Did the FBI’s Charles McGonigal Help Throw the 2016 Election to Trump? - Craig Unger / February 1, 2023
Did the FBI’s Charles McGonigal Help Throw the 2016 Election to Trump?
In the course of writing two books on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the same question occurred to me again and again: How is it possible that I knew all sorts of stuff about Donald Trump, and the FBI didn’t seem to have a clue? Or if they did, why weren’t they doing anything with it?
Specifically, I knew that:
- Starting in 1980, an alleged “spotter agent” for the KGB began cultivating Trump as a new asset for Soviet intelligence.
- The Russian mafia laundered millions of dollars through Donald Trump’s real estate by purchasing condos in all-cash transactions through anonymous corporations that did not disclose real ownership.
- Trump Tower was a home away from home for Vyacheslav Ivankov, one of the most brutal leaders of the Russian mafia, and at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the mafia held the deeds to, lived in, or ran alleged criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties.
- Trump was some $4 billion in debt when the Russians came to bail him out via the Bayrock Group, a real estate firm that was largely staffed, owned, and financed by Soviet émigrés who had ties to Russian intelligence and/or organized crime.
Much of my material came from FBI documents. A lot came from open-source databases. It made no sense. There was an astounding amount of data on the public record. The FBI had launched enormous investigations of the Russian mafia in the 1980s. They had staked out a New York electronics store that was a haven for KGB officers. They knew that’s where the Trump Organization bought hundreds of TV sets. They had their eyes on Ivankov and other Russian mobsters who were denizens of Trump’s casinos and bought and sold his condos through shell companies. They had to know that Trump laundered money for and provided a base of operations for the Russian mafia, which was, after all, a de facto state actor tied to Russian intelligence. They had to know that the Russians repeatedly bailed Trump out when he was bankrupt. They had to know that Russia owned him.
I’m well aware of the strict secrecy that accompanies ongoing investigations as a matter of procedure. But once the Mueller Report was finally released, it became crystal clear that Robert Mueller’s investigation dealt only with criminal matters, not counterintelligence. Trump had been thoroughly compromised by Russia and was a grave threat to national security. But the FBI wasn’t doing anything about it!
One reason for that may have been that on far too many occasions, FBI men in sensitive positions ended up on the take from the very people they were supposed to be investigating. And on January 23, a bomb dropped: We learned that the latest of these is Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York, who ended up working for billionaire oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a major target in the Trump Russia investigation. McGonigal was indicted in Manhattan on charges of money laundering, violating U.S. sanctions, and other counts relating to his alleged ties to Deripaska. He was also indicted in Washington, where he was accused of concealing $225,000 he allegedly received from a New Jersey man employed long ago by Albanian intelligence.
McGonigal has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
McGonigal’s troubles began in late 2018, after his wife found out about his girlfriend, Allison Guerriero, who did not know that he was still married. “I was shocked,” Guerriero said, in an interview with Mattathias Schwartz for Business Insider. “I was very much in love with him, and I was so hurt.”
A few months later, Guerriero wrote an angry email about McGonigal to the man who had introduced them as a couple—William Sweeney, who just happened to be assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York City office. On a number of occasions, Guerriero had seen McGonigal leave huge amounts of cash around the house. At first, she thought it must be “buy money” for a sting operation or some other FBI procedure. Then she became suspicious. Among other things, she told Sweeney to look into McGonigal’s dealings in Albania, where McGonigal had traveled extensively and participated in transactions that later appeared in his indictments.
McGonigal had a stellar resume, including working on the Chelsea Manning–WikiLeaks investigation and on Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the bureau’s probe into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia.* Though he was not assigned to that operation when he moved to New York, running FBI counterintelligence in New York is a very special, highly sensitive position that affords unquestioned access to a spectacular array of international elites as well as highly sought-after information.
Similarly, Oleg Deripaska is not just another oligarch. Having emerged victorious from the brutal Aluminum Wars as a vital functionary of the Kremlin, he played a key role in financing Putin’s efforts to take over Ukraine from within via a political operation directed by Paul Manafort that put Putin surrogate Viktor Yanukovych in the Ukraine presidency in 2010. Manafort is alleged to have funneled $75 million into offshore accounts in return for his efforts.
