Dec. 20, 2023 - Epoch Times
11:09
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| In a turn of events which is so wild that it almost sounds like it's the plot for some movie, well, a former top FBI official who played a key role in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, well, he himself was just sentenced to four years in prison because he was actually colluding with a Russian billionaire. | |
| Furthermore, those four years behind bars might only be the beginning, given the fact that this same FBI official is facing another set of indictments for hiding $225,000 in payments that he received from an Albanian intelligence officer. | |
| Again, if you wrote this into the script of a movie, it would just sound too ridiculous to be believable. | |
| The FBI agent who was investigating Trump for alleged Russian collusion, which was of course fake, is now himself in prison for colluding with Russians. | |
| Now, the man in question is this man right here, Mr. | |
| Charles McGonigal. | |
| And he was a top FBI official who previously led the FBI's New York Counterintelligence Division. | |
| And back in January of this year, in January of 2023, Mr. | |
| McGonigal was arrested and slapped with two separate sets of indictments. | |
| The first set of indictments was related to the secret Albanian money. | |
| That case is still ongoing. | |
| While the second set of indictments was related to Mr. | |
| McGonigal's taking bribes from one Russian billionaire in order to investigate a rival Russian billionaire. | |
| That second indictment charged Mr. | |
| McGonigal with several different counts, including conspiracy to evade U.S. sanctions, money laundering, conspiracy to commit money laundering, as well as conspiracy to violate federal law against doing business with sanctioned individuals. | |
| Mr. | |
| McGonagall pled guilty to these charges, and just four days ago, he was sentenced to four years in prison, as well as a fine of $40,000. | |
| However, it's really the details in this case which make it wild. | |
| So let's go through them together right after you take a super quick moment to smash those like and subscribe buttons so this video can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm. | |
| Now, to start at the beginning, you likely remember that soon after the 2016 presidential election, it was revealed that the FBI was investigating President Trump for his alleged ties to Russia. | |
| That was their infamous crossfire hurricane investigation. | |
| And the reason that you likely remember it is because it was the number one covered news item for the first two years of Trump's presidency. | |
| Meaning, despite the fact that these allegations turned out to be patently false, President Trump's first two years in office, they were spent being under FBI investigation, as well as under 24-hour assault from the news media who painted him to the entire country and the entire world as being a Russian asset. | |
| And one of the FBI Special Agents who was involved in this whole affair was Mr. | |
| Charles McGonigal. | |
| Back in 2016, Charles was the Section Chief of the Cyber Counterintelligence Coordination Section over at FBI Headquarters. | |
| And according to emails and text messages which were released over the past several years, well, they show that Special Agent Charles McGonigal, he was intimately involved in the FBI investigations against Trump from their very inception. | |
| For instance, this back-and-forth internal communication from within the FBI, it shows that Mr. | |
| McGonigal was the FBI's recipient of the quote-unquote tip which supposedly started the whole Trump-Russia investigation in the first place. | |
| And without getting too much into the weeds here, the point is that Special Agent Charles McGonigal, he was right there, at the very center of the FBI's investigation when they began their probe into Trump's alleged ties with Russia. | |
| He was right there at the center. | |
| But that wasn't the only thing that Mr. | |
| McGonigal was involved in. | |
| Besides the Trump probe, he was also deeply involved in the FBI's investigations into Russian oligarchs. | |
| Here's a timeline. | |
| In 2014, President Obama issued something known as Executive Order 13660, and this declared a national emergency with respect to the situation that was then happening in Ukraine. | |
| According to the Justice Department, this is what this meant in practical terms: "To address this national emergency, the president blocked all property of individuals determined by the U.S. Treasury to be responsible for, or complicit in, actions or policies that threaten the security, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine, or who materially assist, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine, or who materially assist, sponsor, or provide support to individuals or entities engaged in such activities." Essentially, this was a directive to put the Russian oligarchs who were within Putin's inner circle on the sanctions list. | |
| Then, you fast forward a few years, and in 2018, when Special Agent Charles McGonigal was in charge of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division in New York, well, he both supervised, as well as participated in, the FBI's investigations of Russian oligarchs. | |
| Those investigations included Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who was eventually placed on the U.S. sanctions list. | |
| However, being a shrewd Russian oligarch, Mr. | |
| Deripaska apparently had a secret weapon. | |
| Two sympathetic FBI agents. | |
| Here's how the indictment from the Justice Department described what took place. | |
