A former FBI counterintelligence official was sentenced to prison after pleading guilty to receiving $225,000 from an individual with ties to the Albanian government, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
The sentencing Friday of Charles McGonigal is the closing chapter of a high-profile legal saga. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced him to 28 months in prison.
McGonigal, 55, had supervised national security operations for the FBI in New York for nearly two years before his retirement in 2018. He pleaded guilty to concealing payments of $225,000 from Albanian American Agron Nezaj, a former Albanian intelligence officer who McGonigal admitted was helping him foster relationships in Albania to help lay the groundwork for future business opportunities in the country.
Those efforts included several meetings in 2017 and 2018 with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in the presence of Nezaj and an adviser to the prime minister, who had business interests in arranging the meetings.
Prime Minister Rama has denied any wrongdoing.
In December, McGonigal was sentenced in New York to 50 months in prison in a separate case for violating Russian sanctions, after McGonigal had retired from the FBI.
He was found guilty of conspiring to violate sanctions on Russia by going to work for a Russian oligarch whom he once investigated. The oligarch, billionaire industrialist Oleg Deripaska, was under U.S. sanctions for reasons related to Russia’s occupation of Crimea.
McGonigal expressed remorse Friday, saying he was taking "full responsibility for my actions" and "asking humbly for a second chance."
On Friday, Seth Ducharme, one of McGonigal’s lawyers, asked Kollar-Kotelly to impose the sentence concurrently with the one in New York, citing McGonigal’s remorse, cooperation and long public service career.
However, Kollar-Kotelly disagreed, saying he had been convicted of two different crimes, each carrying a different sentence, and would be served consecutively. This means the 28-month sentence will begin once the 50-month sentence ends.
Kollar-Kotelly said McGonigal appeared to have lost his "moral compass" at the end of his career and that the motivation couldn’t have been other than "greed and arrogance" that he thought he could escape responsibility.
Prosecutor Elizabeth Ann Aloi called McGonigal’s actions "flagrant" and "outrageous" and said "he received money not from a personal friend," but from someone connecting him to foreign officials.
In court filings, prosecutors had said: "This is, at its core, corruption that undermines transparency and trust in the integrity of the executive branch of government. The defendant was sworn to investigate and prevent crimes against the United States, not perpetrate them."
McGonigal was scheduled to report to prison next month to begin serving his sentence in the New York case.
Some information for this article came from The Associated Press.