What could be more perfect? Having installed a Putin surrogate in the Ukrainian presidency, in 2016, Manafort repeated that feat on a much bigger stage, as campaign manager guiding Trump into the White House. As Yale professor Timothy Snyder, a close observer of Ukraine, points out, “Russia was backing Trump in much the way that it had once backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.”
Which brings us back to McGonigal. After assuming his new job in October 2016, just a month before the election, he would have been in a position to undermine the bureau’s investigation into Deripaska and Manafort and to sabotage those investigations with disinformation. Similarly, he would have been in a position to leak the information about Anthony Weiner’s laptop that led to the reopening of the FBI probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails 11 days before the election. Finally, he was in a position to have been a source behind the false exculpatory news published by The New York Times on October 31, 2016, a week before the election, with the headline that seemed give to Trump a clean bill of health: “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.”
Of course, McGonigal wasn’t the only FBI official who went over to the dark side. In 1997, four years after he had retired and returned to private practice, FBI Director William Sessions traveled to Moscow and alerted the world to the horrifying dangers of the brutal Russian mafia. A decade later, however, Sessions had no qualms about taking on as a client Ukrainian-born Semion Mogilevich, the so-called “Brainy Don” behind the Russian mafia, whom the FBI had put on its “Ten Most Wanted” list.
Sessions’s successor as FBI director, Louis Freeh, followed a similar path. His pro-Putin benefactor was Prevezon Holdings, the giant real estate firm that won international attention in 2008 when Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky investigated a tax fraud case involving Prevezon. For his efforts on behalf of Bill Browder’s Hermitage Capital Management, Magnitsky was arrested, imprisoned, assaulted repeatedly, and beaten to death.
As FBI director, Freeh had warned that Russian organized crime posed a grave threat to the United States that far transcended mere criminality. It is not clear how much he was paid by Prevezon after he switched sides, but Freeh later bought a $9.38 million mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, just a 10-minute drive from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.
Then there was the late James Kallstrom, who ran the FBI’s New York office in the mid-’90s and oversaw successful investigations into both the Italian Mafia and later the Russian mob. Kallstrom had developed close friendships with two key players in the Trump-Russia saga. He worked closely with then–U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudy Giuliani in the investigation of the Cosa Nostra network that led to the famed Mafia Commission Trial of 1985–1986. Going even further back, Kallstrom had also been friends with Donald Trump since around 1973, when Kallstrom was putting together a Trump-funded parade in New York to honor Vietnam veterans.
“We just got to be friends,” said Kallstrom in a 2020 interview as the Trump reelection campaign was gearing up. (The interview was done for a 2020 documentary by David Carr-Brown about Trump and the FBI called An American Affair: Donald Trump and the FBI.)
“I went to a few dinners with him, we talked quite often. He was very, very supportive of the bureau. We lose an agent, or somebody gets shot up, he was always there to pay for the food or whatever it took.”
According to The New York Times, Kallstrom had founded the Marine Corps–Law Enforcement Foundation, a nonprofit that got more than $1.3 million from Trump, a strikingly generous offering from the usually parsimonious real estate magnate. Under Kallstrom’s aegis, the New York office became known as Trumpland. “I would say we were associates who liked each other,” Kallstrom added in the film. “He [Trump] would call me periodically and try to boost my morale, and then I’d call him when he was in the news and try to boost his morale. But he’s basically a very, very good person and with a big heart that does a lot of things, 90 percent of which nobody knows about. I mean, we stay in touch even today.”
But Trump being Trump, loyalty and generosity came with strings attached. “He [Trump] cultivated FBI people,” says Jeff Stein, editor of the intelligence newsletter SpyTalk, in An American Affair. “And that’s well-known behavior by people who swim in dangerous waters. They want to have a get-out-of-jail card, and that get-out-of-jail is having friendships or being a good source for the FBI.”
