From last November to March, the court papers say, Mr. Rush asked for, and received, “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.”
Obvious plant nobody would be that stupid to store the valuables at home within the first six months after the „acquisition“.
——
Also the CIA was unable to confirm his discharge with the navy earlier? As if people aren’t properly vetted every time they switch jobs within the agency. (Especially considering his CIA career was on an upward trajectory)
I have no clue what Mr. Rush actually did but it was neither of these two things which earned him ire.
Maybe he’s a traitor and the gold + foreign money are bribes. If the CIA doesn’t want to explain what he‘s been bribed for the charges make a more sense.
> nobody would be that stupid to store the valuables at home within the first six months after the „acquisition“.
But where else would you keep it? A safe-deposit box at a bank?
I think, if I received illegitimate gold bars and figured the FBI might look into that, I would choose to keep them somewhere where a judge would think twice before issuing a search warrant for. Judges don't generally just issue search warrants for residences willy-nilly (because there can often be collateral damage); they're much more blasé about issuing search warrants for safe-deposit boxes.
Or are you imagining he'd go bury the gold in a hole in the woods somewhere?
Because, for someone with any kind of security clearance, suddenly going out to the woods, if you don't normally go out to the woods, would be a major outlier from your highly-scrutinized and documented regular life; and so could easily lead the FBI to finding your buried gold, without having to get any kind of warrant.
Leave it at home obviously, or carry a burner, or just turn it off and put it in a metal lunch box etc. Solutions galore. This would only be a problem if every CIA employee is under surveillance.
Isn't the FBI investigating deaths and disappearances of people with critical access to sensitive material and only found out about it from a newspaper? How much resources do you think are put into monitoring every aspect of the lives of people with access to sensitive info?
Those deaths and disappearances is a big non-story if you actually look in to the details of the cases. The media is making a big deal out of it because the headline grabs eyeballs. So since the media is making a big deal about it the FBI now has to say and do something.
Why not carry 600 lbs of gold bars out into the forest and bury them, then hope nobody thought it was suspicious to see someone carrying a shovel into the forest on any one of the trips necessary to do it?
A small plot of forested rural land without utility service doesn't cost much at all. Go car camping at your new private getaway for a few days. This isn't rocket science.
Also if you drive out to a remote part of the US who is going to see you? There are some very empty places in this country. Not quite on the level of Canada or Russia but still.
They would see you driving out into the sticks to go camping for a few days. That's entirely normal isn't it? We haven't (yet) made it to the level of flock cameras on gravel logging roads.
Why not make multiple trips to carry extremely heavy metal, as a frail office worker, into the woods, which are full of hikers and hunters, on country roads in a suspicious-looking sedan, with a shovel in hand? And then do it all over again whenever you intend to retrieve these gold bars to do whatever it is you want to do with them? Why indeed.
Honestly I'm just trying to wrap my head around the fact that you can just ask for $40M in gold bars as a CIA agent and they don't have a better way of figuring out if you pocketed it than looking for it later (and apparently taking a while to think of checking his home?)
Vetting has been put on hold in cases where there are labor shortages. Don’t remember where, but I read an account of a military guy applying to ICE and they did no vetting at all, and had he accepted the jobs with a sizablebonus (he did it to see what their process was) he would have been deployed without training. At the time the source and person seemed credible.
This is what happens when a new administration fires the incumbent experts and hires by loyalty tests.
Planting drugs would be wildly easier, both logistically and conveniently. Gold bars have got to be among the least easy ways to manufacture evidence to throw someone behind bars. Hell it could even easily explain the gold bars…
There’s zero reason to assume this is anything but exceptional incompetence, and looking at the current administration that’s wildly easy to believe.
> Obvious plant nobody would be that stupid to store the valuables at home within the first six months after the „acquisition“.
This is an entertaining conspiracy theory because you'd have to believe that the CIA was so smart that they would completely manufacture a story to get someone arrested, yet so dumb that they'd make up a story that raises questions and makes them look like they did some stupid things.
