The Justice Department acknowledged Thursday that it “inadvertently” withheld evidence from defense attorneys representing a former top FBI official who was involved in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation and is now charged with conspiring with Russia to violate U.S. sanctions.
In a letter to Manhattan U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rearden, Justice Department prosecutor Damian Williams said his team mistakenly forgot to turn over four categories of evidence to ex-FBI official Charles McGonigal’s defense team during the discovery process.
“In reviewing our files, the government identified certain items that were inadvertently omitted from the government’s prior productions,” Mr. Williams wrote. “The government expects to make a supplemental discovery production containing these materials by the end of the week.”
According to Mr. Williams’ letter, prosecutors omitted additional subpoena returns, additional documents from the FBI’s investigative files, materials found on seized electronic devices that were not included in previously produced sets, and data related to pen register applications.
A pen register is an electronic device that records all numbers from a particular telephone line.
Mr. Williams also said he expects additional requests for discovery to come from defense counsel and promised to be responsive.
The letter comes more than three months after the arrest of Mr. McGonigal, who was the special agent in charge of the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York.
Prosecutors say Mr. McGonigal accepted secret payments from Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska in exchange for investigating a rival oligarch, according to court documents. He is also accused of forging signatures to keep those payments secret.
Mr. McGonigal, 54, is the highest-ranking FBI official ever charged with a crime. He has pleaded not guilty to four counts of violating U.S. sanctions, one count of money laundering and two conspiracy counts.
He also is facing separate criminal charges in Washington, where he is accused of falsifying documents to conceal secret cash payments from a person who once served with Albanian intelligence. At the official’s request, Mr. McGonigal opened an FBI investigation into foreign lobbying in which the former Albanian intelligence employee was a confidential informant.
Mr. McGonigal was involved in the FBI’s investigation into accusations of collusion between the Kremlin and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.
In 2016, Mr. McGonigal served as chief of the cybercrime section at FBI headquarters. In that position, he was one of the first FBI officials to learn that a Trump campaign official bragged that Russian officials had dirt on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, sparking the Trump-Russia collusion investigation known as Operation Crossfire Hurricane.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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