The Murky World Of Ex-FBI Agents And Their Paymasters

Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

The two indictments this week of Charles McGonigal, a former special agent in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI’s New York field office, was pretty shocking. The scandal that underlay it was also byzantine: McGonigal was accused in two separate indictments of, in one, evading sanctions to help Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a former paymaster of 2016 Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

He was also accused, while in the FBI, of taking $225,000 from a former member of Albanian intelligence, and of concealing that money and the nature of trips he took to Albania while working at the bureau. It’s quite a lot.

At least one seasoned former FBI counterintelligence official, Ray Batvinis, told me that he believed McGonigal likely committed espionage, and that the bureau had not yet built out the case. Batvinis said that from examining the lives of people who start to work with foreign powers, a pattern becomes clear. “You take the fateful decision to commit espionage,  you look back six months, maybe a year, and something happened — a problem with his family, with his finances, with a child. If you look at a security file for someone like this, you’ll find that six months before, something happened in his life that caused him to go off the rails.”

It’s not clear what caused McGonigal to go off the rails, or how the FBI initially predicated its investigation. But we published a new report on Friday that looks at where going off the rails led McGonigal: to an Albanian company called LAWOFFICE & INVESTIGATION, where he served as a partner alongside another disgraced former agent named Mark Rossini.

Rossini is a colorful character who went down in flames in 2008 after he stole internal FBI files, gave them to his girlfriend actress Linda Fiorentino, who then passed the records on to the defense team of a Hollywood fixer on trial for racketeering and other offenses. His link to McGonigal is bizarre, but offers a glimpse into the murky world of ex-FBI agents and their paymasters.

More on other news below. Let’s dig in.

— Josh Kovensky

Remember The “People’s Convoy?”

They were the truckers who threatened to storm D.C. last year in a protest against COVID restrictions. While similar protests briefly shut down the Canadian capital of Ottawa, the American remix failed to catch on and essentially disbanded amid literal fistfights and allegations of shadiness related to donations.

Now, the convoy movement has devolved even further. Last weekend, text message “scammers” took over the “people’s convoy” phone list to send a message to their “patriot friends” hawking a multilevel marketing scheme selling questionable fuel additives. Organizers on Facebook quickly disavowed the texts.

The fiasco is yet another example of how grifters seem to have found fertile ground on the far right. Examples include Alex Jones’ “primal human nutrition,” a whole bunch of crap being sold on former President Trump’s “Truth” social network, Seb Gorka’s fish oil, brain pills, and, well, George Santos’ entire nascent political career.

— Hunter Walker

New Abortion Frontier 

At a time when the anti-abortion movement notched a victory 50 years in the making, the procedure has become more accessible than ever before. The development, proliferation and FDA approval of abortion pills — more specifically, of mifepristone — completely changed the abortion landscape.

Thanks to the Biden administration’s lifting of some of the more egregious restrictions on mifepristone (which leading medical organizations have long called to be removed as scientifically unsound), patients can now have the drug prescribed over telehealth and either mailed or available for pickup at certified pharmacies. The gray market is also alive and well, aided by online resources and guides.

Accordingly, the anti-abortion movement has shifted its attention to the pills. In a significant case, a group of anti-abortion medical groups sued the FDA to undo the 20-plus years of mifepristone authorization. They “forum shopped” to get the case in the hands of an anti-abortion judge, in a district court governed by the infamously right-wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. It could lead to the distribution of mifepristone being banned nationwide.    

But the other side is punching back. The makers of a generic version of mifepristone sued West Virginia this week, arguing that its abortion ban should give way to the FDA’s authority under the Supremacy and Commerce Clauses of the Constitution. 

— Kate Riga

Santos Owes The New York Maps 

Since the extent of George Santos’ lies came to light, many have wondered how he possibly could have survived an election undetected. His race holds some clues.

Before New York’s chaotic redistricting cycle, he was competing in a heavily Democratic district, fresh off getting trounced in 2020. If no one — including him — thought he could win…it wasn’t all that surprising.

Everything changed in May 2021, when the maps were finally finalized. All of a sudden, Santos saw himself competing in a nearly 50-50 district with no time left for another Republican to jump into the race — the primary was less than three months away. So Santos, uncontested, sailed on.

And because it’s a Santos story, there has to be an additional oddity. Here, he reacted to his district becoming more winnable than he possibly could have dreamed with a barrage of Twitter complaints, so eyebrow-raising that a Republican elections blog noted his grousing and tried to tap in a state Senator instead. Curiouser and curiouser… 

— Kate Riga 

“This is an event for the new speaker, but I’m the most famous person in the room.”

That’s Rep. George Santos (R-NY) — aka the Anna Delvey of Capitol Hill — responding to questions about how he’s doing at a Kevin McCarthy event held at the Conrad Hotel for members and donors, according to the Washington Post reporter Isaac Stanley-Becker.

I wrote on Friday that Santos seems to be trying to make the best out of the time he has in Congress — including a big night out in D.C. where he took dozens of selfies with people who happened to be at the same BBQ restaurant as him. The joint was also hosting a karaoke event. This quote just expands on what we already knew about Santos: that he is not only enjoying his likely short-lived career as a congressman – but he’s also loving the attention. At least when he is not being bombarded by questions on the multiple investigations he is under and the lies that keep on surfacing almost everyday.

I guess Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) was right when she said, “Any outside observer can tell you that this is someone who is absolutely, thoroughly, completely loving the attention he’s getting.”

— Emine Yücel 

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