By Andrew Goudsward
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A former senior FBI agent pleaded guilty on Friday to a charge that he concealed $225,000 in cash payments from a former Albanian intelligence officer and prospective business partner.
Charles McGonigal, who led the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York before retiring in 2018, pleaded guilty to a single charge of concealment of a material fact. All other charges against him were dismissed.
McGonigal has already pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge in a separate federal case in Manhattan related to his work for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska while Deripaska was under U.S. sanctions.
In Washington, McGonigal faced a nine-count indictment charging him with failing to report cash payments and trips to Europe he took with the former Albanian intelligence officer in 2017 and 2018.
The trips were designed lay the groundwork for a security consulting business the pair planned to start when McGonigal left the FBI, McGonigal told the judge.
In a brief statement in court on Friday, McGonigal apologized to the FBI.
“This is not the situation I wanted to be in or to put them through,” he told U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
U.S. prosecutors say the former Albanian intelligence officer had business interests in Europe and was a source for an FBI investigation involving foreign lobbying that McGonigal supervised.
The concealment charge carries a maximum of five years in prison, but prosecutors will likely seek a more lenient sentence as part of the plea agreement.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone, Andy Sullivan, Grant McCool and Daniel Wallis)
Brought to you by www.srnnews.com
