A senior F.B.I. official once tipped off Chinese executives to pending arrests, compromising a major criminal investigation, according to a watchdog report that added damaging new detail to the extent of the official’s misconduct at the bureau as he oversaw its counterintelligence work in New York.
In at least one instance, a targeted suspect likely ignored the warning from the agent, Charles McGonigal, because a member of the Biden family cast doubt on its veracity, according to the report by the Justice Department’s inspector general.
Mr. McGonigal, who retired from the bureau in 2018, pleaded guilty in 2023 to working secretly for a Russian oligarch and to other crimes, and is now serving a six-and-half-year prison sentence.
The report, released on Thursday, revives one of the more serious recent scandals for the F.B.I. The disclosures only deepen the intrigue that has swirled around a man who was once a top American spy catcher.
Describing Mr. McGonigal’s work overseeing an investigation into a Chinese business, the report called his misconduct “extraordinary,” and revealed that it nearly led to additional charges against him, for obstruction of justice.
“Through his scheme, McGonigal intentionally damaged an important criminal case, violated the public trust, and compromised the integrity of the F.B.I.,” the report concluded.
A lawyer for Mr. McGonigal did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The report recounted how Mr. McGonigal himself admitted to some of the conduct at issue during a voluntary interview with investigators, in what is known as a proffer session. In the session, he claimed “bravado” had motivated him to disclose information about the investigation. “However, he said that he should not have gone as far as he did,” the report said.
The new details date to a 2017 investigation by the F.B.I. into a Chinese-funded think tank called the China Energy Fund Committee, and several related companies.
Through a series of personal conversations with someone at the China Energy Fund Committee, Mr. McGonigal tipped off someone who worked for the firm, described in documents only as “Person B,” that the F.B.I. planned to arrest one of the think tank’s executives, Patrick Ho, the report said.
Mr. McGonigal “obstructed a criminal investigation that he was then supervising by disclosing sensitive, nonpublic case information about the subjects and targets of the investigation to the foreign national,” the report said, adding that he also withheld “information relevant to the case from the investigating F.B.I. N.Y. case agents.”
The New York Times has previously identified “Person B” as Dorian Ducka, a former Albanian government official who helped make a number of business introductions for Mr. McGonigal.
During a dinner with Mr. Ducka in June 2017, Mr. McGonigal told him that his agents were investigating the China Energy Fund Committee. The next day, Mr. Ducka met with Mr. Ho in Washington and passed along the tip.
Later that year, when Mr. Ducka was considering whether to come to the United States for an event related to the China Energy Fund Committee, Mr. McGonigal advised him to stay in Albania. Mr. Ducka interpreted that to mean that the F.B.I. was preparing to make arrests, according to the inspector general’s report.
The Chinese executives seemed unsure of whether to trust the tip. In November, James Biden, the brother of Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was out of office at the time, hired a retired Secret Service agent to determine whether the U.S. authorities, in fact, planned to arrest Mr. Ho if he came to the United States.
The retired Secret Service agent told investigators that James Biden told him that “we have information from China that Ho may be arrested,” and that Mr. Ho still wanted to travel to the United States, but was concerned about the outcome.
Messages the retired agent sent to a former colleague indicated that he was being asked, in essence, to verify the information in Mr. McGonigal’s tip months earlier. But because that investigation, and any charges, were still a secret being held by the F.B.I., the retired Secret Service agent’s review of available databases showed no warrants for Mr. Ho or other associates.
Asked about it before Congress, however, James Biden offered a different explanation for his request, given that he and his nephew Hunter Biden were trying to craft business deals at the time with the China Energy Fund Committee.
Pressed on whether he had asked the retired Secret Service agent “to try and identify whether or not there was a federal investigation before you and Hunter Biden went out to go visit Patrick Ho so that you could inform Patrick Ho if there was an indictment,” Mr. Biden answered: “Absolutely not.”
He also asserted that he had made the request because he wanted to know if it would be problematic for himself and Hunter Biden to meet with Mr. Ho in Asia.
“I just wanted to know, you know, if there was any issue with Patrick Ho. Not to inform or anything else,” James Biden said. “Just for my own edification.”
A lawyer for Mr. Biden did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
F.B.I. investigators later concluded that Mr. Ho decided to visit the United States after he “was likely told, based on information provided by a private investigator, that it was safe for Ho to return to the United States.”
Upon arriving in the United States, Mr. Ho was arrested by F.B.I. agents. He was convicted at a 2018 trial.
One of the other targets of the investigation, an Israeli American, decided as a result of Mr. McGonigal’s tip to the China Energy Fund Committee that he, too, might be a target of the F.B.I. He abruptly decided against visiting the United States, as he had intended, the report said. As a result, the F.B.I. missed the opportunity to search the man’s home and phone, as they had planned, the inspector general concluded.
Court records and a person familiar with the case indicate the man in question is Gal Luft, who was indicted in 2023 on charges including sanctions violations, arms trafficking, failing to register as a foreign agent and making false statements to F.B.I. agents in 2019. Mr. Luft has denied the charges, and has claimed to have damaging information against the Biden family.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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