Day: December 16, 2023

The arrest of Charles McGonigal, chief of the FBI counterintelligence division in New York from October 2016 until his retirement in 2018, reopens festering questions about the troubled election that put Donald Trump in the White House. Among the crimes charged against McGonigal in two lengthy federal indictments is a secret financial relationship with Oleg Deripaska — a Russian oligarch close to dictator Vladimir Putin and associated with Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, himself convicted of crimes and pardoned.

During his FBI career, McGonigal oversaw investigations of Deripaska and other oligarchs suspected of various crimes, including espionage. Now the exposure of his illegal connection with Deripaska may provide fresh insights into Trump’s tainted victory.

On Oct. 4, 2016, a month before Election Day, FBI director James Comey appointed McGonigal as special agent in charge of the FBI counterintelligence division in New York City, an exceptionally influential job that he took over at an extraordinarily sensitive moment. The bureau already had open investigations of both Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her Republican adversary Trump. The Clinton investigation concerned “her emails,” of course, and the Trump investigation involved his campaign’s Russian connections.

What followed McGonigal’s sudden ascent to power in the New York FBI office were two seemingly separate incidents, occurring days before the election, that had a fateful impact. On Oct. 28, Comey sent a letter to the Congress publicly announcing that the bureau had resumed its investigation of Clinton due to the discovery of a laptop owned by former Rep. Anthony Weiner, whose spouse Huma Abedin was a top Clinton aide.

Months earlier the Justice Department months had cleared Clinton of any crime, but Comey violated Justice Department guidelines in accusing her of being neglectful about classified information, though it was later revealed that her emails contained no classified documents. (That means zero, zilch, nada, none, nothing.) But then Comey was driven to examine Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop.

Comey’s announcement stopped the Clinton campaign’s forward momentum and almost certainly cost her the election — even though the FBI director acknowledged on Nov. 2, days before the election, that nearly all of the data on the Weiner laptop duplicated emails the FBI already had seen. None contained any damaging information. Just as Clinton was severely damaged among swing suburban voters, Trump’s base voters were galvanized.

While Comey’s broadside against Clinton stunned the nation, perhaps nobody should have been shocked. Trump crony Rudolph Giuliani —who for decades maintained a close relationship with Republican-leaning officials in the New York FBI office as the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York — had repeatedly hinted on Fox News in the weeks before the election that the bureau was sitting on a “big surprise” that would vault his candidate to victory.

Meanwhile, on Oct. 31, 2016, The New York Times published a front-page story on that other FBI investigation, known internally as Crossfire Hurricane, which unlike her emails had gotten no public attention (and inspired no leaks). The headline was declarative and conclusive: “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” That false story, exonerating Trump of Kremlin connections that we now know were extensive and incriminating, was pushed by Trump operatives and agents and clearly originated in the New York FBI counterintelligence division — which had played a key role in the beginning of Crossfire Hurricane. It quoted anonymous “law enforcement sources,” which did not mean a local police lieutenant.

Before he moved on to other positions at FBI headquarters, McGonigal’s career had begun in New York, where he worked closely with James Kallstrom — the right-wing ideologue who headed the New York office for decades. A bosom buddy of Giuliani and Trump, Kallstrom is suspected of leading the pressure campaign that induced Comey to reopen the Clinton investigation. The explicit threat of leaks by agents and former agents like Kallstrom, who reportedly hated Clinton, spurred Comey’s disastrous decision and his public announcement, which again violated department policy against election interference.

Damning as those facts may seem, they only get us so far. There is much more to learn before we can understand the full story of 2016. The scrupulously nonpartisan presidential historian Michael Beschloss asked this week whether McGonigal’s indictment will lead us closer to the truth. Will the prosecution of McGonigal reveal the details of his relationship with Deripaska, whom he had once investigated before becoming his corrupt stooge? Will Comey provide a full and honest accounting of what happened in the New York FBI office before the election? Will the New York Times examine — and disclose — how that misleading story about Trump and Russia appeared on its front page? Who briefed the Times for that bogus story?

With Trump seeking to return to the White House, the answers to those questions do not merely reckon with the past but are critical to democracy’s future. The malign conspirators who first brought that would-be tyrant to power, both foreign and domestic, are still at large.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: TayebMEZAHDIA at Pixabay

Of course, the timing of revelations like this is always an issue (such as in this case, the fact it awaited the transition to a new party in control of the House), but the arrest of perhaps the most consequential person at the FBI, Charlie McGonigal, for ostensible espionage on behalf of a hostile foreign power, the Russians he was supposed to be in charge of stopping, is shaping up to be perhaps the story of the century.

Hardly mentioned for this aspect in the coverage of his arrest this week is the extensive documentation via Twitter by highly-credible Presidential historian Michael Beschloss. It is drawing major attention for its amazing claim of the central role of McGonigal, acting as an insider Russian agent, to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Namely, if Beschloss is to be believed (and there is no reason not to), McGonigal’s elevation to a critical slot at the highest level of the FBI just weeks before the November 2016 election was pivotal in the last-minute decision by FBI Director James Comey to announce the relaunch of his investigation into Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails that threw her otherwise certain election in favor of GOP candidate Donald Trump at the proverbial 11th hour.

Comey’s inexplicable decision marked one of the most egregious cases of an intelligence agency’s intervention into a presidential election in history, one which subjected the nation and the world into its greatest crisis ever in the form of the four years of chaos the was the Trump presidency and that still represents the nation’s biggest threat to its democracy since the Civil War.

Beschloss has not minced his words in this. The arrest of McGonigal for acting as the agent of a hostile foreign power at the top of the FBI is the stuff of perhaps the most remarkable espionage case ever, one which, if true, has altered the course of history in favor of Russia’s Vladimir  Putin against the strategic interests of the U.S. It has been documented that Trump was Russia’s chosen agent of influence at the top of the U.S. government since 1987, and what he has done to weaken the Western Alliance as the American president has been perhaps irreversible, much less how he disenfranchised the American public since he was declared the winner of the presidential election in November 2016 despite coming up almost three million votes short in the popular vote, and continually insisting he won the 2020 election despite coming up over seven million votes short.

Perhaps this explains the historical essay that appeared in this Monday’s Washington Post that argued strangely that America’s strategic disadvantages since the 1930s only made it stronger. Are we supposed to believe that being wounded by McGonigal’s treachery only strengthened the U.S., notwithstanding the impact of Trump’s presidency?

 No, the McGonigal arrest is hopefully only the first step in the Justice Department’s revelations about how Putin’s counterintelligence operations in the U.S. have brought our nation so close to ruin in a sequence of events that have damaged us and that remain far from over. The sabotage of the American national interest was greater than anything the Rosenbergs did in the 1940s that led to their capital punishment. 

Curiously, this has now just begun to come to light just weeks after the Democrats had to relinquish power in the House to weaken their ability to bring the full consequences of this to the American public.

Beschloff tweeted that, as is entirely relevant, Trump attorney Rudy Guliani “boasted late in Fall 2016 presidential campaign about the contacts with the FBI’s New York field office and later said publicly that (FBI) director James Comey had responded to ‘pressure of a group of FBI agents.’”

In the final days of the 2016 campaign, Trump surrogate Giuliani said publicly that “help is on the way” for Trump. “He’s got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about,” Giuliani said.  

McGonigal resigned from the FBI in 2018 after his damage was done and he faced internal audits that were beginning to show over $200,000 in unaccounted for funds to him.