Ex-FBI agent who leaked to Chinese company had his hands in a wide range of notable investigations

The since-convicted FBI counterintelligence leader, who leaked information about a criminal investigation into a Chinese company linked to Hunter Biden’s business efforts, had previously played what he claimed in his defense to have had supervisory roles in a wide range of investigations.

Charles McGonigal, now known to have leaked sensitive information to China-linked targets of an FBI investigation he was helping oversee, played a role in a host of other FBI investigations, including a Chinese mole hunt, a defensive briefing given to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, the baseless Trump-Russia collusion investigation, a failed prosecution of Huawei executives, Chelsea Manning's leaks to WikiLeaks, the explosion of TWA Flight 800, Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks, and more.

McGonigal, who served as the section chief of the Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section at FBI Headquarters for much of 2016, was promoted by since-fired FBI Director James Comey to be the special agent in charge of the FBI’s counterintelligence division at its New York field office in October 2016.

McGonigal was sentenced in December 2023 for money laundering related to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and in February 2024 for receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from an Albanian government official. The DOJ described Deripaska as "a Russian tycoon who acts as Vladimir Putin’s agent."

Seth DuCharme, a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York during the first Trump administration who served as a defense lawyer for McGonigal, touted McGonigal’s lengthy résumé in sentencing memos in 2023 and 2024. “To weigh the seriousness of this offense against Mr. McGonigal’s personal background, including his extensive work as a national security professional, the Court must carefully consider the totality of his circumstances,” DuCharme argued. He also said, "Mr. McGonigal’s service to the United States has been truly extraordinary, and often at grave personal risk.”

Neither sentencing memo made any mention of McGonigal’s role in the hunt for a mole who was helping the Chinese nor of his connections to the flawed Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Ironically, the Crossfire Hurricane hoax painted Donald Trump as a Russian asset.

DuCharme did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Just the News.

The Chinese connection to Hunter Biden

CEFC was a multibillion-dollar Chinese conglomerate founded by Ye Jianming, a Chinese Communist Party-linked business tycoon who subsequently disappeared in China but with whom Hunter Biden had attempted to work out numerous deals. Chinese state-run media identified Ye in an alleged corruption case in 2018, and China allowed CEFC to go bankrupt.

Hunter Biden and his associated businesses are also believed to have received millions in payments from CEFC in 2017 and 2018, and Ye’s deputy, Patrick Ho, also agreed to pay Hunter Biden a $1 million legal retainer. 

Hunter referred to Ho as “the fucking spy chief of China” in a May 11, 2018, voice recording.

Ho was sentenced to three years in prison in March 2019 for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. He was deported to Hong Kong in June 2021 after serving his sentence.

McGonigal met with prosecutors in November 2023 and “acknowledged during the proffer interview that he shared information with Person B about the CEFC investigation and anticipated arrests arising from it.”

McGonigal was recently revealed to have leaked information to “Person B” — believed to be businessman Dorian Duka, an ally of Albanian socialist president Edi Rama and an associate of CEFC — even as the FBI was secretly investigating the Chinese company, according to the new report by Acting DOJ Inspector General William M. Blier.

McGonigal led Chinese mole hunt, would later become a mole for China 

The CIA’s spy network in China was dismantled by Chinese intelligence services from 2010 to 2012, with more than a dozen sources for the U.S. reportedly being killed or disappearing during that timeframe. McGonigal was reportedly put in charge of a joint intragovernmental effort to determine whether the CIA spy ring had been discovered due to a mole within the CIA.

The New York Times reported in 2018 that “a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent, Charles McGonigal, was assigned to run it” according to “former American law enforcement officials.” The Guardian also reported that McGonigal was responsible for “leading […] a hunt for a suspected Chinese spy working as a mole in the CIA.” Courthouse News reported that McGonigal “led an investigation into a massive security breach that led to the imprisonment, disappearance or execution of CIA informants in China.”

The New York Times reported that former CIA case officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee “was the prime suspect” to be the mole, but although he was eventually arrested and convicted, it has never been publicly confirmed if there had been multiple moles, or if China had broken up the CIA spy ring in some other way.

