Sentencing Punctuates Downfall of Former FBI Counterintelligence Chief

Charles McGonigal spent more than two decades as an FBI agent working on some of the country’s most important national-security and terrorism cases, including the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and ended up as the bureau’s chief spy hunter in New York.

He has since taken a humiliating fall, pleading guilty earlier this year to felonies in two separate cases, including violating U.S. sanctions by accepting secret payments from a Russian oligarch, a crime for which he faces sentencing in New York on Thursday.