"Star"

Former FBI officer and Russian judicial translator were arrested for the help of the Russian oligarch Deripaska

On Saturday, at the Washington Airport, the FBI arrested its noble retirement-54-year-old Charles McGonigal, who flew from Sri Lanka. Early in the morning of the same day, the FBI representatives came to visit my acquaintance-69-year-old Sergei Shestakov, who lives in Morrisa (Connecticut) in his own house, a mortgage for which the United Nations was provided, where he once worked as a deputy representative of Alexander Bogomolov.

Shestakov retired from the Russian diplomatic service in 1993. The house in tiny Morris, whose population is about 2,200 people, has been owed since 2005. On Monday, both prisoners told the judges that they would not plead guilty. Both were released before the trial, in the case of Shestakov, is 200 thousand dollars. Both are attracted in New York, and McGonigal is also in Washington. The fact that clouds were thickened over them, they have known for a long time.

The collapse of the counterintelligence

September 15 last year, an article appeared in the media under the heading “The former high-ranking employee of the FBI, who participated in the investigation of Trump-Russia, is developed by federal prosecutors for his own connections with Russia.” According to the correspondent of Mattatias Schwartz, at the end of 2021 the feds secretly convened a large jury, which investigated the behavior of McGonigal, who worked in the FBI for 22 years and retired in September 2018.

The Ministry of Justice abstained the comments, but the journalist got a copy of the agenda, written out by a large jury in November 2021, from which it was clear that the prosecutors were interested in McGonigal’s business connections with one of the closest assistants to the aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska.

The agenda demanded to provide the prosecutor’s office with documents spilling light in the connection of McGonigal with a little -known advisory company Spectrum Risk Solutions. A week later, Sergei Shestakov said (this became known from another official document) that McGonigal helped to connect the assistant oligarch Deripaska with the New York Law Office “Kobra and Kim”, created in 2003 by two former Manhattan federal prosecutors, and received 33 thousand dollars for this service.

At that moment, it was not yet obvious that the federals were developing McGonigal, but the agenda was clearly a bad omen.

The Ministry of Justice is extremely rarely involved in the large jury in the affairs of the former Febeers, and even more seniorly, which, of course, was also belonged to McGonigal, who commanded the counterintelligence department of the New York FBI before retirement.

He also led the investigative team, which developed the ordinary/rank -and -file Chelsea Manning, who leaked the Vikiliks Mount of Secrets, and Sandy Berger, assistant Bill Clinton on National Security, which secretly issued secret documents from the reading room of the national archive. McGonigal was instructed to investigate the mysterious failures of American agents in China, who were taken one after another.

In 2016, when there were reports that the Russians hacked the electronic bins of the Central Committee of the Democratic Party, McGonigala was appointed head of the Cybercrime Unit at the Washington FBI headquarters.

He was one of the first Febeers, who came to the news that the third -rate adviser to the Trump Electoral Staff, George Papadopoulos, told the Australian Saterial Sald in the UK, that the Russians supposedly have compromising evidence for Hillary Clinton. Thus, an operation was born under the code name "Hurricane of Cross Fire", within the framework of which the FBI investigated Rashagate.

As a large jury appears from the agenda, the prosecutor’s office also found out if McGonigal had illegal ties with the Bosnia and Herzegovina government and whether he received “payments or gifts” from the Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania authorities. These assumptions were only partially true. But this is another story.

A modest translator

As for Shestakov, who received US citizenship and was the vice president of the RTVI television channel for many years, where he arranged me in 2001, in recent years he worked as a translator in federal courts.

On December 20, 2021, Forensic News meter website said that on November 29, that is, shortly after the large jury broke out the agenda, Shestakov hastily registered in the Ministry of Justice as a foreign agent.

In his application for registration, he said that he was an agent of Russian Evgeny Fokin, who is a close assistant of Deripaska, and in the past, according to the American media, was an employee of the reconnaissance department of the Russian Federation, which Fokin himself denies.

Having secured the help of McGonigal, Shestakov, he said, brought Fokin with the Kobra and Kim office and the advisory company Spectrum Risk Solutions, which Forensic News managed to find only difficulty. Two days after the emergence of an article on the registration of Shestakov, he submitted an addition to the Ministry of Justice, in which he specified that his services were not paid by a foreigner, but by the Americans: at first a lawyer’s office (25 thousand dollars), and then an advisory company (8 thousand).

Suzam, emphasized Shestakov, his help to Fokin ended. But registration was not enough. Worse - over time, there were more claims to Shestakov: according to the indictment announced this week,

The FBI made an appointment in the Manhattan restaurant, at which he allegedly gave false answers to the questions of investigators, which is fraught with deprivation of liberty up to five years.

True, I do not know a single case, when the judge would have wood it for this full period.