The Times said of Lee that, in 2012, the FBI “could have arrested him on the spot for possessing classified information” but that “inside a secretive government task force, investigators argued against it.” FBI agents reportedly allowed Lee to leave the U.S. for Hong Kong in 2013 and, despite the fact that Lee reportedly “returned to the United States without attracting the FBI’s attention” at least once, he was not arrested until 2018.

The Justice Department announced in 2018 that Lee, a Chinese-American, had been indicted for unlawfully retaining documents related to the national defense and for “conspiracy to gather or deliver national defense information to aid a foreign government.”

That government would turn out to be China.

The DOJ said that FBI agents searched Lee’s belongings at hotels in Hawaii and Virginia in 2012, where they found that Lee “was in unauthorized possession of materials relating to the national defense” including “two books containing handwritten notes that contained classified information, including but not limited to, true names and phone numbers of assets and covert CIA employees, operational notes from asset meetings, operational meeting locations and locations of covert facilities.”

The DOJ alleged that “two Chinese intelligence officers (IOs) approached Lee and offered to pay him for information” in 2010 and that “Lee received taskings from the IOs until at least 2011.”

Nevertheless, Lee was allowed to leave the U.S. and return to Hong Kong, and he was not arrested until half a decade later.

Lee pleaded guilty in May 2019 to “conspiring to communicate, deliver and transmit national defense information to the People’s Republic of China.” He was sentenced to nineteen years in prison in November 2019.

“The head of the FBI’s hunt for the mole who betrayed U.S. assets in China turned out to himself be a mole who leaked information to the CCP operation that paid the Bidens,” the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project tweeted on Monday.

Clinton gets a defensive briefing, and Trump gets investigated

​​Republicans have long pointed to a double standard in how FBI defensive briefings were used in high-profile cases involving political figures. Hillary Clinton received a defensive briefing on efforts by Turkey to influence her, and defensive briefings were also given to Rep. Eric Swalwell and then-Sen. Dianne Feinstein about their close ties to suspected Chinese agents, which effectively ended the FBI’s criminal or counterintelligence investigations.

FBI documents indicate that McGonigal played a role in the defensive briefing given to the Clinton campaign in October 2015.

The declassified FBI record states that the briefing to the Clinton campaign was given by FBI official David Archey, but McGonigal was the top FBI official “CC’ed” on the write-up of the Clinton briefing.

The "Synopsis" of the briefing said the goal was to provide a “defensive briefing to David E. Kendall and his associate Katherine Turner… personal attorneys to Hillary Clinton.”

The recently-declassified documents reveal that Clinton was targeted by the Turkish government. “The purpose of the meeting was to provide a classified defensive briefing for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign… Kendall and Turner were advised the FBI was providing them with this briefing for awareness and so Ms. Clinton could take appropriate action to protect herself,” the FBI wrote.

The handling of the defensive briefing for Clinton in 2015 was far different from the FBI briefing given to Trump in 2016.

The FBI’s first intelligence briefing of then-candidate Trump in August 2016 at its New York field office was used as a “pretext” to gather evidence on him and on then-foreign policy adviser Mike Flynn, according to 2019 testimony from then-DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. 

FBI official Joseph Pientka conducted the briefing and would later accompany disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok to interview Flynn in January 2017. “They sent a supervisory agent to the briefing from the Crossfire Hurricane team, and that agent prepared a report to the file of the briefing about what Mr. Trump and Mr. Flynn said,” Horowitz previously testified. 

“So the agent was actually doing the briefing but also using it for the purpose of investigation,” Horowitz said.

Then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in 2020 that “there was a clear double standard by the Department of Justice and FBI when it came to the Trump and Clinton campaigns in 2016.”

McGonigal and Strzok worked together on "Crossfire Hurricane"

McGonigal was involved in various key parts of Crossfire Hurricane, including the initial receipt of the claims that the bureau used to launch the inquiry, as well as the FBI’s targeting of Trump campaign associate Carter Page.

