigal is no longer with Brookfield," Andrew Brent, Brookfield's chief communications officer, told Insider. McGonigal left the company, he added, in early January — just as witnesses were scheduled to appear before the grand jury.

(BalkanWeb)