Kallstrom insisted that Trump was not an FBI informant, but another agent told Stein that Trump was known within the bureau as a “hip pocket” source—that is, someone who was not officially a source and therefore not in the FBI’s files.
Nevertheless, Trump appears to have gotten exactly what he sought. As it happens, Kallstrom worked closely with McGonigal and cultivated friendships not just with Trump but also with Rudy Giuliani. Together, they are suspected of being party to an internal campaign just before the 2016 election that spurred FBI Director James Comey to publicly announce he was reopening his investigation into Clinton’s emails.
Ultimately, of course, America found out that none of Hillary’s emails were classified. The Times story on the subject was misleading at best. The “reopened” investigation was short-lived and appeared to reflect the wishful thinking of the pro-Trump leaker in the bureau, whether it was McGonigal or someone else. Likewise, the Times headline declaring “no link” between Trump and Russia seemed to reflect wishful thinking on the parts of Kallstrom, Giuliani, and McGonigal—not reality.
But the damage had already been done. When voters cast their ballots on November 8, they thought that the FBI had given Trump a clean bill of health but was still investigating Hillary. McGonigal and company may well have made the difference in tipping the election to Trump.
So in the end, the FBI failed miserably at documenting Trump’s four-decade relationship with the Russian mafia and Russian intelligence, and all the financial transactions between them. The bureau failed miserably when it came to assessing how the former president might be compromised.
As Adam Schiff, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told The Washington Post in 2019, “Just as a reminder, this all began as an FBI counterintelligence investigation into whether people around then-candidate Trump were acting as witting or unwitting agents of a foreign power. So it began as a counterintelligence investigation, not as a criminal investigation.”
Which is a vital distinction. “It may not be a crime for a candidate for president to seek to make money from a hostile foreign power during an election and mislead the country about it,” Schiff added. “But the counterintelligence concerns go beyond mere violation of criminal law.
“They’re at one time not necessarily a criminal activity and at the same time potentially far more serious than criminal activity because you have the capacity to warp U.S. policy owing to some form of compromise.”
In other words, as the KGB and its successor agencies know all too well, intelligence operations are designed to operate within the law while exploiting the latitude afforded by lax regulations and lax enforcement.
A serious counterintelligence investigation, then, would presumably have asked how the KGB began its relationship with Trump and whether Trump had been compromised first by the Soviets and later by Russia. It would have asked how deeply Trump was indebted to the Russian mafia, because he had made a fortune by at the very least turning a blind eye as former Soviet officials laundered millions of dollars through his real estate. How much business had he done with operatives of Russian intelligence and/or the Russian mafia? Did Russia have kompromat on Trump? Was he a Russian asset? How far back did his relationship go? How much did he make laundering money for them? What about other members of his family, the Trump administration and campaign, other politicians?
All unanswered questions, leading to perhaps the biggest question of all: If the FBI won’t ask those questions, who will? It will be interesting to see whether they are answered when McGonigal come to trial or, perhaps, if he is the string that, when pulled, will unravel all sorts of unimaginable secrets.
* This article has been updated.
It was arguably the most consequential “October Surprise” in the history of American presidential elections. In the waning days of the 2016 race, with polls showing Hillary Clinton clinging to a lead over Donald Trump, two last-minute stories broke that rekindled on-the-fence voters’ ethical doubts about Democrat Clinton and quashed a budding scandal around her GOP rival.
Except the “October Surprise” was no surprise to one key player: Rudolph Giuliani, the ex-New York City mayor and Trump insider who later became the 45th president’s attorney. Late that month, Giuliani told Fox News that the trailing Republican nominee had “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.”
Just two days later, then-FBI director James Comey revealed the bureau had reopened its probe into Clinton’s emails, based on the possible discovery of new communications on a laptop belonging to disgraced New York politico Anthony Weiner. The news jolted the campaign with a particularly strong boost from the New York Times, which devoted two-thirds of its front page to the story — and the notion it was a major blow to Clinton’s prospects.
It was later reported that Comey was motivated to make the unusual announcement about the laptop because he feared leaks from the FBI’s New York field office, which, according to Reuters, had “a faction of investigators based in the office known to be hostile to Hillary Clinton.” Indeed, Giuliani bragged immediately after that he had sources in the FBI, including current agents.
