Charles McGonigal

Charles McGonigal served as Special Agent in Charge of the Counterintelligence Division at the FBI's New York Field Office from October 2016 to 2018, a position to which he was appointed by then-Director James Comey. In that role, he supervised all FBI counterintelligence investigations in the New York area, including investigations of Russian oligarchs and foreign intelligence operations. McGonigal pleaded guilty in August 2023 to conspiring with sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and to money laundering. After retiring from the FBI in 2018, McGonigal and a former Russian diplomat-turned-interpreter worked on Deripaska's behalf to seek removal of U.S. sanctions and to investigate a rival Russian oligarch for Deripaska, while concealing the source of Deripaska's payments. He was sentenced to 50 months in prison in December 2023.

In a separate case filed in Washington, D.C., McGonigal received an additional 28 months for concealing $225,000 in payments from Agron Neza, a former Albanian intelligence official. The FBI subsequently announced a review of 22 years of cases McGonigal had supervised for potential compromise. McGonigal's conviction is significant to the Epstein files because his New York counterintelligence office held jurisdiction over any potential investigation into Epstein's foreign intelligence connections during his tenure. The same senior FBI official secretly working for a sanctioned Russian oligarch was simultaneously responsible for counterintelligence oversight of Manhattan, where Epstein operated from his East 71st Street townhouse for decades.

The DOJ-released EFTA documents contain multiple FBI Daily News Briefings that tracked McGonigal's prosecution, placing his case within the broader Epstein evidentiary record.