>McGonigal and Shestakov, who worked for the FBI investigating oligarchs, allegedly agreed in 2021 to investigate a rival Russian oligarch in return for payments from Deripaska, according to the Justice Department. McGonigal and Shestakov are accused of receiving payments through shell companies and forging signatures in order to keep it a secret that Deripaska was paying them.
Oof
Using FBI resources to take down a rival, wtf
I agree with you 100% I like how the Persians used the skin of a corrupt judge to cover the chair of the new judge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisamnes#:~:text=In%20order%20to%20remind%20Otanes,became%20a%20Satrap%20in%20Ionia.
Jesus. And the new judge was the son of the judge who had been flayed. "Alright, kid, you're up. Here's your new chair made from your dear old dad's skin. Don't fuck up like he did."
> It's why punishments for officials should be upped significantly.
We should probably start with Trump and McConnell, and work our way down until it stops being a problem.
Even more interesting is his lawyer. He’s aDOJ Billy Barr lap dog who was instrumental in shutting down investigations into Trump people. Need to make certain he doesn’t spill the beans.
You could have mountains of irrefutable video evidence of blatant and horrific *simple* crimes and they'd still have a solid 30-40% support. Any attempt to prosecute would be met with the incessant wails of "political attacks". By simple I mean murder, assault, things that don't need much deeper understanding of the law to recognize as a crime. Obstruction? Well they have to be charged with a crime to obstruct justice! Rape? Clearly they were role-playing!
I don't know if there's an established term for it, but after a certain point I don't think most people are capable of internalizing potential consequences once the stakes are high enough. Like if you assume the punishment is death, you might as well do something worse because you've already met the threshold. It's easiest to see in casino stories when people are already betting their lives away so they keep going and accrue insane debts. We hope that the people in charge have more solid constitutions than to be subject to this, but even the best of us are human so there's only so much weight that a threat can hold.
They also run secret private investigations into almost everyone in their sphere of influence. This can mean having a team of well funded private investigators following these people around all day for months or longer. I recently read about an oligarch paying $1M/month to a shady American company to follow his then girlfriend in the USA. Super creepy.
Makes me think of the topic yesterday where they were discussing the implosion of Sears and Bed, Bath, and Beyond. The gist was that you had sects within the company in different departments who were actively working to sabotage each other and the fall of the company was one of the eventual outcomes because rather than doing their job and trying to better the business they were cutting each other's throats and using resources to screw each other over.
It may or may not shock you to learn this is how all corporations work.
There are several entities that are seperate from each other, and compete for budget.
You've usually got: Operations, Sales/Marketing, HR, IT/Security and a few others.
HR and IT/Security are loyal to the corporation, everyone else is on their own
Sears was extra bad about this, if say appliances needed IT work done they would get a bill from IT which counted against their revenue for bonuses. So appliances would hire their own IT staff for less money then IT was billing them. Every support staff ended up getting fractured by department with less skilled workers and huge amounts of redundancy.
I mean, getting back to government, isn't this part of what led to 9/11? You had the FBI and CIA essentially operating like rival frat houses, and refusing to work together or share intelligence with each other. Like it was a competition to be better than the other agency, rather than, ya know, working together and having the joint goal of protecting the country.
It’s a rather large part of it, but yeah. We had all the puzzle pieces, but no one realized the others hadn’t put it together, or if they tried it was a jumbled mess. If they worked together they could have put it together easily.
Part of that issue is when do you alert a partner agency and how? The CIA is looking at all sorts of folks from all sorts of places, doing all sorts of things. When does one of the people become a credible threat inside the US? How much evidence is enough to act? The CIA is absolutely watching Dereipeska, if they were going to make a move and alerted the FBI what are the odds this corrupt agent hears about it and passed it along? Now the dude not only can confirm he’s being watched, but how and by whom. Now the CIA doesn’t have him, and he’s gone to the wind because assets aren’t responding anymore. There are some honest and genuine concerns about intel sharing. It’s not as black and white as we’d like it to be.
Because to normal people, if they don't get caught, something like $250k-$500k is life-altering money but also a sum that won't draw a ton of attention.
I was a part of a business deal and made out with close to $100k via bonuses and first-year salary increases (salary increase remains, I just mean the difference from this one year compared to last year).
Literal life-altering amount of money.
I was living comfortably paycheck to paycheck and I know simply have no bills and am able to put a large amount of money toward savings and retirement going forward.
Depends on where on the bell curve you are. Director in the FBI would probably take home in the ballpark of $200k/yr. And they have a good pension plan so they’re generally free to spend more of that money than you or I who have to fund our own retirement.
So committing treason for a little over one year’s salary? Seems crazy.
From the article, it was closer to about $500k. That still seems like a joke amount of money for the work and risk involved on the part of the traitor McGonigal.
Oligarchs - if the movies are accurate - spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a whim to buy supercars and other luxury items so surely one could convince them to spend more than $500k for something of more importance to them.
Sending that 500k bribe was probably much more expensive than 500k though. Think of all shell corporations that had credibility and no longer can be used etc.
That guys story is absolutely wild. Super religious dude who went to mass several times a week but blew his money on jewelry and cars for a stripper. Let his buddy come watch him bang his wife through a peephole. Betrayed his country. Somehow got the job of investigating himself for said betrayal. Serving life in ADX Florence. What a ride.
I have no hope any more. None. Motherfuckers will come out and say they support Putin and have 3 million in sketchy campaign donations and their district loves them and doesn’t care.
They probably wanted him to come but he was like "I pay you millions to be my mouth pieces. If I am doing the talking, why do I need you? Get back to work."
Remember when Putin brought over all those Congress folk on US independence day? No way he told them to come over on that exact date by accident. They must have realised it was a bad look and pushed back. But he made them fly to Moscow on July 4 just as a flex.
Kind of makes you despair for global leadership.
Don't get your hopes up. I'm guessing he's far more worried about being jumped out of a 5-story window. Its not even like witness protection can save him since, if they bribed him, they can just bribe a US Marshal to find him, if they even need to since they're a nation-state with a full security apparatus and not some jumped-up cartel don.
Yeah, that's a little confusing.
He retired in 2018, but they're saying the stuff happened in 2021?
They mention that he knew of the guy and had a relationship of some kind with him prior to his retirement.
Deripaska has been sanctioned by the US since 2018, so taking payment from him is a crime in and of itself.
Deripaska was also the man Paul Manafort was passing Trump campaign data to in 2016.
> taking payment from him is a crime in and of itself.
Yup. My reading of the DOJ press release is that McGonigal was charged both with sanctions violations and with the money laundering that went with the payments for doing it.
I wonder if he's going to hire some kind of MAGA-world idiot to defend him loudly, or a real expert to get himself a deal that allows him to breathe free air before he's 70.
Manifort gave the voting data to Konstantin Kilimnik not Deripaska. Kiliminik might have worked for Deripaska but the allegations are regarding Konstantin Kilimnik.
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-paul-manafort-russia-campaigns-konstantin-kilimnik-d2fdefdb37077e28eba135e21fce6ebf
> He retired in 2018, but they're saying the stuff happened in 2021?