Horowitz’s 2019 report on FISA abuses against the Trump campaign revealed that McGonigal had been one of the first FBI recipients of the "Downer information" that the bureau used to justify the launch of Crossfire Hurricane. That information bears the name of former Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer, who gave an account of a May 2016 meeting he had with Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos in a London bar. According to the Financial Review, Downer said that Papadopoulos indicated knowledge of a Russian "dirt" file on then Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton.

The FBI’s overseas Legal Attaché sent an electronic communication documenting the Downer information to the FBI’s Philadelphia field office in late July 2016, the DOJ watchdog report said, and “the same day, the information in the EC was emailed to the Section Chief of the Cyber Counterintelligence Coordination Section at FBI Headquarters.” The section chief was McGonigal.

FBI deputy assistant director Jonathan Moffa confirmed with the Senate Judiciary Committee during a September 2020 interview that McGonigal was one of the first FBI officials to receive the Downer allegations. Moffa said that “I received an email that contained essentially that reporting, which then served as the basis for the opening of the case, that’s right.”

“I received it from … This was a section chief name. Charles McGonigal, who was in the division at the time. … He was a section chief within the Counterintelligence Division, on the operational side,” Moffa said. 

Just before the November 2016 election, Strzok copy and pasted a text conversation he had allegedly had with McGonigal and sent it to his co-worker and paramour Lisa Page. McGonigal had asked Strzok if he had time for McGonigal to stop by. Strzok asked McGonigal how New York was, adding, “A lot of rumbling up there from the whole crim side on our stuff.” McGonigal replied that he “thought we had leaks here in NYC .... I'm sure you will be glad once Tuesday has come and gone.”

McGonigal also sent a mid-March 2017 message to then-FBI deputy assistant director Jennifer Boone, asking, “TS [Top Secret] FISA briefed to HPSCI tomorrow? Any concerns this will leak?”

Boone replied, “Trying to find out about it [...] I’m always concerned there will be leaks. You’re talking about Dragon, yes?” Dragon was the codename given by the FBI to Carter Page as they pursued FISA warrants against him. Page was a colleague of Papadopoulos.

“Yes, and it will create a real issue for us if it is made public as CP [Carter Page] will out our engagement in a NY minute,” McGonigal messaged back. “Our Team is currently talking to CP re: Russia.”

Because the Crossfire Hurricane operation has been called "a manufactured hoax" by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and is itself the subject of investigation, it is highly likely that any other communications, deals or plans made between McGonigal and Strzok along with others will come to light.

McGonigal supervises investigation of Huawei's CFO — to no avail

The disgraced FBI official also played a previous role in an ultimately unsuccessful investigation into another massive Chinese company: Huawei.

In his sentencing process, McGonigal’s defense lawyer argued to the courts that McGonigal “supervised, among other cases, the multi-year investigation of Huawei Technologies … and its CFO Wanzhou Meng in connection with a scheme to defraud numerous global financial institutions concerning the company’s business activities in Iran.”

Meng Wanzhou was arrested by Canadian authorities in December 2018 at the request of the U.S., indicted in the Eastern District of New York in January 2019, and charged with bank fraud and wire fraud as well as conspiracy to commit both.

She walked free and returned to China in September 2021 after the Biden Justice Department agreed to enter into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Huawei leader and acquiesced to ending the U.S. extradition request.

Shortly after Meng’s arrest in 2018, Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, dubbed “the two Michaels”, were arrested by Chinese authorities and then secretly tried and convicted in China in March 2021. Hours after Meng’s release was announced, news broke that the two Michaels were released and headed back to Canada. The Biden administration would go on to claim that it had not been a prisoner exchange.

Chelsea Manning and the WikiLeaks leak

McGonigal played an important role in investigating Army Private First Class Bradley Manning, who after identifying as a female, changed her name to Chelsea. Manning was eventually convicted of illegally leaking classified information to WikiLeaks.

McGonigal’s defense lawyer told the courts ahead of sentencing that his client “led the FBI’s WikiLeaks Task Force investigating the release of over 200,000 classified documents to the WikiLeaks website — the largest in U.S. history — ultimately resulting in the 20-count conviction of Chelsea Manning for espionage and related charges.”