If a powerful organization hypothetically wanted to get someone arrested by planting evidence, do you really believe this is the best idea they could come up with?
The idea isn't that they manufacture it from scratch but rather that they contrive a convenient explanation for the physical reality that already exists. In that scenario the evidence isn't planted but rather misattributed.
There's this one guy who's apparently also insider and he and his family earns a lot of money because of market manipulation with his decisions. Maybe FBI should get into him as well?
It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.
It’s reasonable to assume they knew it from the start he was getting money illicitly from the Navy and they might have enabled it. This was part of the leverage they had on him, to be used if he ever became a liability.
> It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.
Iran–Contra? Their cyber espoinage tools getting swiped? The self-admission from the US administration that the CIA failed to properly recognize and prepare for the tactics used in 9/11, in spite of ample forward warning?
Like most intelligence agencies, their unaccountable power often gets mistaken for actual intelligence. That power makes them dangerous, but it doesn't make them smart.
They also totally missed India's second round of nuclear weapon development and were blindsided by the tests:
U.S. Intelligence and India's Nuclear Tests: Lessons Learned
August 11, 1998 98-672
The U.S. Intelligence Community did not have advance knowledge that India intended to conduct nuclear tests beginning on May 11, 1998.
Although intelligence agencies cannot have foreknowledge of every significant development in world affairs, many observers (and senior intelligence officials) believe that, in view of the election of an Indian government committed to "inducting" nuclear weapons, much greater attention should have been given to indications of impending nuclear tests
I reject the the idea that these types of people are needed. It's probably that most of the people in the CIA happen to be like that because they're power-hungry and they're just selecting their kin and justifying their choices as "right kind" because they narcissistically believe themselves to be the right type... They're probably the wrong type. Especially if they all share narcissistic or psychopathic traits; it's too many, it cannot work.
the CIA is literally tasked with breaking (other countries') laws. tradecraft is a very similar skillset to being an effective criminal.
think about it: shell companies, lockpicks, bribes, theft, blackmail, hacking, forgery. two kinds of people do those things: spooks, and the mob. the difference is why you're doing it and to whom.
also, if anything the CIA is far tamer today than it was in the '60s.
All spies are bastards. That's sort of their job. In the CIA it might speak more ill of the guy who was arrested that he was arrested than that he (allegedly) inflated his credentials and might have bilked the military for leave pay.
Yeah, that's why in a functioning State you have means to control the damage. But now we seem to have accepted it is a free for all and just throw ours helpless hands in the air and hope we are next to enjoy the criminal bonanza at some point.
the CIA told him to make that part of his identity and then burned him with it
isn’t it obvious?
not being charged for the forty million dollars in gold and foreign currency missing, no explanation on why they are even looking for something that was rightly paid out as expenses, no explanation on what kind of expenses those could be to begin with to incur this much, no explanation on why the government wasn't using US dollars to pay a government employee expenses. Its a complete red herring because some client state is paying off a debt, CIA just needs this guy burned
> no explanation on what kind of expenses those could be
I think it's pretty obvious the gold was to pay a bribe. The only thing I'm surprised about is the value. That's A LOT of money for a single pay-off or bribe. It seems more than what would conceivably be paid to an individual at once because spy agencies tend to prefer to pay-as-you-go with individuals. Each round of documents, actions or whatever gets a payment.
So I suspect this was intended to either buy a one-time, career-ending action from someone very senior or, more likely, the ongoing cooperation of a company, gang or small nation-state. It's hard to guess but looking over major events in that time frame, Venezuela might be a good bet. The odd part is that the gold was in his house. Aside from the dumb trade craft of keeping it in the very first place anyone would look, why is the gold even in CONUS?
And why gold? Bulk gold is one of the worse ways to transfer that much money. It's big, heavy, and easy to trace until melted down (which is hardly trivial for most people). But the thing I'm stuck on is the places you can walk into and get cash for even one kilo of gold, much less over 300 of them, is extremely limited - and half of them will be under some form of "Know Your Customer" reporting, especially in North America, and the other half might prefer to "Kill Your Customer" and keep the gold. Diamonds, bearer bonds, offshore numbered account, even good old Benjamins seem far better. I think the amount and medium both narrow down the sort of person or entity the intended recipient must be.