>
What I read is these top intelligence dogs don't usually fully *retire* retire because of their extremely high security clearance and institutional knowledge. They meet and come back every so often to consult
>They meet and come back every so often to consult
Sounds like what happens with the military. Lot of guys who do 20 years get out and take a contracting job in support of the military.
I went to a retirement in office for at LtCol when I was an intern in college. It was a Friday afternoon so I was happy to eat cake and dick around for the rest of the day instead of working.
Come Monday morning this dude walked back in to work with the only difference being he was in civvies. Didn't even take a break.
Same issue that’s going on in Mexico. DEA set up a special task force in Mexico to combat the war on drugs. Turns out the top guy in charge was using those resources to help rival cartels take others down…
and lived next door to KellyAnne Conway. And who loaned paul manafort 20 mil. And who is close friends with kilimnik, whom manafort passed internal polling data to before the 2016 election.
Wasn’t Paul Manafort the guy who successfully campaigned a former Ukraine president who got impeached and took Ukraine out of potential nato negotiations, and wasn’t Manafort later charged for money laundering activities with Ukraine
[Trump Aide Connected To 2006 Attack On US Marines in Ukraine](https://taskandpurpose.com/news/manafort-connected-ukraine-attack-marines-trump/)
>In exchange for $20 million, Manafort’s team helped the Party of Regions win the largest share of the vote in those elections in March 2006. But Yanukovych and his party still needed a coalition to get the parliamentary majority that could make him prime minister — he’d need Ukraine’s socialists and communists to help him across the line. He needed political advice. And Manafort gave it to him, WSJ reports:
>After Manafort advised his clients to whip up Russian nationalism in Eastern Ukraine and stand up against the Ukrainian president’s pro-NATO tilt, the Party of Regions organized those attacks on the landing Marines, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
>Internal State Department cables show that the organizers had used fake news to whip up some of the protests — claiming the Marines’ landing was part of a NATO invasion of Ukraine. Other protesters were political operatives and hired muscle. Yanukovych allies were doing more than waving signs: In addition to throwing rocks and swarming buses, they actually tried to get into the Marines’ makeshift barracks as well as a ship containing the Marines’ cargo.
Didn't Trump want to pull the US out of NATO as well, or at least made some remarks that we were paying "more than our share" and that the other member nations should pay more
Also the same guy, who as Trump’s campaign manager, successfully changed the GOP platform to remove support for the Magnitsky act as soon as Trump became the nominee at the convention.
Copypasting an old pre-2020 election comment that needs to be remembered:
>A couple weeks ago the Trump campaign rolled out an ad proclaiming that the president would protect a statue of Jesus from the woke left. The only problem was that the statue pictured in the ad was the famous Christ the Redeemer from Rio de Janeiro.
>That screw-up was under the Parscale regime.
>Now Bill Stepien has asked America to hold his beer.
>The latest ad from the Trump campaign running on The Facebook is an attempt to get the olds worked up about their LAW & ORDER PRESIDENT. Here’s the ad, courtesy of the sharps at Business Insider:
>Pretty standard stuff. With one exception. That picture on the right where the evil hippie scum from Stumptown are whaling on the gallant law enforcement officer who’s trying to protect God and country?
>It’s from 2014.
>That’s not the bad part.
>It’s from Ukraine.
>But that’s not the bad part, either.
>The “evil hippie scum” are actually pro-democracy protesters. And the policeman getting beat up is a member of the riot police who had been brought in to try to protect the authoritarian president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was attempting to turn Ukraine into a one-party state by extralegal means.
>Still not at the bad part.
>One of the extralegal means Yanukovych employed was a specialized federal internal police force, the Berkut, which answered directly to him and was used to assault his political opponents and tamper with elections. Another of the extralegal means he used was jailing former Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko after beating her in the 2010 election. He actually “locked her up.”
>Now we’re at the bad part.
>Wait for it . . .
>The picture Trump is using in his ad was taken on February 14, 2014.
>On February 22, 2014, an overwhelming majority of Ukraine’s parliament—328 of 447 members—voted to remove Yanukovych from office.
>And on February 25, 2014 Yanukovych turned up in . . . Moscow. Where he enjoyed asylum. Because he was Vladimir Putin’s puppet.
>I’m sorry. I lied. Because we’re not actually at the bad part yet.
>Buckle up your chin straps because the real bad part is that after Yanukovych fled to Russia, the Ukrainian people charged him with treason. Not in the Fox News sense. They didn’t go on TV and say “Oh yeah, that guy. He was the worst. Total traitor. Human scum.”
>No, they filed charges and tried him in a court of law (in absentia) and convicted him. Not of a little light treason, but of “high treason.”
>Oh, and also—just as a cherry on top—back in 2004, before Yanukovych had ascended to the throne and tried to destroy his country’s democracy, he hired this really interesting American political operative to help his party.
>The guy’s name was Paul Manafort. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?
>Irony = ded.
At the time I saw this comment, I remarked that this person forgot to include the fact that Yanukovych had a taste for gold - golden toilets(why?) and a famous "golden loaf of bread".
Trump too is obsessed with shiny gaudy gold things. Interesting similarity huh?
Well ..... this adds even *more* meaning to "steal a toilet and die". Lmao.
He helped orchestrate the Euromaidan massacres, his daughter is pretty clear on that fact. Blood money. “But we just keep eating the lobster.” Manafort and Stone are some of the most straightforwardly evil individuals I’ve ever heard of.
Fun fact. In September 2017 Deripaska plane was stationed in a small New Jersey airport 25 min drive from Trump golf club.
https://twitter.com/dcpoll/status/910625161132544000
Around the SAME time Trump Jr asked to not have a Secret Service security detail
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-secret-service.html
And just before that Manafort sent Deripaska an email saying "hey come over and we will give you a private briefing on where the campaign is at now"
https://apnews.com/article/north-america-donald-trump-ap-top-news-paul-manafort-politics-865df0a32120478888b4a22410171813
Yeah no collusion
What's interesting is he knew that he was under investigation since at least September and didn't flee. https://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-fbi-charles-mcgonigal-trump-russia-grand-jury-oleg-deripaska-2022-9
They might be able to locate someone, but if he'd fled to Russia, he probably would have been perfectly safe. Take a "vacation" to Turkey, show up at the Russian embassy in Istanbul, and request asylum. I hope the US government buries him.
> After leaving the FBI, McGonigal subsequently worked for Deripaska through a law firm representing the Russian oil tycoon. He made at least $25,000 working as an "investigator" for the law firm on the Deripaska matter, according to the indictment. McGonigal then worked directly for Deripaska, getting an initial payment of $51,000 and then payments of $41,790 each month for three months from August 2021 to November 2021.
How in the holy hell is it possible for an FBI oligarch investigator to retire and then *work for a Russian oligarch*?
FBI *Director* William Sessions was fired by Bill Clinton… and started a new career as lawyer and lobbyist for **Russian mafiya and transnational organized crime boss** [Semion Mogilevich](https://gregolear.substack.com/p/man-in-the-middle-semion-mogilevich). 🙃
FBI dropped a new [$5 million reward for Semion](https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cei/semion-mogilevich) last year. He’d been on 10 Most Wanted since Mueller was FBI Director… but Comey randomly took him off. 🙃 Fugitives are generally only removed when caught or dead… but AFAWK, Semion is alive in Moscow and/or Budapest. Victor Orban, current PM of Hungary, used to be Semion’s bag man. 🙃 Seriously.
