Former FBI agent accused of helping Russian oligarch walks free on $500,000 bail

The former FBI counterintelligence agent accused of helping a Russian oligarch evade US sanctions has been released on bail.

Charles McGonigal, 54, walked free from Manhattan federal court Monday on a $500,000 personal recognition bond, following his arrest Saturday on charges set out in two newly unsealed indictments.

One of the indictments, filed in Manhattan, accused McGonigal of violating US sanctions laws by working for Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire crony of Vladimir Putin, following his retirement from the FBI in 2018.

The other charges, filed in Washington, DC, allege that McGonigal received $225,000 in cash bribes from an unnamed former Albanian intelligence agent while he headed the counterintelligence branch at the FBI’s New York field office.

Accompanied by the former spy, McGonigal met secretly with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in September 2017, where he gave Rama “FBI paraphernalia” and offered advice on lucrative oil drilling licenses, according to the indictment.

McGonigal was released on a signed bond, meaning the money didn’t actually have to be deposited in advance, as it was signed by himself and two other unidentified people.

Leaving court, McGonigal’s attorney, Seth Ducharme, told reporters that his client “has had a long and distinguished career with the FBI.”

“Obviously, this is a harrowing day for Mr. McGonigal and his family, but we will review the evidence, we will examine it closely, and we have a great deal of confidence in Mr. McGonigal,” said Ducharme, the former lead federal prosecutor. in Brooklyn.

McGonigal worked for the FBI from 1996 until his retirement in 2018, and from 2016 until he left the office he was the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division in the New York field office.

He played a role in high-profile and sensitive investigations, including Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s alleged ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

He also led an FBI team that investigated why CIA informants in China were being arrested and killed, an investigation that led to the arrest and conviction of Chinese double agent Jerry Chun Shing Lee.

Now, however, McGonigal is accused of spinning his own web of deception into multiple alleged schemes to profit from illegal foreign payments.

In an office-wide email Monday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said McGonigal’s alleged conduct “is totally inconsistent with what I see of the men and women of the FBI demonstrating every day through their actions that are worthy of the public’s trust”. .’

The most stupefying charge accused him of working with a former Soviet diplomat turned Russian interpreter on behalf of Deripaska, a Russian billionaire who was allegedly referred to in code as “the big guy” and “the client.”

McGonigal, who had overseen and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs, including Deripaska, worked to get Deripaska’s sanctions lifted in 2019 and took money from him in 2021 to investigate a rival oligarch, the Justice Department said.

McGonigal and the interpreter, Sergey Shestakov, were arrested Saturday: McGonigal after landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport and Shestakov at his home in Morris, Connecticut.

Shestakov, who worked as an interpreter for federal and prosecutorial courts in New York City after retiring as a diplomat in 1993, helped connect McGonigal to Deripaska, according to the indictment.

In 2018, while McGonigal was still working for the FBI, Shestakov introduced him to a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who worked as Deripaska’s agent, according to the indictment.

That person is not named in court documents, but the Justice Department says he was “rumored in public media reports to be a Russian intelligence officer.”

According to the indictment, Shestakov asked McGonigal to help get the officer’s daughter an internship with the New York Police Department’s counterterrorism and intelligence units. McGonigal agreed, prosecutors say, telling a police department contact that “I have an interest in her father for a number of reasons.”

According to the indictment, a police sergeant later informed the NYPD and the FBI that the woman claimed to have an “unusually close relationship” with an FBI agent who he said had given her access to confidential FBI files.

The sergeant found it “unusual for a college student to receive such special treatment from the NYPD and the FBI,” the indictment says.

After retiring from the FBI, according to the indictment, McGonigal began working in 2019 as a consultant and investigator for an international law firm seeking to reverse Deripaska’s sanctions, a process known as delisting.

The law firm paid McGonigal $25,000 through a corporation owned by Shestakov, prosecutors say, though work was ultimately disrupted by factors including the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2021, according to the indictment, Deripaska’s agent recruited McGonigal and Shestakov to unearth a rival oligarch, with whom Deripaska was fighting for control of a large Russian corporation, in exchange for $51,280 up front and $41,790 per month paid through from a Russian bank to a New Jersey company owned by McGonigal’s friend. McGonigal kept his friend in the dark about the true nature of the payments, prosecutors say.

McGonigal is also accused of withholding from the FBI key details of a trip he took to Albania in 2017 with the former Albanian intelligence official who allegedly gave him at least $225,000 in three separate cash payments.

While there, according to the Justice Department, McGonigal met with the Albanian prime minister and urged caution in granting licenses to Russian front companies to drill oil fields in the country. McGonigal’s Albanian contacts had a financial interest in those decisions.

In an example of how McGonigal allegedly mistook personal gain for professional responsibilities, prosecutors in Washington say he “caused” the FBI’s New York office to open a criminal lobbying investigation in which the former Albanian intelligence official was to serve. as a confidential human source. .

McGonigal did so, prosecutors allege, without disclosing to the FBI or Justice Department his financial connections to the man.