The arrest of Charles McGonigal, the former chief of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York field office, has revealed its connection to the Hunter Biden case.
McGonigal was charged last month with taking secret cash payments from a former Albanian intelligence officer. Prosecutors then tied the spy-hunter’s scandal to Hunter and the Chinese energy company CEFC, which paid him and his uncle Jim Biden millions of dollars in a deal that then-Vice President Joe Biden was slated to join.
Prosecutors allege that McGonigal received $225,000 in cash in 2017 while serving as the FBI’s counterintelligence chief in New York from a former Albanian intelligence official known as Agron Neza.
Neza then introduced McGonigal to Dorian Ducka, an influential Albanian who worked for CEFC and was an advisor to Rama.
Last month, a picture of Ducka and CEFC chairman Ye Jianming, who famously handed Hunter a 3.16-carat diamond estimated to be worth $80,000 in February 2017, was released in Albanian media and was sourced from China Daily in May 2017.
Ye also put Hunter on a $1 million legal retainer in 2017, which was ultimately used to support CEFC associate Patrick Ho after his arrest.
This comes after a shocking report last month revealed that Biden was named in an Oct. 2017 email found on Hunter’s infamous laptop discussing a 25 million-ton gas deal with China.
According to an email dated Oct. 27 of that year, Louisiana attorney Robert W. Fenet told Hunter and his uncle, Jim Biden, that he had secured a contract for them at Houston energy company Cherniere.
In emails to Fenet, Jim mentioned the Biden family’s participation in the project, which involves sending millions of tons of liquid natural gas from Louisiana to the Chinese state-backed corporation CEFC Energy.
Biden has a history of ties to Cherniere’s executives. Ankit Desai, a former vice president and lobbyist at Cherniere, served as the president’s political director from 2005 to 2020, while Heather Zichal, a former board member, served as his campaign’s climate adviser in 2019.
But at the time the email was sent, Biden was still the vice president of the Obama administration and about a year and a half away from declaring his candidacy for president.