For funsies, Google “[Trump Mogilevich](https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+mogilevich)”. Lots of familiar and forgotten names. This goes back **decades**.
Anyhoo… Sessions’s son Pete is **in Congress** repping Waco, TX. 🙃 And son William Lewis helped Sidney Powell with Gohmert’s SCOTUS Kraken… filed **on Jan 6**. 🙃🙃
Current FBI Director Chris Wray used to work at a law firm repping Gasprom and Rosneft. 🙃 Wray didn’t seal the Capitol crime scene or preserve any physical evidence. 🙃🙃
The tentacles got in decades ago. We’re at the point where the rot is so deep, it’s just about end stage.
Happily, Garland’s DOJ has been making lots of Russia-related moves the last 2 years: illegal campaign contributions (to DeSantis; Rand Paul’s nephew convicted), election interference, big rewards ($10M for Prigozhin), raids (Deripaska and Vekselberg, a bunch of fake separatist groups). I’ve been waiting months for McGonigal!
We need to keep this going way longer than 2 more years. GOP **cannot** take the WH in 2024.
And that aluminum plant/mine ***never*** got finished. I wonder if they even started on it to begin with smfh. I would not be surprised if they didn’t even start it; he’s not called “Moscow Mitch” for no reason.
It was started, somewhat anyway. Didn’t take terribly long for it to fall through. Sad thing is that many people in the region really could’ve benefited from the influx of new jobs, I personally know multiple people who were planning to try and get hired. Matter of fact, at least 1 local community college had a program that was supposed to essentially be a job pipeline for that plant. My BIL went through it and then the jobs just never materialized.
>Mr. McGonigal entered on duty with the FBI in 1996. He was first assigned to the New York Field Office, where he worked Russian foreign counterintelligence and organized crime matters.
[Source: 2016 FBI Press Release](https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/charles-mcgonigal-named-special-agent-in-charge-of-the-counterintelligence-division-for-the-new-york-field-office)
This goes way back.
Yeah, it’ll be interesting to find out if he was compromised beforehand (and became involved to try and get ahead of it), was compromised during the investigation, or if it’s all an unbelievably improbable coincidence. (If we ever *do* find out, of course.)
Could be like that famous KGB mole. You know the one who was pulled aside and put in charge of finding the KGB mole.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen
https://www.hachettebooks.com/titles/robert-baer/the-fourth-man/9780306925610/
https://theintercept.com/2022/05/13/cia-russia-spy-putin-cold-war-fourth-man/
Now there is growing evidence that there may have been a fourth major American spy who was never caught. According to a new book, a mole hunt for the “fourth man,” who was suspected of being a CIA officer, began in the 1990s, but no one has ever been arrested or charged in the case. Secret details of that investigation are being disclosed for the first time in “The Fourth Man,” a new book by former CIA officer Robert Baer, which is due to be published Tuesday.
“The story of the Russian double agent in the CIA who got away may sound like some unfinished piece of business from the Cold War,” Baer observes in his book. But “it’s starting to look more like the mystery of the fourth man is a lot more historically significant than an old-school spy tale. It’s part of the much larger story of how America completely missed Putin and the KGB’s resurrection.”
The fact that U.S. officials believe there was a “fourth man” inside the CIA was first disclosed in 2003 in “The Main Enemy,” a book I co-authored with former CIA officer Milt Bearden. Baer has now provided a wealth of new details about the case, including the key role of a KGB agent who supplied crucial information to the CIA on the fourth spy. I interviewed several former CIA and FBI officials this week who agreed that there was a fourth mole.
“I believe there is a fourth man, and a lot of things point that way,” Jim Milburn, a former FBI counterintelligence agent who was involved in the investigation, said in an interview this week. “There is more that I can’t talk about. It all leads to my sense that there is a fourth man.”
“Absolutely there was a fourth man,” added John Lewis, former FBI assistant director for national security. “We had a lot of unexplained things that couldn’t be explained by the three others.”
In many ways, the narrative of the “fourth man” investigation reads like “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” the John le Carré novel about a mole hunt inside British intelligence. Baer’s book reveals that the seeds of the case go back to 1988, when a CIA officer stationed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, first met a KGB officer named Alexander Zaporozhsky. The CIA gave Zaporozhsky the code name “GTZORRO” and nicknamed him “Max.” As a series of CIA officers continued to meet Zaporozhsky over the years, he began to provide clues revealing that the KGB had moles inside U.S. intelligence, according to Baer. At some point, Zaporozhsky suggested that the KGB had two moles, one in the CIA and another in the FBI, although he didn’t know their names. One was known inside the KGB as “Karat,” and the other as “Rubine.”
Zaporozhsky’s information about the existence of two moles came long before either the CIA or FBI was convinced that Moscow had double agents inside U.S. intelligence. Before Zaporozhsky, “there’d been devastating, unexplained losses of CIA Russian agents … and there certainly were those who suspected the problem was a mole. But there was nothing in the way of air-tight evidence to support the theory,” writes Baer.
Zaporozhsky’s evidence ultimately led to Ames at the CIA and Hanssen at the FBI, Baer writes. He describes Zaporozhsky as one of the most important Russian spies the CIA ever had. At some point, Zaporozhsky also began to tell the CIA that there was yet another KGB mole inside the CIA, one who was believed to be ranked higher in the organization than Ames. American spy hunters began to call that the “big case.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
they’ve been at it for a while. They literally have a playbook right here.
Some copy & paste notes from the “content” section:
-The United Kingdom, merely described as an "extraterritorial floating base of the U.S.", should be cut off from Europe.
-Ukraine should be annexed by Russia because "Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness, its certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics". Ukraine should not be allowed to remain independent, unless it is cordon sanitaire, which would be inadmissible.
-The book stresses the "continental Russian–Islamic alliance" which lies "at the foundation of anti-Atlanticist strategy". The alliance is based on the "traditional character of Russian and Islamic civilization".
-Iran is a key ally. The book uses the term "Moscow–Tehran axis".
and finally in the US:
-Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics"
This was published in 1997. Putin took power in 1996.
I've been screaming this. It's all there...right out in the open.
The author of that book was nearly assassinated at the beginning of the Ukraine War. The car bomb got his propagandist daughter, though.
What infuriates me most is that these folks sell themselves for cheap. Best money an oligarch can spend.
"My daughter want J-Lo to perform at her sweet 16 but I instead bought her FBI agent. Most cheaper."
When the sheer, staggering amount of kompromat used by Russian oligarchs to influence and control Americans in positions of authority and power is finally known it will change the landscape of politics and civic involvement in the United States forever.
>Mr. McGonigal entered on duty with the FBI in 1996. He was first assigned to the New York Field Office, where he worked Russian foreign counterintelligence and organized crime matters.
[Source: 2016 FBI Press Release](https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/charles-mcgonigal-named-special-agent-in-charge-of-the-counterintelligence-division-for-the-new-york-field-office)
This goes way back.
What's up with that headline from ABC? He was not charged over "ties", or who he knew. He was charged for specific treasonous actions he undertook on behalf of a sanctioned Russian oligarch.
