President Donald Trump‘s revenge tour for “Russiagate” is in full swing. Determined to change the conversation to anything but the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that has engulfed it, Team Trump has reopened the controversies surrounding the president’s 2016 election.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accused former senior members of the Obama administration of nothing less than treason over their misconduct regarding the investigation of alleged Russian ties to the 2016 Trump campaign. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the misconduct of these officials was so egregious that he decided to refer them to the Department of Justice for prosecution. Former CIA Director John Brennan is under particular scrutiny.
It’s obvious that if top-ranking former national security officials are indicted by the DOJ for crimes related to what Team Trump has termed the “Russia hoax,” it will be a game-changing event. While that prospect fills the MAGA faithful with glee, others are less enthusiastic about the criminalizing of interagency intelligence disagreements about sources and methods. That’s a hazardous precedent to set, no matter how unethically Brennan, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, and former FBI Director James Comey may have acted. Although former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden oversaw the dangerous politicization of intelligence to serve their partisan ends, for instance, regarding the origins of COVID-19 and the so-called Havana Syndrome, Trump’s remedy may prove more dangerous than the disease.
Time and energy are finite, nowhere more so than in our nation’s capital, and Gabbard’s entire agenda seems to be getting payback for alleged intelligence community crimes committed nearly a decade ago. While senior Trump administration officials have made noise about correcting the intelligence record regarding COVID-19 origins and the Havana Syndrome, all of Gabbard’s energy and that of her top staff seems to be devoted to avenging Russiagate. Our spy agencies have many problems, and 2016 is just one of them.
Moreover, what happened to the broad intelligence community reform agenda that pro-Trump intelligence officials — there are more of them than the White House seems to realize — believe the administration promised the American public? Gabbard and her retinue, most of whom have little intelligence community experience, seem not to understand that the defects of our intelligence agencies are at least as much about bureaucracy as personalities. There’s no point in punishing or even prosecuting top Obama-Biden spy bureaucrats if the broken system that created and promoted them remains intact.
Take the topic of counterintelligence, which, as this column has explained at length, is the most compromised component of the intelligence community. It’s organized wrong, gives too much power to police officers at the expense of counterspies, and its recent track record is abysmal. See the FBI’s 2016 Operation Crossfire Hurricane, which was supposed to discover Russian links to the Trump campaign but instead got mired in foolish methods and partisan politics. That’s exactly the sort of deformed intelligence activity, operationally inept plus hazardous to civil liberties, that must never happen again.
Sadly, there’s nothing in Gabbard’s reform plan that recommends anything different. Indeed, the only substantive GOP intelligence reform plan we’ve seen was from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), and it goes in the wrong direction, granting the FBI even more counterintelligence power and authority despite its awful record in 2016. Instead, the FBI needs to have the national security mission taken away from it, with the national counterintelligence mission given to a new, stand-alone domestic intelligence agency without law enforcement powers. Only that will prevent another Russiagate.
Congress isn’t on the case. A major hearing on counterintelligence reform by the House Intelligence Committee was scheduled for last week but canceled because House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sent the House home for the summer in panic over the Epstein files. Extensive staff planning for that hearing was cut short, and nobody knows when it might be rescheduled — September at the earliest. Regardless, the clock is ticking, and our enemies are spying on us relentlessly, as Congress plays partisan politics.
Team Trump’s inattention to significant counterintelligence matters is baffling at times. That the FBI needs root and branch reform after its 2016 election cataclysm is beyond question. Unfortunately, Trump’s chosen director, Kash Patel, seems not to know how to implement necessary changes. He and his deputy, Dan Bongino, have seen their credibility among MAGA devotees plummet over the Epstein files imbroglio. As tenacious right-wing podcasters, Patel and Bongino castigated the deep state and its alleged corruption, including over the sordid Epstein affair. Now that they’re in charge of the FBI, they seem powerless and aimless.
Last weekend, Bongino posted a cryptic message to X, reiterating his commitment, alongside Patel, to “stamping out public corruption and the political weaponization of both law enforcement and intelligence operations.” He added a puzzling rejoinder: “What I have learned in the course of our properly predicated and necessary investigations into these aforementioned matters, has shocked me down to my core. We cannot run a Republic like this. I’ll never be the same after learning what I’ve learned.”
Nobody’s sure what ominous truths Bongino was referring to. But his and Patel’s commitment to seriously reforming the FBI appears questionable. For example, consider that perhaps the biggest scandal in FBI history, that of disgraced top FBI agent Charles McGonigal, is right in front of them, yet Patel and Bongino remain silent about it.
The McGonigal case, involving a top FBI counterintelligence official who went rogue for cash from more than one country, including Russia, raises very troubling questions about FBI management and values. Moreover, McGonigal, as head of counterintelligence at the FBI’s New York office in 2016, was deeply involved in Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Was McGonigal involved in collecting false information that was used to smear Trump and his campaign? McGonigal wound up on the payroll of top Kremlin oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a figure who was accused of meddling with our 2016 election. You’d think that the question of how a senior bureau counterintelligence official got mixed up in all this would be of interest to FBI leadership.
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McGonigal pleaded guilty in 2023 for illegally working for Deripaska, who is under U.S. sanctions. He received a four-year prison sentence and was subsequently sentenced to 28 additional months for taking money from Albanian officials for illegal lobbying and allegedly much worse. The full extent of McGonigal’s betrayal remains hidden from public view, and nobody in Trump’s FBI seems interested in explaining why.
If the White House is serious about unraveling Russiagate, start looking at McGonigal and his circle. Or at least get Gabbard to start looking at institutional reform rather than fixating on personalities.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