The supposed bombshell — it turned out there was nothing incriminating or particularly new on the laptop — wasn’t the only FBI-related story that boosted Trump in the homestretch of the 2016 campaign. On Oct. 31, citing unnamed “intelligence sources,” the Times reported, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” That article defused a budding scandal about the GOP White House hopeful — at least until after Trump’s shock election on Nov. 8, 2016. In the coming days and weeks, the basis of that Times article would melt, but by then the most unlikely POTUS in U.S. history was ensconced in the Oval Office.
There are many reasons for Trump’s victory, but experts have argued the FBI disclosures were decisive. In 2017, polling guru Nate Silver argued that the Comey probe disclosure cost Clinton as many as 3-4 percentage points and at least 1 percentage point, which would have flipped Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and handed her the Electoral College.
Clearly, the wrong investigation was reopened.
This week’s stunning corruption charges against a top FBI spymaster who assumed a key role in the bureau’s New York office just weeks before 2016′s “October surprise” — an agent who by 2018 was known to be working for a Vladimir Putin-tied Russian oligarch — should cause America to rethink everything we think we know about the Trump-Russia scandal and how it really happened that Trump won that election.
The government allegations against the former G-man Charles McGonigal (also accused of taking a large foreign payment while still on the FBI payroll) and the outsized American influence of the sanctioned-and-later-indicted Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska — also tied to U.S. pols from Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell — should make us also look again at what was really up with the FBI in 2016.
How coordinated was the effort in that New York field office to pump up the ultimate nothingburger about Clinton’s emails while pooh-poohing the very real evidence of Russian interference on Trump’s behalf, and who were the agents behind it? What was the role, if any, of McGonigal and his international web of intrigue? Was the now-tainted McGonigal a source who told the New York Times that fateful October that Russia was not trying to help Trump win the election — before the U.S. intelligence community determined the exact opposite? If not McGonigal, just who was intentionally misleading America’s most influential news org, and why?
As a veteran journalist, I find the Times’ role in this fiasco — although likely an unwitting one — deeply disturbing. To be sure, the 2016 FBI leaks weren’t the first time a major news organization has been burned by anonymous law enforcement sources, and regrettably, it probably won’t be the last. Media critics have been talking for years about the Times’ flawed coverage, and how its near certainty that Clinton would win and a desire to show its aggressiveness toward a future president seemed to have skewed its coverage.
It’s not only that America’s so-called paper of record has never apologized for its over-the-top coverage of the Clinton emails or the deeply flawed story about the FBI Trump-Russia probe. It’s that the Times has shown a stunning lack of curiosity about finding out what went wrong. In May 2017, or just seven months after Trump’s election, the paper ended the position of public editor, an independent journalist who was embedded in the newsroom to cover controversies exactly like these.
Publisher Arthur Sulzberger said the rise of social media meant the public could now raise such questions. OK, those questions are being raised. When can we expect answers? (I’ve sent a Twitter direct message to one of the coauthors of the 2016 FBI-Trump-Russia article, Eric Lichtblau, and attempted connecting with the other, Steven Lee Myers, and I’ll let you know if I hear back.)
Last week’s indictment of McGonigal is a classic case of raising more questions than were answered. The evidence presented by prosecutors suggests the FBI counterintelligence expert wasn’t introduced to Deripaska until his waning days with the bureau in 2018, aided by a pair of Russian diplomats. In 2019, after he’d retired, the indictment says McGonigal went to work for the oligarch to help him evade U.S. sanctions and to investigate a rival. But the Times also reported that U.S. counterintelligence — in which McGonigal had been a key player — had tried unsuccessfully to recruit Deripaska as an asset in the years around the 2016 election.
Like the Woody Allen character Zelig, Deripaska — a 55-year-old aluminum magnate who at one time was the richest man in Putin’s Russia — is turning up in the background everywhere in the ongoing corruption of American democracy. The oligarch’s history of multimillion-dollar business dealings with Paul Manafort — Trump’s campaign manager in the summer of 2016 — is central to the theory of Russian interference, after it was confirmed that Manafort shared key campaign data with a suspected Russian intelligence agent also connected to Deripaska.