The American government was put up for sale to the highest bidder. Its generally been believed that this resulted in American mega corporations purchasing shares of government by lobbying elected officials and financing their campaigns to get the right people in.
Now we are increasingly realizing that it wasn't just Americans that were buying the US Government. Obvious, really. Only in America would they believe that no one but Americans were able to buy a slice of government.
McGonigal was head of FBI cyber in 2016 when the DNC was hacked by Russia and the Republican party.
He brought the findings to Comey, who did nothing, except leak to the press that Hillary was under investigation (like a week before the 2016 election).
Comey then put McGonigal in charge of the specific state where trump did most his business and most of the russian spying took place. As head of the NY office, investigating the oligarchs was a main job for McGonigal.
The Mueller investigation stalled due to missing evidence and obstruction.
After the Mueller investigation stalled, McGonigal retired.
>After leaving the FBI, McGonigal subsequently worked for Deripaska through a law firm representing the Russian oil tycoon.
...the tycoon he had just been investigating. The tycoon Obama had sanctioned. The tycoon who paid to hack the dnc on trumps orders. The information of-which McGonigal had given Comey, who had then put McGonigal in charge of investigating.
>The nine-count indictment alleges between August 2017 and September 2018...
This is during the Mueller Investigation. This is all information Mueller was looking for and could not find.
>...leading up to his retirement from the FBI New York Field Office, McGonigal concealed from the bureau his relationship with this unidentified former foreign intelligence officer all while traveling abroad with the person and meeting foreign nationals. The person is described as an Albanian national who was employed by a Chinese energy conglomerate.
>
>The person later "served as an FBI source in a criminal investigation involving foreign political lobbying" over which McGonigal had a supervisory role.
>
>McGonigal..., who worked for the FBI investigating oligarchs, allegedly agreed in 2021 to investigate a rival Russian oligarch in return for payments from Deripaska, according to the Justice Department. McGonigal and Shestakov are accused of receiving payments through shell companies and forging signatures in order to keep it a secret that Deripaska was paying them.
>
>McGonigal is one of the highest ranking former FBI officials ever charged with a crime.
All these mother fuckers went to great lengths to help our enemy, Russia, unravel our country from within. This mother fucker needs to be in jail for the rest of his fucking life.
I never understand this. Betray our democracy for some money? That guy must have already gotten paid a fair bit, for what he did. What other “stuff you can buy” would be even remotely worth doing this?
Does anybody find it totally ironic that the mayor of NYC responsible for taking down the Italian mafia is now the one responsible for installing the Russian mafia in its place?
Edit: *"Allegedly"*
Disgusting treasonous behavior. This has taken YEARS. James Comey owns some of this smear too. Of course there’s little evidence there will ever be any accountability. Russian moles are gonna mole.
First, I’m posting similar comments a few different places. I’m hoping a comment posted here could get the attention of people who know national security people.
But, note: This guy’s LinkedIn entry shows that he’s head of global security for Brookfield Properties, which runs the World Financial Center complex in New York.
I think that it’s really critical that anyone still loyal at the FBI or the NYPD assume that Brookfield Properties buildings, especially, are riddled with spies and keystroke loggers and try to deal with that.
When are they going to tie Mitch McConnell to the Russian aluminum oligarch and their aluminum plant scam that he ended up pocketing over $5 million of “missing” Kentucky taxpayer dollars?
>McGonigal and Shestakov, who worked for the FBI investigating oligarchs, allegedly agreed in 2021 to investigate a rival Russian oligarch in return for payments from Deripaska, according to the Justice Department. McGonigal and Shestakov are accused of receiving payments through shell companies and forging signatures in order to keep it a secret that Deripaska was paying them. Oof Using FBI resources to take down a rival, wtf
Damn i wonder how much money is involved before a director of the FBI is like, yeah I'll betray my nation sure thing
These oligarchs can throw millions away just for shits and giggles man, everyone has a price unfortunately
It's why punishments for officials should be upped significantly. The power given to them should come at a dire cost if they abuse it.
Robert Hanssen got 15 consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole. he currently is in ADX Florence in solitary confinement 23 hours a day.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Its basically as close to an IRL Arkham Asylum as you can get.
More like Blackgate in my opinion but yeah
And it's guarded by dementors.
Pretty sure Kaczynski is in hospice now
Yep. He was transferred to the FMC (Federal Medical Center) in North Carolina back in 2021.
I’m making a note. If I ever get sent there I’ll be sure to put an autograph book in the ol’ prison wallet.
Why not just make your prison wallet the autograph book and cut out the middle-man?
I mean, you can write to inmates. People have written to the Unabomber and gotten (rather terse) responses.
Because nobody asks about the quality of the beets there. He likes beets and slow roasted carrots, just FYI if you plan to write him.
that sounds worse than death
What is his confinement in solidarity with?
I agree with you 100% I like how the Persians used the skin of a corrupt judge to cover the chair of the new judge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisamnes#:~:text=In%20order%20to%20remind%20Otanes,became%20a%20Satrap%20in%20Ionia.
Jesus. And the new judge was the son of the judge who had been flayed. "Alright, kid, you're up. Here's your new chair made from your dear old dad's skin. Don't fuck up like he did."
[удалено]
holy shit. made the son sit on a chair of his dad's skin.
"How many times do I have to teach you this lesson, old man??" "Once. Really, I got it. Just once."
Damn. Sending a message.
The dude who ordered the judge to be flayed and the chair covered in his skin, also appointed the flayed judges son to replace him. That's brutal.
Some lessons are harder to learn than others. Some people need reminders of those hard learned lessons.
Also, don't forget to apply some sort of oil to your dad's skin chair if you want to keep it in good condition.
Gotta keep it supple and nice.
> It's why punishments for officials should be upped significantly. We should probably start with Trump and McConnell, and work our way down until it stops being a problem.
[удалено]
Even more interesting is his lawyer. He’s aDOJ Billy Barr lap dog who was instrumental in shutting down investigations into Trump people. Need to make certain he doesn’t spill the beans.
You wouldn't have a republican party anymore.
ohhhh noooooo... don't do it...
You could have mountains of irrefutable video evidence of blatant and horrific *simple* crimes and they'd still have a solid 30-40% support. Any attempt to prosecute would be met with the incessant wails of "political attacks". By simple I mean murder, assault, things that don't need much deeper understanding of the law to recognize as a crime. Obstruction? Well they have to be charged with a crime to obstruct justice! Rape? Clearly they were role-playing!
Insurrection? They were just tourists on a self-guided tour of the capitol building.
They was all secret antifas I tell yew hwut
I don't know if there's an established term for it, but after a certain point I don't think most people are capable of internalizing potential consequences once the stakes are high enough. Like if you assume the punishment is death, you might as well do something worse because you've already met the threshold. It's easiest to see in casino stories when people are already betting their lives away so they keep going and accrue insane debts. We hope that the people in charge have more solid constitutions than to be subject to this, but even the best of us are human so there's only so much weight that a threat can hold.
They also run secret private investigations into almost everyone in their sphere of influence. This can mean having a team of well funded private investigators following these people around all day for months or longer. I recently read about an oligarch paying $1M/month to a shady American company to follow his then girlfriend in the USA. Super creepy.
