FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
The American media have echoed Charles McGonigal's condemnation of the Albanian file. He was sentenced to 2 and a half years in prison the day before and almost all important media have covered it, emphasizing the meetings with Prime Minister Rama. The American network "CBS News" has made a long article, where it mentions how McGonigal instigated the launch of investigations into Basha's lobbying with suspicions of Russian money.
Charles McGonigal, the former top counterintelligence official in the FBI's New York office, was sentenced to more than 2 years in prison Friday for concealing at least $225,000 in cash he received from a former officer. of Albanian intelligence.
In exchange for his guilty plea, charges related to McGonigal's concealment of overseas trips to meet with Albanian government officials and businessmen while employed by the FBI were dropped.
McGonigal will serve 6.5 years in prison, as he is also convicted of the Russian case. In December, McGonigal was sentenced in New York to more than four years in prison for ties to a sanctioned Russian oligarch and close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
" Mr. McGonigal appears to have lost his moral compass ," Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said Friday. " His motivation was just greed and frankly arrogance ," she added.
Prosecutors in Washington argued that McGonigal's actions "suggest he was compromised" and claims he was considering retirement "were not his only motivation."
The FBI was also forced to review files it had been investigating after suspicions of compromise.
" The defendant has worked on some of the most sensitive and important cases handled by the FBI. His lack of credibility, as revealed by his conduct on the basis of his conviction, could jeopardize it all. By The internal investigation found that there was a major commitment, requiring an unnecessary expenditure of significant government resources ," prosecutors said.
Prosecutor Elizabeth Aloi pointed out that McGonigal "sold his badge".
The start of McGonigal's troubles
McGonigal spent more than two decades at the FBI, working on some of the country's top national security issues, from stopping a plot to bomb the New York City subway to releasing a trove of classified documents from WikiLeaks. He rose through the ranks to become the chief of counterintelligence in New York, before retiring in 2018.
His decline began in 2017 as he prepared for retirement, according to court documents.
McGonigal asked the former Albanian intelligence officer, who had become a naturalized American citizen, for a 'loan' as they discussed business opportunities. The loan was never repaid. The two traveled to Albania and other countries, where McGonigal had business interests and met with foreign nationals on several occasions.
On one of those trips, McGonigal met with Albania's prime minister to warn him against awarding lucrative oil drilling licenses to Russian companies — a matter in which the former intelligence officer had a financial interest. As a token of appreciation, McGonigal presented the prime minister with an FBI hat.
He then traveled to Kosovo with the "dual purpose of gathering information potentially useful to the FBI" and "developing an undisclosed personal business plan," prosecutors said. During that trip, he gave an FBI hat to a politician in Kosovo.
About a month later, in a car parked outside a New York restaurant, the former intelligence officer handed McGonigal about $80,000 in cash as part of the loan he had requested. In 2017, he made two more payments to McGonigal at his home in New Jersey.
At McGonigal's urging, the bureau opened an investigation into an American lobbyist working for a political opponent of the Albanian prime minister, in which the former intelligence officer served as an FBI source. The investigation was closed shortly after McGonigal retired, "because the allegations were never proven," prosecutors said. ( The case of Basha )
The charges against McGonigal in the New York case also related to the concealment of payments. McGonigal admitted helping oligarch Oleg Deripaska snoop on a rival Russian oligarch and launder money by hiding the source of payments for that job. The action was in violation of US sanctions imposed on Deripaska in 2018.
McGonigal pleaded for mercy in court on Friday, telling the judge he had a "deep sense of remorse and sorrow" for the crimes committed.
" I am humbly asking you for a second chance ," he said, apologizing to his wife, their two children and his former FBI colleagues.
His widow, Pamela, in a letter to federal judges in Washington and New York before his sentencing, said McGonigal "was ambitious and was looking to provide a good life" for his family after retirement.
" I believe this ambition led him astray and caused him to lose focus on the reality of his decision-making and actions ," she wrote.
McGonigal will begin serving his prison sentence on March 18. / Adapted "Pamphlet" from "CBS News"
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