Did The New York Times Miss the Big Story of the 2016 Election?
You wouldn't think last week's arrest of a top FBI officer would raise questions about the paper in 2016. However....
The arrest of Charles McGonigal on January 23rd, the former FBI special agent in charge of the Bureau's counterintelligence division run out of the New York field office, has thrown a new light on the 2016 election. At the same time that McGonigal's assignment was to oversee the department's investigation of Russian oligarchs, he is accused of violating sanctions against Russia by aiding Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to be removed from the sanctions list. There is no evidence yet that he was paid by the Russian while still with the Bureau, but he did an unusual favor for a Deripaska employee while there and was hired by Deripaska after he retired.
That's only part of the charges against McGonigal, but it's the part that adds an extra dimension to the reporting by Reuters and others at the time that a faction at the New York FBI was hostile to Hillary Clinton. The Guardian reported two days before the election that animosity toward Clinton had intensified in the months since FBI Director James Comey decided not to indict her for trafficking in classified material over a private computer server. That the head of counterintelligence in New York, who had also a role in uncovering Russian interference in the 2016 election, was simultaneously consorting with a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin suggests even a deliberate policy as explanation for a series of leaks damaging to Clinton's campaign. “The FBI is Trumpland,” said one agent at the time.
It was, after all, the New York FBI and the New York Police Department, not Main Justice in Washington, that discovered e-mails pertinent to the Clinton controversy on computers belonging to former New York congressman Anthony Weiner and his wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin. It led to Comey notifying Congress, which leaked it to the press, that the FBI had re-awakened the Clinton e-mail investigation on the brink of the election, an action that is widely thought to have swung the election to Donald Trump. Fewer than 78,000 votes across three states decided the Electoral College win.
Reuters subsequently reported that Comey felt compelled to announce the reopening of the e-mail probe to head off the world learning of it from leaks by — as we're pointing out — FBI New York. Just two days before Comey went public, Rudolph Giuliani, who had joined the Trump camp with uncountable contacts as a New Yorker and its ex-mayor, was on Fox News talking about
“a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.”
McGonigal may not have been in Deripaska's direct employ while still at the FBI – he retired September 2018 – but while there he tapped a contact in the NYPD to get a job for the daughter of a Deripaska employee, the specific request being in the counterterrorism, intelligence gathering, and “international liaisoning” branch. The indictment said that she told a police sergeant that she had
"an unusually close relationship to 'an FBI agent' who had given her access to confidential FBI files, and it was unusual for a college student to receive such special treatment from the NYPD and FBI.”
WHERE WAS THE TIMES GETTING ITS NEWS?
The McGonigal arrest caused Will Bunch, a veteran reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, to have a backward look at the Times pre-election coverage. Thinking it had found the inside track, had the paper fallen for tips from New York FBI that were designed to subvert Clinton? Bunch asks
what possibly could have caused the Times …Click to continue reading