Manning uploaded to WikiLeaks classified documents regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a video, dubbed “Collateral Murder,” taken from a military helicopter. The gunsight video shows soldiers in a U.S. military helicopter shooting down suspected insurgents, who were, it was later learned, civilians.

Manning was charged in 2012 for leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks while in the Army. He pleaded guilty to some of the charges in 2013, and was found guilty of other charges that year — although not the most serious charge of knowingly aiding the enemy.

Manning’s prison sentence was commuted by then-President Barack Obama in January 2017. It is not clear what McGonigal's precise role was, and what evidence he had accumulated in the case against Manning.

McGonigal and "Operation Ghost Stories"

A since-deleted biography for McGonigal stated that he “was one of the original Case Agents on the New York Russian Illegals counterintelligence investigation taken down in 2010, captioned Ghost Stories.”

This Russian espionage effort — which inspired the FX show The Americans — was unearthed by the FBI, but soon resulted in all the “Illegals” being deported in a prisoner exchange rather than spending much time in a U.S. prison. 

The FBI later said that “our case against the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) operatives — dubbed Operation Ghost Stories — went on for more than a decade.”

“Our agents and analysts watched the deep-cover operatives as they established themselves in the U.S. (some by using stolen identities) and went about leading seemingly normal lives—getting married, buying homes, raising children, and assimilating into American society,” the FBI said.

The Justice Department announced in June 2010 that they had arrested and charged numerous “Illegals” for working on behalf of Russian intelligence. The next month, the Russians were flown out of the U.S. in a prisoner exchange with Russia.

The explosion of TWA Flight 800

The FBI press release announcing McGonigal’s October 2016 promotion noted that he had “worked on the TWA Flight 800 investigation.” McGonigal’s defense lawyer told the courts that McGonigal had “investigated a number of high-profile cases, including the TWA Flight 800 explosion” and that he “was part of the eight-month investigation, which included 244 eyewitness interviews and over 2000 hours of work.”

CIA analyst Randolph Tauss, who helped lead the investigation, later wrote about it at length, saying “The crash of TWA Flight 800 touched off the most extensive, complex, and costly air disaster investigation in US history. Had the crash been the result of state-sponsored terrorism, it would have been considered an act of war.”

“FBI and National Transportation Safety Board investigators almost immediately focused on three possible causes: a bomb, a missile, or a mechanical failure,” the CIA analyst wrote. “The missile theory seemed particularly plausible because of reports from dozens of eyewitnesses in the Long Island area who … recalled seeing something resembling a flare or firework ascend and culminate in an explosion.”

Tauss argued: “After eight months of work, the analysts concluded with confidence and full substantiation that the eyewitnesses had not seen a missile.”

The National Transportation Safety Board ultimately determined that “the probable cause of the TWA flight 800 accident was an explosion of the center wing fuel tank, resulting from ignition of the flammable fuel/air mixture in the tank.”

McGonigal investigates Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11

The FBI press release announcing his promotion in October 2016 said McGonigal had “investigated the 1998 terrorist bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and investigated the September 11, 2001 terror attack.”

McGonigal’s defense lawyer similarly argued that McGonigal “also served as a member of the FBI’s Rapid Deployment Team to Dar es Salaam to investigate the 1998 terrorist bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya” and that “after participating in the investigation of the September 11 attacks, Mr. McGonigal joined an investigative response squad that focused on international terrorist threats in the New York City area.”

Scrutiny of McGonigal and his work continues

Even after his sentencings in 2023 and 2024, DOJ weaponization czar Ed Martin sent a May letter to McGonigal’s attorney, requesting an interview with the disgraced FBI official about “information [that] has come to the attention of my office,” according to The New York Post.

Martin’s letter also noted McGonigal had been convicted of “falsifying records, making false statements, conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions, and conspiracy to commit money laundering,” according to The Federalist, with Martin saying the new information he had received “requires us to interview Mr. McGonigal.”

The DOJ watchdog report — along with McGonigal’s deep involvement in some of the nation’s most important investigations over the past decades — will likely give Martin and others much more to scrutinize.