A former senior FBI counterintelligence official who spearheaded the Trump-Russia probe was arrested and charged over his own alleged ties to a sanctioned Russian oligarch amid the war in Ukraine. 

Charles McGonigal, the former Special Agent in Charge of FBI’s Counterintelligence Division in New York, who retired in 2018, is accused of violating U.S. sanctions by agreeing to provide services to Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch. He is charged alongside Sergey Shestakov, a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who later became a U.S. citizen and a Russian interpreter for courts and government offices, through a five-count indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court Monday. 

McGonigal and Shestakov both were arrested Saturday. The indictment is a rare move by federal prosecutors to bring charges against a senior former FBI official before a federal grand jury.