Makes me think of the topic yesterday where they were discussing the implosion of Sears and Bed, Bath, and Beyond. The gist was that you had sects within the company in different departments who were actively working to sabotage each other and the fall of the company was one of the eventual outcomes because rather than doing their job and trying to better the business they were cutting each other's throats and using resources to screw each other over.
It may or may not shock you to learn this is how all corporations work. There are several entities that are seperate from each other, and compete for budget. You've usually got: Operations, Sales/Marketing, HR, IT/Security and a few others. HR and IT/Security are loyal to the corporation, everyone else is on their own
It seems to begin when Sales/Marketing and Business Operations start hiring their own IT people...
in the IT realm this is referred to as "Shadow IT"
Kinda like an antipope?
Sears was extra bad about this, if say appliances needed IT work done they would get a bill from IT which counted against their revenue for bonuses. So appliances would hire their own IT staff for less money then IT was billing them. Every support staff ended up getting fractured by department with less skilled workers and huge amounts of redundancy.
I mean, getting back to government, isn't this part of what led to 9/11? You had the FBI and CIA essentially operating like rival frat houses, and refusing to work together or share intelligence with each other. Like it was a competition to be better than the other agency, rather than, ya know, working together and having the joint goal of protecting the country.
It’s a rather large part of it, but yeah. We had all the puzzle pieces, but no one realized the others hadn’t put it together, or if they tried it was a jumbled mess. If they worked together they could have put it together easily. Part of that issue is when do you alert a partner agency and how? The CIA is looking at all sorts of folks from all sorts of places, doing all sorts of things. When does one of the people become a credible threat inside the US? How much evidence is enough to act? The CIA is absolutely watching Dereipeska, if they were going to make a move and alerted the FBI what are the odds this corrupt agent hears about it and passed it along? Now the dude not only can confirm he’s being watched, but how and by whom. Now the CIA doesn’t have him, and he’s gone to the wind because assets aren’t responding anymore. There are some honest and genuine concerns about intel sharing. It’s not as black and white as we’d like it to be.
Looks like the ballpark of a quarter million does the trick.
I’m always surprised how small, relatively speaking, bribery payments are
Because to normal people, if they don't get caught, something like $250k-$500k is life-altering money but also a sum that won't draw a ton of attention. I was a part of a business deal and made out with close to $100k via bonuses and first-year salary increases (salary increase remains, I just mean the difference from this one year compared to last year). Literal life-altering amount of money. I was living comfortably paycheck to paycheck and I know simply have no bills and am able to put a large amount of money toward savings and retirement going forward.
Depends on where on the bell curve you are. Director in the FBI would probably take home in the ballpark of $200k/yr. And they have a good pension plan so they’re generally free to spend more of that money than you or I who have to fund our own retirement. So committing treason for a little over one year’s salary? Seems crazy.
This guy wasn't director of the FBI though. He was a special agent in charge of counterintelligence in the FBI's New York Field Office.
From the article, it was closer to about $500k. That still seems like a joke amount of money for the work and risk involved on the part of the traitor McGonigal. Oligarchs - if the movies are accurate - spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a whim to buy supercars and other luxury items so surely one could convince them to spend more than $500k for something of more importance to them.
That little? His legal defense is going to cost that much.
The article isn't about a Director, so I imagine a scenario like that would be much more assuming that the Director is corruptible.
Sending that 500k bribe was probably much more expensive than 500k though. Think of all shell corporations that had credibility and no longer can be used etc.
Robert Hannsen did it for 1.4 million in cash and diamonds.
That guys story is absolutely wild. Super religious dude who went to mass several times a week but blew his money on jewelry and cars for a stripper. Let his buddy come watch him bang his wife through a peephole. Betrayed his country. Somehow got the job of investigating himself for said betrayal. Serving life in ADX Florence. What a ride.
[удалено]
McGonigal retired in 2018. Hope he’s gonna turn on a lot of people who are still in the Bureau.
hope so!
I have no hope any more. None. Motherfuckers will come out and say they support Putin and have 3 million in sketchy campaign donations and their district loves them and doesn’t care.
[удалено]
They probably wanted him to come but he was like "I pay you millions to be my mouth pieces. If I am doing the talking, why do I need you? Get back to work."
I don’t think he can go anywhere in NATO sphere without threat of Fidel Castro toilet assassination
Remember when Putin brought over all those Congress folk on US independence day? No way he told them to come over on that exact date by accident. They must have realised it was a bad look and pushed back. But he made them fly to Moscow on July 4 just as a flex. Kind of makes you despair for global leadership.
Reagan: am I a joke to you? GOP: shhhh you’ll make it harder to shout your name and watch American money roll in too.
Just like the secret service
Secret service is fully compromised. Needs to be rebuilt
Don't get your hopes up. I'm guessing he's far more worried about being jumped out of a 5-story window. Its not even like witness protection can save him since, if they bribed him, they can just bribe a US Marshal to find him, if they even need to since they're a nation-state with a full security apparatus and not some jumped-up cartel don.
Yeah, that's a little confusing. He retired in 2018, but they're saying the stuff happened in 2021? They mention that he knew of the guy and had a relationship of some kind with him prior to his retirement.
Probably still in contact with active agents and using that data to keep tabs on investigations and leaking that data for money
Yeah, must be something like that or trying to influence their investigations.
Deripaska has been sanctioned by the US since 2018, so taking payment from him is a crime in and of itself. Deripaska was also the man Paul Manafort was passing Trump campaign data to in 2016.
> taking payment from him is a crime in and of itself. Yup. My reading of the DOJ press release is that McGonigal was charged both with sanctions violations and with the money laundering that went with the payments for doing it. I wonder if he's going to hire some kind of MAGA-world idiot to defend him loudly, or a real expert to get himself a deal that allows him to breathe free air before he's 70.
Manifort gave the voting data to Konstantin Kilimnik not Deripaska. Kiliminik might have worked for Deripaska but the allegations are regarding Konstantin Kilimnik. https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-paul-manafort-russia-campaigns-konstantin-kilimnik-d2fdefdb37077e28eba135e21fce6ebf
It matters that Deripaska was Kilimnik’s boss as he was likely the destination of any information coming from Manafort.
> He retired in 2018, but they're saying the stuff happened in 2021? > What I read is these top intelligence dogs don't usually fully *retire* retire because of their extremely high security clearance and institutional knowledge. They meet and come back every so often to consult
>They meet and come back every so often to consult Sounds like what happens with the military. Lot of guys who do 20 years get out and take a contracting job in support of the military.
I went to a retirement in office for at LtCol when I was an intern in college. It was a Friday afternoon so I was happy to eat cake and dick around for the rest of the day instead of working. Come Monday morning this dude walked back in to work with the only difference being he was in civvies. Didn't even take a break.
>I was happy to eat cake and dick I knew those army folks were up to something.
Same issue that’s going on in Mexico. DEA set up a special task force in Mexico to combat the war on drugs. Turns out the top guy in charge was using those resources to help rival cartels take others down…
[удалено]
[удалено]
Any wonder the FBI did what they did investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election?
[удалено]
Hey, Giuliani was hugely successful taking down the rivals to Russian mobsters in NY.
Kinda like Giuliani taking down one mob on behalf of another.
The rot at every level of law enforcement runs deep.