| While working at the FBI, McGonagall supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs, including Deripaska. | |
| In 2019, McGonagall and Shestikov, Shestikov is another FBI agent, they both worked on behalf of Deripaska in an unsuccessful effort to have the sanctions against Deripaska lifted. | |
| In 2021, McGonagall and Shestikov conspired to provide services to Deripaska. | |
| Specifically, following their negotiations with an agent of Deripaska, McGonagall and Shestikov agreed to, and did, investigate a rival Russian oligarch in return for concealed payments from Deripaska. | |
| Now, just to pause here for a super quick moment. | |
| What this indictment is alluding to is the fact that this FBI special agent, who was himself the one in the FBI investigating these Russian oligarchs, he left the FBI and he began to get paid by one of these very same Russian oligarchs in order to do several things, to try and get that oligarch off the sanctions list and also to investigate and to dig up dirt on a rival Russian oligarch. | |
| Here is how the New York Times described the general situation. | |
| Quote, Mr. | |
| McGonigal's work on Deripaska's behalf, obscured by use of shell companies and subcontractors, involved seeking information about Mr. | |
| Patanin's business. | |
| Patanin was the other oligarch. | |
| The ultimate goal, prosecutors said, was to cause sanctions to be placed on Mr. | |
| Patanin, potentially leveling the playing field with Mr. | |
| Deripaska. | |
| But the plot unraveled within months after the FBI seized Mr. | |
| McGonigal's cell phone. | |
| And as wild as all this is, this collusion actually gets a lot deeper, which we'll get into right after I introduce today's sponsor by showing you this little piece of money. | |
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| And now, let's head on back to the studio. | |
| And so what this Russian billionaire, Mr. | |
| Oleg Deripaska, did It was that he paid Charles McGonigal through a bunch of different subcontractors and shell companies to investigate his rival and to find out whether he had any hidden assets outside the country, whether he had any non-Russian passports, and to basically use his FBI connections to dig up as much dirt as he could on this Russian billionaire rival. | |
| And it was very obvious that Mr. | |
| McGonigal knew that what he was doing was illegal, not only because he was at the FBI when the decision to put Deripaska on the sanctions list was made, but also because in his internal chats, McGonigal would make a point of not using this Russian oligarch's real name. | |
| Instead, in his emails, he referred to him as the big guy and the client. | |
| And, well, it looks like this particular big guy got a lot more than 10%. | |
| Regardless, though, the indictment actually goes a lot further, and it lays out how Mr. | |
| McGonagall, while still working at the FBI in 2018, was introduced to an agent of this Russian oligarch, and then subsequently, Mr. | |
| McGonagall helped to get this agent's daughter placed into the... | |
| In 2018, while McGonagall was still working for the FBI, Shestikov introduced him to a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who functioned as an agent for Deripaska. | |
| That person is not named in court papers, but the Justice Department says he was rumored in public media reports to be a Russian intelligence officer. | |
| According to the indictment, Shestakov asked McGonigal for help getting the agent's daughter an internship in the New York Police Department's counterterrorism and intelligence units. | |
| McGonigal agreed and told a police department contact that I have an interest in her father for a number of reasons. | |
| According to the indictment, a police sergeant subsequently reported to the NYPD and the FBI that the woman claimed to have an unusually close relationship with an FBI agent whom she said had given her access to confidential FBI files. | |
| In summary, the FBI agent who was investigating Trump for colluding with Russia was doing all this behind the scenes. | |
| He was colluding with one Russian oligarch to investigate another Russian oligarch, while also getting the daughter of the oligarch's agent placed inside the intelligence unit of the NYPD. That is, if nothing else, amazing. | |
| You sometimes really cannot make these things up. | |
| Regardless, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, Mr. | |
| McGonigal has now pled guilty, and as of four days ago, he has been sentenced to a 50-month-long prison term alongside a $40,000 fine. | |
| And if that sounds like a light sentence to you, well, here was the judge's rationale. | |
| Quote, Judge Jennifer H. Reardon said her sentence was designed to balance McGonigal's more than two decades as a law enforcement officer with the extremely serious nature of his crimes, which she said threatened national security. | |
| Which is perhaps an understatement, to say the least. | |
| If you'd like to go through the details of this entire story, including the full-length indictment that was released by the Justice Department, I'll throw a link to the PDF version of it down into the description box below, which is, of course, that little description box right below those like and subscribe buttons, both of which I hope you have already smashed, and if you haven't, please take a moment to do so. | |
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| And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman, from The Epic Times. | |
| Stay informed. |
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