Lied to FBI about Charles McGonigal's connections, Former Diplomat Pleads Guilty

American media reports that the case of former senior DBI agent Charles McGonigal has returned to the spotlight in the US.

McGonigal was Special Agent in Charge of Counterintelligence in the New York field office. He left the FBI in 2018, joined the massive asset management fund Brookfield as vice president for global security, and was arrested and convicted in 2023. 

But not for espionage. McGonigal quickly pleaded guilty to corruption-related crimes. He is serving a six-and-a-half-year sentence in federal prison. His prosecution and plea deal appear to be in order.

A day earlier, a former Russian diplomat pleaded guilty in court to lying about McGonigal's relationship with a Russian oligarch.

FULL ARTICLE FROM  Court News Service

A former diplomat who worked as a translator for the U.S. judicial system pleaded guilty on Thursday to defrauding the FBI over business dealings on behalf of a U.S.-sanctioned Russian oligarch, avoiding a new trial that was set to begin next week.

Sergey Shestakov pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court, where he and former FBI agent Charles McGonigal are accused of violating US sanctions by working for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, after they had previously attempted to lift those same sanctions.

The 71-year-old Shestakov explained on Thursday that he intended to deceive an FBI agent in August 2021, telling him he was unsure about McGonigal's relationship with Deripaska.

“My response intentionally and consciously concealed certain facts,” Shestakov said, “both in my behavior and in my words.”

McGonigal and Shestakov were charged with violating and attempting to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, attempted money laundering, and money laundering.

Shestakov was also charged with defrauding the FBI and was scheduled to go on trial on Monday.

However, earlier this week, prosecutors said they would drop all but the last charge — making false statements — according to Shestakov's lawyer, Rita Glavin. The government then offered a plea deal.

Before accepting the plea deal, U.S. federal judge Jed Rakoff, a Clinton appointee, warned that he did not place much weight on the sentencing guidelines, which recommend up to six months in prison. The charges themselves carry a maximum sentence of five years.

“I pay little or no attention to the guidelines. I consider the guidelines to be profoundly irrational in their essence and totally irrational in many of their applications,” the judge said.

He later added: "I can sentence you to five years, for everything you know."

Rakoff also told Shestakov that he would impose the same sentence under the plea agreement as he would if Shestakov were convicted by a jury.

“I never punish anyone in any way for going to court,” Rakoff said. “I do that because I don’t think it’s constitutional to punish someone for going to court.”

 

The judge confirmed with prosecutors for the Southern District of New York that the decision to drop the other charges against Shestakov was not an order from the U.S. Department of Justice.

“I wanted to make sure we didn’t have an Adams-like situation here,” Rakoff said.

McGonigal received a four-year prison sentence in 2023, after pleading guilty to a federal indictment in New York, and an additional two-year sentence in 2024 for another guilty plea to an indictment in Washington.

“[As] public servants, they should have known better,” Damian Williams, then the U.S. Attorney, said in a statement when the charges were announced in 2023.

The New York indictment described the couple as receiving secret payments from Deripaska for investigating a rival Russian oligarch, using shell companies and forged signatures to carry out the deal.

On Thursday, Shestakov admitted that he had signed someone else's name, at McGonigal's direction, to a contract he had negotiated as part of the case's business dealings.

He told the court he did so because he believed McGonigal's claim that he had permission to do so, especially considering his background in the FBI.

“I had no reason not to believe him,” Shestakov said.