Other crimes incriminated to the accomplices-that is, a violation of sanctions and laundering of money-threaten them with a prisoners of up to 20 years, although, again, I never heard someone sentenced for the whole reel. (However, a tiny share of criminal cases reaches a court in the United States. The most part of them ends in a grateful deal.)

Indictment

We now take a look at the indictment of the 21st page long, in which, as is customary in the United States, only the accused are named, and almost all other names and names are encoded. In this case, the exception is Deripaska, to which McGonigal and Shestakov allegedly agreed in 2021 to help assembly of compromising on his competitor, encoded as an oligarch-2.

The so -called Ukrainian sanctions were imposed on Deripaska back in April 2018, and he has since been a criminal offense in the United States.

McGonigal could not but know about sanctions, if only because, as a member of the leading link in the FBI, he had to receive in advance a secret list of the persons on whom they would put them. And after he left the FBI, he and Shestakov "worked on Deripaska, unsuccessfully trying to achieve these sanctions."

In 2018, when McGonal still worked in the FBI, Shestakov introduced him to Imil “an employee and agent Deripaska”, encoded in the indictment as agent-1. According to the prosecutor's office, in the past, agent-1 was a Soviet and Russian diplomat, worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, "as the media claimed, was an officer of Russian intelligence." At that moment, he was an official in Deripaska Corporation, to which sanctions were extended.

In the spring and summer of 2018, Shestakov asked McGonigal to help agent-1 attach his daughter to an interpretation of the New York police, where she would be practiced in the fight against terrorism, a collection of intelligence and “international ties”.

Febeerovets agreed to help and turned to a friend in the police, explaining that "for a number of reasons I am interested in her father." He also told one colleague that he wants to recruit agent-1, who, according to him, is a Russian intelligence officer.

Prosecutors write that thanks to McGonigal with the daughter of Agent-1, they treated VIP.

The police sergeant, who was assigned to the girl, then informed about what happened to his authorities and the FBI, because, among other things, the girl claimed that she was close to the FBI investigator and that he provides her with access to secret official materials.

In 2019, when McGonal did not work in the FBI, he and Shestakov introduced agent-1 an international law firm with an office on Manhattan.

After reading this, I no longer doubted that we were talking about Evgenia Fokin and the Kobra and Kim office, which last summer acquired another suction client - Roman Abramovich.

During negotiations with lawyers, McGonal flew to Deripaska in London and Vienna. Neither he, nor Shestakov, nor Fokin called him by name in his electronic correspondence, but instead they wrote “Person” (as I translated Individual), “Our Friend from Vienna” and “Our Vienna Client”. The prosecutors will nod to this trick, proved by the jury: the defendants knew that they were doing something imminent.

At the end of the negotiations, Deripaska signed an agreement with the law office, which contracted to try to save him from sanctions (lawyers in the form of an exception are allowed to provide such services to people under sanctions), and promised to pay her 175 thousand dollars a month. 25 thousand of this amount were intended for McGonigal, whom the office hired by a consultant and interrogator. He asked that this amount was transferred to him to accounts belonging to Shestakov.

In the future, the work of Kobra and Kim on Deripaska was interrupted by Pandemia Covid-19. Although their agreement was not officially terminated, work and payments ceased in March 2020.

In the spring of 2021, Fokin began to negotiate with McGonigal and Shestakov that they work for Deripaska directly, and not through lawyers, that is, already purely anti -corneum. In electronic correspondence, the oligarch was again not called by name, but wrote “you know who”, “the elder” or “client”.

Our heroes were instructed to delve into the Suvenue oligarch-2, who fought with Derpaska for the possession of a large Russian corporation, to find out what avoirs the opponent hid abroad, and to establish whether he had a foreign passport.

In August 2021, McGonigal, Shestakov and Fokin signed a contract. According to this document, according to the prosecutor’s office, a certain Cyprus corporation pledged to pay the New Jersia company $ 51,280, and then pay 41,790 dollars a month for “business intelligence, analysis and research services” regarding the Russian corporation for which Deripaska fought with the opponent.

Although it was a question in the contract about how much Deripaska would pay the accused and for what, and the names of all three were not mentioned in him. But, as agreed, on August 13, 2021, $ 51,280 were transferred from the Russian bank to the New Jersia company, which was followed by monthly payments in the amount of $ 41,790, received from August 18 to November 18, 2021.

The company received these transfers belonged to a friend of McGonigal. The latter was listed as his partner since the time when he worked as one of the bosses in the New York branch of the FBI.

A friend provided him with an email address of the company and a mobile phone registered for a fictional name. McGonigal told Shestakov that a friend has no idea why there are transfers from Russia to the accounts of his offices.

According to the prosecutors, the signature of a friend in the contract with Deripaska was allegedly falsified by Shestakov.

From August to the end of November 2021, McGonagal collected information on the oligarch-2 for Deripaska. On November 21, 2021, the FBI came up with a search to him and Shestakov and seized their electronic devices. They were arrested only now.