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AD2016, again and again: Arrest of senior FBI official puts focus on Russia’s role in ascent of Trump

AD2016, again and again: Arrest of senior FBI official puts focus on Russia’s role in ascent of Trump
Former FBI director Robert Mueller. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Jim Lo Scalzo)
Phillip van Niekerk
By Phillip van Niekerk
29 Jan 2023
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The full extent of one of Russia’s most successful intelligence operations — helping to elect Donald Trump as President of the US — may never be known, but the blows to the credibility of America’s spy agencies are still coming.

Last week, Charles McConigal, a former senior FBI official, was arrested and charged in a federal court in Manhattan for being in the pay of the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a man with deep ties to Vladimir Putin and Russia’s spy agencies.

russia trump mcgonigal Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York office, listens to his attorney Seth Ducharme give a statement to the media after leaving Manhattan Federal Court on 23 January 2023 in New York City. McGonigal is being charged with money laundering and conspiring to violate US sanctions against Russia while secretly working with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Sergey Shestakov, a former Soviet and Russian diplomat, has also been charged in the case. (Photo: Michael M Santiago / Getty Images)



Days later, the New York Times published an account of how John Durham, the special counsel appointed by Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr to expose the “deep state” conspiracy behind the investigation into Russia’s ties with Trump’s 2016 campaign, had landed up with little more than egg on his goatee.

The Times reported that the only new information brought to light by Durham’s exhaustive and futile four-year-long quest, which is wrapping up at last, was information from Italian officials about Trump’s involvement in financial crimes — an inconvenient tip that was promptly buried.

In short: Trump’s claim that the nation’s spy agencies were weaponised against him was in itself a weaponisation of the federal government, amounting to an attempted cover-up of a massive and hostile Russian influence operation.

Trump ruined the careers of FBI officials who investigated Russia’s 2016 elections links, accusing them of launching a witch hunt against him. FBI agents who actually did engage in brazenly partisan behaviour — against his opponent Hillary Clinton — went unpunished.

russia trump clinton Hillary Clinton. (Photo: Reuters / Kevin Lamarque)



Phillip van Niekerk McConigal Former FBI director James Comey delivers his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the FBI’s investigation into the Trump administration. (Photo: EPA / Jim Lo Scalzo)



russia trump giuliani Trump acolyte Rudy Giuliani. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Michael Reynolds)



McGonigal was appointed by the then-FBI chief James Comey to head the counterintelligence unit at the FBI’s New York field office 27 days before the November 2016 election.

A few days before the election, Trump acolyte Rudy Giuliani, acting on information leaked to him from the FBI, told Fox News, “we’ve got a couple of things up our sleeve that should turn this thing around”.

The Clinton emails


The very next day Comey sent a letter to Congress that changed the course of history. It informed them that the FBI was reopening its investigation of Clinton’s emails after discovering new emails on a laptop owned by Anthony Weiner, the husband of Clinton’s aide and confidante Huma Abedin.

Comey’s letter, gleefully publicised by Republicans, landed like a bombshell in the last week of the campaign and is widely credited with pushing the election to Trump. Comey’s follow-up statement that the emails were innocuous came too late to penetrate the media noise and set the record straight.

Two years later, the Inspector General of the FBI, Michael Horowitz, reported that FBI officials believed that the fear of leaks from the New York office influenced Comey’s decision to send the letter, in violation of the justice department’s longstanding policy of not releasing information that could sway the outcome of an election.

But that was not the only mischief. A week before the election the FBI suddenly released a 15-year-old investigation into Bill Clinton’s controversial pardon of Marc Rich, the commodity trader and founder of what became Glencore, who for decades had been wanted for tax evasion and racketeering.

And eight days before the election, the New York Times published a front-page headline that will long embarrass the great newspaper of record: “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia”.  It was presumably put out by the same source that was leaking prolifically about the Clintons.

Something rotten


The smell of something rotten had long hung around the New York office of the FBI, but it was always assumed to be just run-of-the-mill right-wing animus against the Clintons. After the McConigal arrest, the possibility that there was a Russian hand directing and overseeing the whole operation no longer seems far-fetched.

What do we make, for instance, of the fact that McGonigal was in charge of the investigation into the Air Force veteran and former National Security Agency official Reality Winner, who leaked a report to the Intercept indicating that Russian hackers had accessed US voter rolls?

Her chilling Gestapo-like interview with the FBI was captured verbatim in the Tina Satter play This is a Room which ran on Broadway. She was sentenced to five years in prison in 2018 before being pardoned by President Joe Biden in 2021.

McGonigal has not been charged with being paid by Deripaska while he was at the FBI — the offence is that the payments were illegal because Deripaska is a sanctioned individual. But given that his job was to find enemy spies and recruit his own, questions are being asked about what more will come to light.

Yale historian and democracy expert Timothy Snyder believes that we are on the edge of a major spy scandal.

Oligarchs, spies and mobsters


Deripaska, who is related by marriage to former President Boris Yeltsin, ticks all the boxes in the murky world of oligarchs, spies and mobsters that owe fealty to the Kremlin. His metals trading empire made him one of the most exposed Russian businessmen to Western sanctions and inclined him to make connections with the great and the good in London and Washington, where he hired expensive lawyers, lobbyists and investigators.

russia trump manafort Paul Manafort (centre), then a campaign adviser for US presidential candidate Donald Trump, talks to supporters and staff after a speech by Trump on the eve of his Indiana primary victory, in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York on 3 May 2016. (Photo: EPA / Justin Lan)



He recruited and paid the American political consultant Paul Manafort in two of Russia’s most strategic frontiers — Montenegro and Ukraine. Manafort was to become campaign manager for both the Russian-backed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and Donald Trump and a major target of the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the US election.

russia trump mueller Former FBI director Robert Mueller. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Jim Lo Scalzo)



As the Mueller report revealed, Manafort ended up owing Deripaska millions of dollars from a business deal that went bad and, before volunteering for Trump’s campaign, offered to pay Deripaska back by sending him information “to get whole”.

“Manafort sent the Russians data from the Trump campaign, including campaign polling data about Americans that would be useful for influence operations,” writes Snyder.  “Manafort was asked to communicate a Russian plan for the partition of Ukraine to Trump.”

At one point in 2017 Deripaska, who had once helped the FBI trace a former agent who disappeared in Iran, offered to reveal what he knew about the 2016 election to Congressional investigators in exchange for immunity — but was turned down.

For the money


Like Manafort, McGonigal appears to have done it for money — to pay for his children’s college education. (There are worse reasons: the CIA spy turned KGB agent Aldrich Ames betrayed his country to fix his bad teeth.)

What is extraordinary is how sloppy McGonigal was. He left hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash lying around in a liquor store bag in the apartment that he shared with his girlfriend Allison Guerriero.

“Where the fuck is this from?” she asked. “Oh, you remember that baseball game?” McGonigal replied, according to Guerriero’s recollection. “I made a bet and won.”

All of this may seem like ancient history, but after the Mueller investigation, the Senate Foreign Intelligence Committee report and multiple media investigations, there are still huge holes missing in the jigsaw puzzle of one of the most audacious intelligence operations of modern times.

What has prevented the truth from coming out is that sections of the Republican Party, under the influence of Trump, continue to run interference for the Russians.

The newly constituted Republican majority in the House wants to go after the FBI for its investigations into Trump and there are influential members who want to stop American military assistance to Ukraine, though they remain in a minority.

As Snyder points out, right after the McGonigal story broke, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy ejected Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, an expert on Russian influence operations, from the House intelligence committee.

“It exhibits carelessness about national security to exclude him. It is downright suspicious to exclude him now.” DM

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