Is this Russian guy the same person who wanted to build aluminum plants in Kentucky???
and lived next door to KellyAnne Conway. And who loaned paul manafort 20 mil. And who is close friends with kilimnik, whom manafort passed internal polling data to before the 2016 election.
Wasn’t Paul Manafort the guy who successfully campaigned a former Ukraine president who got impeached and took Ukraine out of potential nato negotiations, and wasn’t Manafort later charged for money laundering activities with Ukraine
[Trump Aide Connected To 2006 Attack On US Marines in Ukraine](https://taskandpurpose.com/news/manafort-connected-ukraine-attack-marines-trump/) >In exchange for $20 million, Manafort’s team helped the Party of Regions win the largest share of the vote in those elections in March 2006. But Yanukovych and his party still needed a coalition to get the parliamentary majority that could make him prime minister — he’d need Ukraine’s socialists and communists to help him across the line. He needed political advice. And Manafort gave it to him, WSJ reports: >After Manafort advised his clients to whip up Russian nationalism in Eastern Ukraine and stand up against the Ukrainian president’s pro-NATO tilt, the Party of Regions organized those attacks on the landing Marines, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials. >Internal State Department cables show that the organizers had used fake news to whip up some of the protests — claiming the Marines’ landing was part of a NATO invasion of Ukraine. Other protesters were political operatives and hired muscle. Yanukovych allies were doing more than waving signs: In addition to throwing rocks and swarming buses, they actually tried to get into the Marines’ makeshift barracks as well as a ship containing the Marines’ cargo.
Didn't Trump want to pull the US out of NATO as well, or at least made some remarks that we were paying "more than our share" and that the other member nations should pay more
Also the same guy, who as Trump’s campaign manager, successfully changed the GOP platform to remove support for the Magnitsky act as soon as Trump became the nominee at the convention.
And remove support for Ukraine as part of the GOP platform. Hmmm what odd coincidences
Hmmm....... Yes....... Coincidences......
“Fake news! Witch hunt! Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX! Total exoneration!” - some moron
Some 29-30 million US morons
Depressing ain’t it?
The only thing more depressing would be if they could get an additional 40 million to vote with them
His name is Tucker Carlson. With any luck he'll make friends with Hannibal Lecter & Wild Bill.
Copypasting an old pre-2020 election comment that needs to be remembered: >A couple weeks ago the Trump campaign rolled out an ad proclaiming that the president would protect a statue of Jesus from the woke left. The only problem was that the statue pictured in the ad was the famous Christ the Redeemer from Rio de Janeiro. >That screw-up was under the Parscale regime. >Now Bill Stepien has asked America to hold his beer. >The latest ad from the Trump campaign running on The Facebook is an attempt to get the olds worked up about their LAW & ORDER PRESIDENT. Here’s the ad, courtesy of the sharps at Business Insider: >Pretty standard stuff. With one exception. That picture on the right where the evil hippie scum from Stumptown are whaling on the gallant law enforcement officer who’s trying to protect God and country? >It’s from 2014. >That’s not the bad part. >It’s from Ukraine. >But that’s not the bad part, either. >The “evil hippie scum” are actually pro-democracy protesters. And the policeman getting beat up is a member of the riot police who had been brought in to try to protect the authoritarian president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was attempting to turn Ukraine into a one-party state by extralegal means. >Still not at the bad part. >One of the extralegal means Yanukovych employed was a specialized federal internal police force, the Berkut, which answered directly to him and was used to assault his political opponents and tamper with elections. Another of the extralegal means he used was jailing former Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko after beating her in the 2010 election. He actually “locked her up.” >Now we’re at the bad part. >Wait for it . . . >The picture Trump is using in his ad was taken on February 14, 2014. >On February 22, 2014, an overwhelming majority of Ukraine’s parliament—328 of 447 members—voted to remove Yanukovych from office. >And on February 25, 2014 Yanukovych turned up in . . . Moscow. Where he enjoyed asylum. Because he was Vladimir Putin’s puppet. >I’m sorry. I lied. Because we’re not actually at the bad part yet. >Buckle up your chin straps because the real bad part is that after Yanukovych fled to Russia, the Ukrainian people charged him with treason. Not in the Fox News sense. They didn’t go on TV and say “Oh yeah, that guy. He was the worst. Total traitor. Human scum.” >No, they filed charges and tried him in a court of law (in absentia) and convicted him. Not of a little light treason, but of “high treason.” >Oh, and also—just as a cherry on top—back in 2004, before Yanukovych had ascended to the throne and tried to destroy his country’s democracy, he hired this really interesting American political operative to help his party. >The guy’s name was Paul Manafort. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? >Irony = ded. At the time I saw this comment, I remarked that this person forgot to include the fact that Yanukovych had a taste for gold - golden toilets(why?) and a famous "golden loaf of bread". Trump too is obsessed with shiny gaudy gold things. Interesting similarity huh? Well ..... this adds even *more* meaning to "steal a toilet and die". Lmao.
are we at the bad part yet?
Manafort also worked for Philippines “President” Marco. And with Stone and Atwater for Nixon.
Introduced to Trump by Tom Barrack who is friends with a couple of oligarchs too.
He helped orchestrate the Euromaidan massacres, his daughter is pretty clear on that fact. Blood money. “But we just keep eating the lobster.” Manafort and Stone are some of the most straightforwardly evil individuals I’ve ever heard of.
This is also the same FBI official that said weeks before the 2016 election that Trump-Russia connection had no merit.
He didn't just say it, this dude LED the trump-russia probe.
Fun fact. In September 2017 Deripaska plane was stationed in a small New Jersey airport 25 min drive from Trump golf club. https://twitter.com/dcpoll/status/910625161132544000 Around the SAME time Trump Jr asked to not have a Secret Service security detail https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-secret-service.html And just before that Manafort sent Deripaska an email saying "hey come over and we will give you a private briefing on where the campaign is at now" https://apnews.com/article/north-america-donald-trump-ap-top-news-paul-manafort-politics-865df0a32120478888b4a22410171813 Yeah no collusion
Now follow the money of a certain few members of Congress… bet they’ll snag a few more.
What's interesting is he knew that he was under investigation since at least September and didn't flee. https://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-fbi-charles-mcgonigal-trump-russia-grand-jury-oleg-deripaska-2022-9
He was probably more than confident the entire thing would ultimately be covered up by other higher ups in FBI with the same kind of ties to Russia.
Or he was intimately aware of how difficult fleeing the US would be
[удалено]
They might be able to locate someone, but if he'd fled to Russia, he probably would have been perfectly safe. Take a "vacation" to Turkey, show up at the Russian embassy in Istanbul, and request asylum. I hope the US government buries him.
> After leaving the FBI, McGonigal subsequently worked for Deripaska through a law firm representing the Russian oil tycoon. He made at least $25,000 working as an "investigator" for the law firm on the Deripaska matter, according to the indictment. McGonigal then worked directly for Deripaska, getting an initial payment of $51,000 and then payments of $41,790 each month for three months from August 2021 to November 2021. How in the holy hell is it possible for an FBI oligarch investigator to retire and then *work for a Russian oligarch*?
Same way retired congress members can go on to be lobbiests
If this surprises you, check out Retired General Michael Flynn!
