The Tangled Web

News today that Charles McGonigal was arrested for his ties with a US sanctioned Russian oligarch.  What's significant is that, until his retirement in 2018, McGonigal was Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of counterintelligence in the New York field office of the FBI where he worked on the Trump Russia collusion investigation, and the oligarch McGonigal has worked with since then is Oleg Deripaska, tied to Vladimir Putin, and who is intertwined with many threads of the Russia collusion story.

McGonigal was working to get US sanctions, imposed on Deripaska in 2018, lifted, faces money-laundering charges as well as allegations of sanctions violations.  McGonigal's name shows up on documents involving the investigation of Carter Page, though the full extent of his involvement in the collusion matter is unknown.

UPDATE:  McGonigal was the FBI agent who sent the email to FBI HQ conveying the allegations from a foreign source that triggered the Crossfire Hurricane investigation (Russia collusion) back in July 2016.  McGonigal is also the subject of a second indictment alleging he illegally worked for Albanian nationals while still employed by the FBI.

SECOND UPDATE:  Haven't seen convincing evidence McGonigal was involved in the Russia investigation, beyond passing on the email mentioned above.  It is the Deripaska connection threading through this that is the intriguing part.

Deripaska's name has been mentioned several times in my posts on Russia collusion.  Christopher Steele worked for Deripaska from 2012 to 2017, at the same time as he was creating his fake dossier on Donald Trump.  Deripaska is also the guy whose dispute with Paul Manafort over whatever they were up to in Ukraine/Russia eventually led to the investigation resulting in Manafort's indictment and conviction.

Deripaska also shows up in connection with Democratic Senator Mark Warner.  In 2017, Warner, ranking minority member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, attempted to reach Deripaska in order to obtain the testimony of Christopher Steele.  Warner went to great lengths to keep these communications secret to Republican committee members.  Warner's approach to Deripaska went through Adam Waldman.  Waldman, a DC lawyer and lobbyist (and Democrat) representing Deripaska in the U.S. from 2009 to 2018.  In June 2009, Waldman filed Foreign Agent Registration (FARA) paperwork with DOJ stating he would be representing the oligarch on "legal advice on issues involving his U.S. visa as well as commercial transactions".  For these services, Waldman's firm was paid $40,000 a month, plus expenses.

In October 2010, Waldman filed FARA papers to represent Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, for "gathering information and providing advice and analysis as it relates to the U.S. policy towards the visa status of Oleg Deripaska" (which was ultimately granted by the Obama administration).  Lavrov remains in the same position today and is a vocal supporter of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

In early 2017, Waldman became involved with Julian Assange, visiting him nine times at the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he'd take refuge.  In a 2018 article Mother Jones reported:

Many of Waldman’s visits to Assange seem related to his effort to broker a deal between Assange and the US government, under which Assange would be allowed safe passage to the United States if he discussed past and future WikiLeaks releases with senior US officials.

In his 2017 texts to Warner, Waldman indicated that Assange hoped to use a stolen archive of documents detailing CIA hacking operations as leverage to win concessions from the United States. “Just want to underscore my opinion and the reason I got involved – this guy is going to do something catastrophic for the dems, Obama, CIA and national security,” Waldman wrote Warner on February 16, 2017. “I hope someone will consider getting him to the US to ameliorate the damage.” Waldman was hinting at a deal: If the US government played ball with Assange, then maybe this material would stay secret.

But there was no deal. And on March 7, WikiLeaks released the CIA material. After these documents were posted, Waldman, while seeking a meeting with Warner, warned the senator that WikiLeaks had additional material: “There is more to come.” Waldman’s warnings apparently worried Warner. He immediately informed the FBI of the messages, according to a Senate aide. 

Via Waldman, Assange offered to come to the U.S. and testify as to what he knew about the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee, in exchange for dropping existing charges against him.  That offer was ultimately refused. 

I'm not sure what to make of all this, except that the straight forward narrative regarding the Russia collusion story promoted by the Democrats and media has passed into the realm of satire.

We already knew that FusionGPS, which retained Steele to create the dossier for the Clinton campaign, was, at the same time, working on behalf of yet another Putin-connected oligarch to overturn the Magnitsky Act.

More recently we learned in the course of the Danchenko trial, that Charles Dolan, a DC lobbyist with links to the Clintons, represented the Kremlin on public relations matters in the U.S. and was personally meeting with Putin's spokesperson, while at the same time being a source for the Steele dossier.  And that Mueller team rejected an FBI agent recommendation to interview Dolan after she learned he was a source for Danchenko.   Turns out that despite Mueller's Congressional testimony that the Steele dossier was "beyond my purview", he had a whole team looking at it.

It's all very curious.