"He was a foreign spy", US media: US Justice Department reopens case against McGonigal

The US Department of Justice has reopened a case against a former senior FBI agent. Charles 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.

McGonigal was part of the FBI's "counterintelligence" operation, dubbed "CROSSFIRE HURRICANE" and led by its chief, Peter Strzok, against Donald Trump and his supporters in 2016. As a former top spy chief in the Bureau's largest field office, McGonigal barely defended himself from charges related to the illegal acceptance of money from Albanian businessmen connected to that small country's intelligence service and for ties to a sanctioned Russian oligarch.

He received a light sentence and a $40,000 fine. But something is wrong. For Russian or Chinese intelligence services, someone in McGonigal's position would be an intelligence icon, the man responsible for tracking them. 

Someone with a double life and an extravagant lifestyle makes for a suitable target. It is highly plausible to think that Albanian intelligence managed to recruit McGonigal instead of Putin's people.

On April 30, then-U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, turned his attention back to McGonigal. In a letter to McGonigal's attorney, Martin noted the former FBI employee's convictions for "falsification of records, making false statements, conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions, and conspiracy to commit money laundering." 

Martin was unclear about the new interest. “My office has been made aware of information that requires us to interview Mr. McGonigal,” he wrote, without providing specific details. It appears the Justice Department is pursuing more than just minor details in McGonigal’s ties to Albanians or Russian oligarchs.

The job of countering foreign intelligence services, counterintelligence, is not well understood, even in government. Investigating foreign spies may sound glamorous, but it is a difficult and fraught job. The hardest part may be investigating fellow Americans legitimately suspected of espionage, and then building criminal cases against them with evidence that the Justice Department can present to a judge and jury without compromising the sources and methods of counterintelligence. 

Justice is elusive. Many spies get away with it because legitimate evidence is inadmissible. Others never get tried. Some are charged with something else, like corruption. Was McGonigal a foreign spy inside the FBI? We don't know. But the Trump administration seems to suspect she was. 

Former FBI agents can command high salaries in the private sector. Brookfield, a trillion-dollar asset management company, hired McGonigal as senior vice president of global security. McGonigal was working there when Mark Carney took over as chief executive in 2020 and became chairman in 2022. Sources say McGonigal was detained for questioning while returning from South America to work at Brookfield. Brookfield, usually vocal in its press releases, has made no public comment on McGonigal's departure from the company or his arrest by the FBI. 

Did McGonigal use his top security position at Brookfield to conduct espionage? Did Brookfield Chairman Carney, now Prime Minister of Canada, order a company-wide review of foreign intelligence infiltration? These questions remain unanswered. 

Here's a clue: Within days of U.S. Attorney Martin's letter to McGonigal's attorney, McGonigal sought a restraining order against his ex-girlfriend, Allison Guerriero, who has publicly claimed she has evidence that he was a spy. The Counterintelligence Division, for at least the past decade, has been one of the most politicized components of the FBI. Didn't the FBI under Christopher Wray want to investigate its own man, McGonigal, as a possible Russian spy because it would reflect badly on the bureau? Apparently, it did.

Could others in the bureau be covering up to protect McGonigal, or to avoid the ugliest crime of all — which is making the bureau look bad? The FBI has a long history of doing so. Martin’s letter to McGonigal’s lawyer, combined with the new FBI leadership of Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who are promising to clean up the situation, could reveal more about the Russian infiltration of the FBI./  The Federalist