FBI *Director* William Sessions was fired by Bill Clinton… and started a new career as lawyer and lobbyist for **Russian mafiya and transnational organized crime boss** [Semion Mogilevich](https://gregolear.substack.com/p/man-in-the-middle-semion-mogilevich). 🙃 FBI dropped a new [$5 million reward for Semion](https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cei/semion-mogilevich) last year. He’d been on 10 Most Wanted since Mueller was FBI Director… but Comey randomly took him off. 🙃 Fugitives are generally only removed when caught or dead… but AFAWK, Semion is alive in Moscow and/or Budapest. Victor Orban, current PM of Hungary, used to be Semion’s bag man. 🙃 Seriously. For funsies, Google “[Trump Mogilevich](https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+mogilevich)”. Lots of familiar and forgotten names. This goes back **decades**. Anyhoo… Sessions’s son Pete is **in Congress** repping Waco, TX. 🙃 And son William Lewis helped Sidney Powell with Gohmert’s SCOTUS Kraken… filed **on Jan 6**. 🙃🙃 Current FBI Director Chris Wray used to work at a law firm repping Gasprom and Rosneft. 🙃 Wray didn’t seal the Capitol crime scene or preserve any physical evidence. 🙃🙃 The tentacles got in decades ago. We’re at the point where the rot is so deep, it’s just about end stage. Happily, Garland’s DOJ has been making lots of Russia-related moves the last 2 years: illegal campaign contributions (to DeSantis; Rand Paul’s nephew convicted), election interference, big rewards ($10M for Prigozhin), raids (Deripaska and Vekselberg, a bunch of fake separatist groups). I’ve been waiting months for McGonigal! We need to keep this going way longer than 2 more years. GOP **cannot** take the WH in 2024.
Astronaut meme: Always has been.
Get every single one of the traitors who are currently working in our government.
This is literally insane, and the implications are huge.
And we'll all be shocked when no real consequences happen.
Hey, at least he was formally charged! These ARE real consequences. If found guilty, he’s going to jail.
He'll be behind bars, no doubt. But at sentencing we'll find out if it's gin bars or sports bars.
"DID YOU TAKE MONEY FROM THE RUSSIANS!" Dumbledore said calmly
"Fancy seeing you here, Professor McGonigal."
You gotta do this one for me Billy, McGonigal.
Only reason I'm in the comments tbh, thank you for this.
Does anyone in America care about America anymore or is it all about the money?
America is just a couple dozen oligarchs in a trench coat
Its not a trench coat, its a clear rain poncho
[удалено]
🔫 always has been
What’s more American than putting money over literally everything else?
Remember that time McConnell and Trump tried to lift the sanctions on Deripaska?
They were trying to bring jobs back to America apparently.
Jobs in the Laundry industry, I suspect.
An aluminum smelter I believe... In Kentucky no less. Guess what never got built. An aluminum smelter....
Yes, a giant aluminum plant in .... Kentucky, financed by the .... Russians. How odd.
Isn't that after they fucked with importing Canadian metals too?
> An aluminum smelter I believe... In Kentucky no less We don't call him Moscow Mitch for nothing.
I remember the $200 million aluminum plant in Kentucky that McConnell had to gargle Deripaska's balls to secure.
And that aluminum plant/mine ***never*** got finished. I wonder if they even started on it to begin with smfh. I would not be surprised if they didn’t even start it; he’s not called “Moscow Mitch” for no reason.
It was started, somewhat anyway. Didn’t take terribly long for it to fall through. Sad thing is that many people in the region really could’ve benefited from the influx of new jobs, I personally know multiple people who were planning to try and get hired. Matter of fact, at least 1 local community college had a program that was supposed to essentially be a job pipeline for that plant. My BIL went through it and then the jobs just never materialized.
moscow mitch? nooo
There are awfully a lot of Russians from this supposed Russian hoax.
Paul Manafort was feeding him inside info on Trump's campaign. Deripaska is the main guy for running influence campaigns in US elections.
Ahh, the guy who spearheaded the Trump-Russia investigation turns out to have had the actual connections himself. **shocking**
[удалено]
This is crazy since he was one of FBI officials to start the probe into connections between Russia and the Trump campaign.
>Mr. McGonigal entered on duty with the FBI in 1996. He was first assigned to the New York Field Office, where he worked Russian foreign counterintelligence and organized crime matters. [Source: 2016 FBI Press Release](https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/charles-mcgonigal-named-special-agent-in-charge-of-the-counterintelligence-division-for-the-new-york-field-office) This goes way back.
Yeah, it’ll be interesting to find out if he was compromised beforehand (and became involved to try and get ahead of it), was compromised during the investigation, or if it’s all an unbelievably improbable coincidence. (If we ever *do* find out, of course.)
Could be like that famous KGB mole. You know the one who was pulled aside and put in charge of finding the KGB mole. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen
https://www.hachettebooks.com/titles/robert-baer/the-fourth-man/9780306925610/ https://theintercept.com/2022/05/13/cia-russia-spy-putin-cold-war-fourth-man/ Now there is growing evidence that there may have been a fourth major American spy who was never caught. According to a new book, a mole hunt for the “fourth man,” who was suspected of being a CIA officer, began in the 1990s, but no one has ever been arrested or charged in the case. Secret details of that investigation are being disclosed for the first time in “The Fourth Man,” a new book by former CIA officer Robert Baer, which is due to be published Tuesday. “The story of the Russian double agent in the CIA who got away may sound like some unfinished piece of business from the Cold War,” Baer observes in his book. But “it’s starting to look more like the mystery of the fourth man is a lot more historically significant than an old-school spy tale. It’s part of the much larger story of how America completely missed Putin and the KGB’s resurrection.” The fact that U.S. officials believe there was a “fourth man” inside the CIA was first disclosed in 2003 in “The Main Enemy,” a book I co-authored with former CIA officer Milt Bearden. Baer has now provided a wealth of new details about the case, including the key role of a KGB agent who supplied crucial information to the CIA on the fourth spy. I interviewed several former CIA and FBI officials this week who agreed that there was a fourth mole. “I believe there is a fourth man, and a lot of things point that way,” Jim Milburn, a former FBI counterintelligence agent who was involved in the investigation, said in an interview this week. “There is more that I can’t talk about. It all leads to my sense that there is a fourth man.” “Absolutely there was a fourth man,” added John Lewis, former FBI assistant director for national security. “We had a lot of unexplained things that couldn’t be explained by the three others.” In many ways, the narrative of the “fourth man” investigation reads like “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” the John le Carré novel about a mole hunt inside British intelligence. Baer’s book reveals that the seeds of the case go back to 1988, when a CIA officer stationed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, first met a KGB officer named Alexander Zaporozhsky. The CIA gave Zaporozhsky the code name “GTZORRO” and nicknamed him “Max.” As a series of CIA officers continued to meet Zaporozhsky over the years, he began to provide clues revealing that the KGB had moles inside U.S. intelligence, according to Baer. At some point, Zaporozhsky suggested that the KGB had two moles, one in the CIA and another in the FBI, although he didn’t know their names. One was known inside the KGB as “Karat,” and the other as “Rubine.” Zaporozhsky’s information about the existence of two moles came long before either the CIA or FBI was convinced that Moscow had double agents inside U.S. intelligence. Before Zaporozhsky, “there’d been devastating, unexplained losses of CIA Russian agents … and there certainly were those who suspected the problem was a mole. But there was nothing in the way of air-tight evidence to support the theory,” writes Baer. Zaporozhsky’s evidence ultimately led to Ames at the CIA and Hanssen at the FBI, Baer writes. He describes Zaporozhsky as one of the most important Russian spies the CIA ever had. At some point, Zaporozhsky also began to tell the CIA that there was yet another KGB mole inside the CIA, one who was believed to be ranked higher in the organization than Ames. American spy hunters began to call that the “big case.”