In 2019, Deripaska did manage to get those U.S. sanctions lifted, in a controversial deal backed not only by Team Trump but critically by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. That same year, a Deripaska-linked aluminum company announced it would build a large plant in Kentucky, where McConnell was running for reelection. (It eventually wasn’t built.) This is the same McConnell who, during that critical fall period in 2016, refused to sign a bipartisan statement warning about Russian election interference.
Another coincidence in a scandal that is drowning in so-called coincidences.
It’s becoming clear that the tamping down of the most explosive parts of the Trump-Russia story is the greatest case of gaslighting since the George Cukor movie dropped in 1944. It’s not just the FBI leaks in New York. We also learned last week — yes, thanks to that same New York Times — about the extraordinary and ethically dubious lengths that Trump’s second attorney general, William Barr, and Barr’s handpicked special prosecutor, John Durham, went to to try to prove the FBI was out to sink Trump. That’s the exact opposite of what really happened. Indeed, the Times noted the only major criminality turned up in the Durham probe was a potentially explosive new charge of financial impropriety — by Donald Trump.
Seven years later, the lack of accountability and justice for the gaslighting of American democracy is appalling. Barr did a remarkable job in blunting the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, including squashing his findings about obstruction of justice by the Trump administration. A much-hyped probe by Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz into the FBI’s New York office took four long years and failed to find the leakers. And new revelations — including that tip about Trump financial crimes that Italian intelligence passed on to Barr and Durham — continue to surface.
» READ MORE: ‘Get the emails’: Revealed memos suggest Mueller probe failed America. Can Congress fix it? | Will Bunch
Why does it matter? Trump is no longer president, after all, and America has a lot of other problems, with police brutality and mass shootings currently on the front burner. Yet when it comes to this all-encompassing Trump-Russia scandal, the past isn’t even past. The seemingly untouchable 45th president was in New Hampshire and South Carolina this weekend, campaigning to become the 47th. The man that critics call “Moscow Mitch” McConnell could return as majority leader in that same election. And Putin’s obsession with Ukraine — always a focus of his U.S. interference and Trump dealings — has become a war with dire global implications.
More importantly, this never-ending scandal has demolished our trust in so many institutions — an FBI that seems to have corrupted an election, a Justice Department that covered up those deeds instead of exposing them, and, yes, a New York Times that enabled several lies instead of exposing them.
Congress and Merrick Garland’s Justice Department can shine a true light on this giant mess, but there’s a reason I’m picking on the New York Times today. It’s a massive temple of journalism that gives us both great work (like the Barr-Durham piece) and inexcusably bad work on a daily basis. The Times can finally apologize for the sins of 2016, expose exactly what went wrong, and then reveal the rest so this kind of disaster never happens again. It owes it to American democracy.
McGonigal, meanwhile, will get a chance to clear his name in court. His defense lawyer comes from the firm Bracewell LLC, the law firm that was previously known as Giuliani and Bracewell after its onetime name partner, the former New York City mayor. Just another coincidence, probably.
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Once the F.B.I.’s top counterintelligence official in New York City, Charles F. McGonigal was charged with concealing contacts with foreign nationals.
A former senior F.B.I. official is in talks to resolve criminal charges in two separate indictments, including entering a possible guilty plea as early as next week in a case involving accusations that he worked for a Russian oligarch, according to a public filing and statements by his lawyer in court.
Charles F. McGonigal, who retired in 2018 as the counterintelligence chief in the F.B.I.’s New York field office, one of the agency’s most sensitive posts, has been accused by federal prosecutors in New York of violating U.S. sanctions, money laundering and conspiracy in connection with Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch once seen as close to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. McGonigal was also charged by federal prosecutors in Washington with concealing his relationship with a businessman who paid him $225,000, as well misleading the F.B.I. about his contacts with foreign nationals and foreign travel, creating a conflict of interest with his official duties.
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