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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.
But when you look at the FARA filing along with the indictment the picture gets more clear. In mid-November 2021, the FBI interviewed Sergey Shastakov, a former Soviet diplomat who now works as a translator in the U.S., who is also charged in the indictment. They asked him about his relationship with McGonigal and Fokin. He lied to them. A short time later, on Nov. 21, the FBI seized Shastakov electronic devices. The FARA filing about his work with McGonigal and Fokin was filed on Nov. 29, 2021. I’m going to assume this wasn’t a coincidence.
There’s another notable detail in the indictment. The D.C. indictment is about things McGonigal did while still serving as an FBI agent. The NY indictment is about his alleged work for Deripaska after he left the FBI. But it’s not entirely after he left the FBI. In 2018, prior to McGonigal’s retirement, Shastakov put McGonigal in touch with Agent-1, who I’ve identified as Fokin. He was a former Soviet and Russia diplomat, a reputed former intelligence agent and, now, an employee of Deripaska. Shastakov asked McGonigal to get Fokin’s daughter a counterterrorism and intelligence internship with the NYPD. McGonigal made it happen. He apparently explained to an FBI subordinate that Fokin was a Russian intelligence officer and McGonigal was trying to recruit him. An NYPD sergeant who briefed the daughter reported the encounter back to the NYPD and FBI because she “claimed to have an unusually close relationship to ‘an FBI agent’ who had given her access to confidential FBI files.”
The indictment doesn’t say any more than that. But it certainly sounds like we’re supposed to think or at least suspect that the agent might be McGonigal.
This took place in mid-2018. McGonigal retired in September 2018. Shastakov, McGonigal and Fokin went to work together in 2019. Now, maybe McGonigal was trying to recruit Fokin and just had a change of plans. But it certainly sounds like the compromising if not the recruitment was moving in the opposite direction. The indictment is elusive about the details. But it certainly seems to suggest that McGonigal started working with Fokin and thus, indirectly, Deripaska, while he was still on the job at the FBI.