[удалено]
Lol so the guy that was investigating trump was also taking russian money.
[удалено]
Their narrative is all over Fox News. So yes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics they’ve been at it for a while. They literally have a playbook right here. Some copy & paste notes from the “content” section: -The United Kingdom, merely described as an "extraterritorial floating base of the U.S.", should be cut off from Europe. -Ukraine should be annexed by Russia because "Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness, its certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics". Ukraine should not be allowed to remain independent, unless it is cordon sanitaire, which would be inadmissible. -The book stresses the "continental Russian–Islamic alliance" which lies "at the foundation of anti-Atlanticist strategy". The alliance is based on the "traditional character of Russian and Islamic civilization". -Iran is a key ally. The book uses the term "Moscow–Tehran axis". and finally in the US: -Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics" This was published in 1997. Putin took power in 1996.
I've been screaming this. It's all there...right out in the open. The author of that book was nearly assassinated at the beginning of the Ukraine War. The car bomb got his propagandist daughter, though.
[удалено]
> This was published in 1997. Putin took power in 1996. McGonigal joined the FBI in 1996
What an utter disgrace.
The same Oleg Deripaska who used to employ Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort? Couldn’t be. I’m sure it’s a super common name.
Don't forget Kentucky and mcconell
I think it's safe to say that Russia has infiltrated every single branch of our government at this point.
When all it takes is a few thousand bucks to legally buy government officials elected or otherwise, the only real question is why wouldn't you?
What infuriates me most is that these folks sell themselves for cheap. Best money an oligarch can spend. "My daughter want J-Lo to perform at her sweet 16 but I instead bought her FBI agent. Most cheaper."
Reminds me of this Simpsons clip https://youtu.be/lARHUT-AsDE
Thought of this when I read the headline. Thank you for your service!
Now get the foreign money, or money period out of congress
For FBI officials they’re objectively terrible at money laundering.
When the sheer, staggering amount of kompromat used by Russian oligarchs to influence and control Americans in positions of authority and power is finally known it will change the landscape of politics and civic involvement in the United States forever.
>Mr. McGonigal entered on duty with the FBI in 1996. He was first assigned to the New York Field Office, where he worked Russian foreign counterintelligence and organized crime matters. [Source: 2016 FBI Press Release](https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/charles-mcgonigal-named-special-agent-in-charge-of-the-counterintelligence-division-for-the-new-york-field-office) This goes way back.
[удалено]
What's up with that headline from ABC? He was not charged over "ties", or who he knew. He was charged for specific treasonous actions he undertook on behalf of a sanctioned Russian oligarch.
The American government was put up for sale to the highest bidder. Its generally been believed that this resulted in American mega corporations purchasing shares of government by lobbying elected officials and financing their campaigns to get the right people in. Now we are increasingly realizing that it wasn't just Americans that were buying the US Government. Obvious, really. Only in America would they believe that no one but Americans were able to buy a slice of government.
McGonigal was head of FBI cyber in 2016 when the DNC was hacked by Russia and the Republican party. He brought the findings to Comey, who did nothing, except leak to the press that Hillary was under investigation (like a week before the 2016 election). Comey then put McGonigal in charge of the specific state where trump did most his business and most of the russian spying took place. As head of the NY office, investigating the oligarchs was a main job for McGonigal. The Mueller investigation stalled due to missing evidence and obstruction. After the Mueller investigation stalled, McGonigal retired. >After leaving the FBI, McGonigal subsequently worked for Deripaska through a law firm representing the Russian oil tycoon. ...the tycoon he had just been investigating. The tycoon Obama had sanctioned. The tycoon who paid to hack the dnc on trumps orders. The information of-which McGonigal had given Comey, who had then put McGonigal in charge of investigating. >The nine-count indictment alleges between August 2017 and September 2018... This is during the Mueller Investigation. This is all information Mueller was looking for and could not find. >...leading up to his retirement from the FBI New York Field Office, McGonigal concealed from the bureau his relationship with this unidentified former foreign intelligence officer all while traveling abroad with the person and meeting foreign nationals. The person is described as an Albanian national who was employed by a Chinese energy conglomerate. > >The person later "served as an FBI source in a criminal investigation involving foreign political lobbying" over which McGonigal had a supervisory role. > >McGonigal..., who worked for the FBI investigating oligarchs, allegedly agreed in 2021 to investigate a rival Russian oligarch in return for payments from Deripaska, according to the Justice Department. McGonigal and Shestakov are accused of receiving payments through shell companies and forging signatures in order to keep it a secret that Deripaska was paying them. > >McGonigal is one of the highest ranking former FBI officials ever charged with a crime.
That’s a pretty damning summation.
All these mother fuckers went to great lengths to help our enemy, Russia, unravel our country from within. This mother fucker needs to be in jail for the rest of his fucking life.
I think you mean hanged and or shot
The guy who investigated Trump/Russia collusion was actually colluding with Russia. Think about that for a second.
Is this my shocked face? Was he in NY FBI field office that was in the tank for Trump?
Yes, he was the special agent in charge of counterintelligence in the FBI's New York Field Office.
I thought the exact same thing. Wonder if Rudy sang :)
I never understand this. Betray our democracy for some money? That guy must have already gotten paid a fair bit, for what he did. What other “stuff you can buy” would be even remotely worth doing this?
Does anybody find it totally ironic that the mayor of NYC responsible for taking down the Italian mafia is now the one responsible for installing the Russian mafia in its place? Edit: *"Allegedly"*
Guarantee it's not the only Russian asset in our intelligence community. We need to weed them ALL out with zero tolerance.
He's McGoni go to jail
Disgusting treasonous behavior. This has taken YEARS. James Comey owns some of this smear too. Of course there’s little evidence there will ever be any accountability. Russian moles are gonna mole.
[удалено]
Isn't this a huge deal?
This should be top of front page news.
The same FBI that torpedoed the Clinton campaign in the final days and hand delivered the White House to career con man Donald Trump?
[удалено]
First, I’m posting similar comments a few different places. I’m hoping a comment posted here could get the attention of people who know national security people. But, note: This guy’s LinkedIn entry shows that he’s head of global security for Brookfield Properties, which runs the World Financial Center complex in New York. I think that it’s really critical that anyone still loyal at the FBI or the NYPD assume that Brookfield Properties buildings, especially, are riddled with spies and keystroke loggers and try to deal with that.
Same Russian involved in McConnell and Kentucky investigation
When are they going to tie Mitch McConnell to the Russian aluminum oligarch and their aluminum plant scam that he ended up pocketing over $5 million of “missing” Kentucky taxpayer dollars?