As you’ve seen, CNN reports that classified documents have now been found at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence. This certainly upends the media narrative of recent weeks and probably spurred a round of guffaws at the White House. But there’s a more important issue here which reporters have done too little to explain for readers. “Classified” material covers a huge range of material, from simple briefing papers that may only barely require classification to Top Secret documents. There’s compartmented information that almost no one can see unless they have a specific need to see it.

I want to draw out a few points I mentioned last night about the arrest of Charles McGonigal. When I first heard about the indictments, I understood them to be one (D.C.) that dealt with events while McGonigal still worked at the FBI and one (New York) that dealt with events after he worked at the FBI. But as I noted last night, it’s not that clear cut. The relationship with Oleg Deripaska and a reputed former Soviet/Russian intelligence officer, Evgeny Fokin, began when McGonigal was still at the FBI.

The New York indictment is elusive about just what it’s suggesting about McGonigal and Fokin in 2018, when the former still worked at the FBI. It is also unclear about whether McGonigal was compromised by a foreign power or was simply building a relationship with Fokin and Deripaska for money he would make after he left the FBI.

Was he compromised by Russia? Or was he just compromised by Deripaska? Needless to say, there’s not necessarily a bright line separating these two scenarios.

Needless to say there’s quite a lot in these indictments of former FBI counterintelligence agent Charles McGonigal et al. There are a number of points I want to note. But let me start with this one.

A fair amount of this information has been public for a long time. I was surprised to see the September 2022 Insider article on the investigation that Josh Kovensky linked in his write up. But I also found this Twitter thread from independent journalist Wendy Siegelman from December 13, 2021. She flags and discusses a November 29th, 2021 FARA filing which actually details a number of the basic relationships if not the specific crimes set forth in today’s New York indictments. Indeed, if you read the FARA filing you can easily identify a number of people in the indictment. People like “Agent-1,” for instance, who appears to be Yevgeny Fokin. I was surprised to see so much of this revealed in a FARA filing more than a year ago.

Put this down as more irony than smoking gun. But for those of us who’ve had serious questions for a long time about the FBI’s New York field office, especially in the run up to the 2016 presidential campaign, here’s an interesting detail. Charles McGonigal was put in charge of counterintelligence at the New York field office some time in the second half of October 2016, just about exactly when the Clinton emails case was reopened in the final days of the campaign. An Oct. 4, 2016 press release announced his appointment and said he would “assume this new role at the end of October.”

I doubt he was there in time to have played a direct role in the highly questionable decision-making. But still … well, interesting.

We’ll be bringing you more on this shortly. But the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI’s New York Field Office has been arrested and charged with money laundering and sanctions busting with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. That happened after he retired from the FBI in 2018. That was the first indictment released. But a short time later a second set of charges in Washington, D.C., were released. These are tied to the time he was still working for the FBI in 2017 and 2018. He allegedly received $225,000 in cash from an individual he knew to be an employee of a foreign intelligence service. The Deripaska related charges have gotten the most press so far, presumably because they came out first. But the second set of charges seems like a much graver matter.

I’m only getting my head around the details now. So I’m going to leave it to these outlines. But needless to say this is a very big deal. We’ll be bringing you more details shortly.

Here’s our story.

Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona announced his campaign for Senate this morning in a campaign video on Twitter. The possibility of his run has been in the cards for months and was made all but official in press reports last week. It’s not a surprise. But it’s a major development. In a way, perhaps, it was inevitable. The question for most of the last year was whether Gallego would give up his safe House seat to challenge Kyrsten Sinema who spent the last two years wrecking her standing with Arizona Democrats. That’s always an extremely high-risk gambit.

But now that’s all moot. Sinema is not running in the Democratic primary. She’s switched to being an independent. (Indeed, that was the whole point of doing so: to avoid this primary.) If she runs in 2024 she’ll run as an independent. For now Gallego is the only candidate in the race and my impression is that he’s a strong favorite to win the nomination. So the question really becomes about Sinema and the eventual Republican nominee. A lot will depend on what kind of candidate Republicans nominate. Will they nominate someone like popular outgoing Gov. Doug Ducey, who suggests he won’t run but hasn’t ruled it out, or one of the many feral Republicans in the Kari Lake and Blake Masters mold?

I’ve been hearing from people in and out of the political world saying things like this: folks like Dick Durbin really need to retire. Yes, I’m talking about his Sunday show appearance yesterday and his commenting on the Biden classified documents. What I’m describing here isn’t only about Dick Durbin. But he is one of the prime offenders.

What is Dick Durbin doing in the Senate exactly? What I’ve seen from him, know of him mostly for years is appearances like that on the Sunday shows, ones which play to the D.C. press and establishment opinion. It’s of a piece with Durbin’s position or really non-position on “Roe and Reform.” Durbin was one of the prime holdouts. Well, he wasn’t even a holdout really — he simply wouldn’t discuss it at all. The best he could manage in mid-2022 were some vague comments about not being over-hasty about things.

Along with a categorical refusal to negotiate on raising the debt ceiling, Democrats need to start now making the affirmative case that the debt ceiling is itself unconstitutional. Back in 2011 President Obama said he had spoken to legal scholars and concluded this was not “a winning argument.”

This again is an example of Democrats playing to the elite legal academy, credentialed opinion.

The other issue with Durbin, and the far more important one, is the debt limit. He said the right things this morning in the same interview: no negotiation on the debt limit, period. But that’s now. Durbin is the deputy leader in the Senate. All the gravitational pull to seek press and elite D.C. approbation will be put to the test in coming months over the debt ceiling. Durbin’s a very weak reed to rely on.

Like more than a few Democrats, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) embarrassed himself this morning on the Biden documents case. He said President Biden is “diminished” by the situation. On Trump and Biden: “At its heart, the issue is the same. Those documents should not have been in the personal possession of either Joe Biden or Donald Trump,” he said. In each case, after whacking Biden around a bit, he went on to lamely distinguish between the two situations. Those distinctions, needless to say, will never be the headlines, never garner attention, never be what shapes news coverage. Manchin of course was worse, saying Biden “should have a lot of regrets” and questioning whether we know whether Biden’s or Trump’s actions are more egregious.