One imagines the sort of folks who'd actually prefer to receive payment in that much gold bar all reside overseas where they might control a national bank or have their own precious metals smelting operation. That's why I'm struggling to picture the fake scenario this senior executive used to plausibly convince anyone at the CIA he personally needed to take possession of more gold than several people can comfortably carry and do so in the vicinity of rural Langley, VA. I mean, he can't carry it on any commercial flight and It's not like he's going to schlepp it himself in his family sedan to put it on a secret CIA cargo flight. The CIA has people for that. Also, someone that senior isn't generally doing any direct case officer work. They manage case officers who manage field assets.
So many interesting questions we'll never get answers to.
Even more tantalizing is that it was probably a domestic bribe he was tasked with. Traveling internationally with hundreds of kg of gold is not very reasonable and I'd assume they have access to resources in other countries as needed.
And we'll get all the answer, it'll just take 50 years, and then everything will probably make a lot more sense. Maybe even sooner if an administration finally gets the courage and brains to get rid of the CIA. So incompetently destructive to US interests, and an overall abhorrent organization.
I did consider that for a minute but if it really was the CIA acting in any domestic capacity, I think they would have taken him down on some other pretext. Not that the CIA doesn't quietly do domestic spying, they just wouldn't let anything get to the media that might lead in that direction.
It’s funny to see how "normal" people talk about 40 million in gold and like a few million in foreign currency.
That’s really nothing in the theatres the CIA operates in. They simply gave it to him and followed up only after the agency’s bureaucrats couldn’t find it during auditing half a year to a year later.
To gain at least some loyalty from a warlord-based Middle East militia, the US was willing to spend 500 million in cash, plus another 200 million in weapons.
If you wanted to bribe a high-level drug trafficker, 40 million would get you laughed out of the room or put in a barrel and shipped around for other associates to laugh at.
According to the 2012 annual report of Sos Impresa, the total annual turnover of money by criminal organisations operating in Italy would be valued at €138 billion, with a net profit of €105 billion.
What’s 40 million to someone moving billions in product?
You’re also wrong about the gold. Gold is easily moved in the hawala system. You give the gold bars to a hawaladar in the US, they give you a piece of paper with a few numbers and you can take it out of the network minus the agreed fees at a different physical location within the network within a few hours in local currency or gold.
Witnesses testified that the trafficker kept track of his drug transactions using relatives who were hawaladars and who recorded the drug transactions
and profits in ledgers.
The ledgers were seized and presented as evidence at trial. One ledger, covering the year 2006-2007, contained a series of money transfers linked to opiate and precursor chemical transactions. Another contained financial records of heroin transactions, arranged by a trafficker, covering
the period March 2006 to March 2007. Analysis of the ledger determined that the defendant produced and sold over 123,000 kg of heroin, worth more than USD261,000,000: this represented over 19 per cent of the total amount of heroin produced worldwide in 2006, based on UNODC figures.
My bet is he is probably responsible for Middle East-related activities and saw an opportunity in this Iran mess to gain some pocket money while simply squeezing his contacts in the Middle East for whatever favour the CIA needed and keeping the money for himself. Not the first time this happened.
This usually either surfaces because the contact tells someone on a tapped phone that he got his balls squeezed by the CIA and not even got any money for it or when someone in CIA finance says, “Hey Lisa, I need to make this report where the billion for the Iran stuff went and how much we spend and for what and we’re missing six paperclips and 40 million in gold and a few mil in foreign currency. Did someone take it home with them again to make Breaking Bad Ka$h bed photos for their Instagram?”
You could encase them in plastic to prevent damage and mask them for some run off the mill equipment. Nobody would suspect anything without prior knowledge.
~681 American footballs. At 27 balls per team per NFL game, an average of 17.8 games per team per season, and an annual salary cap of $301 million, those many balls are equivalent to a salary of $481 million. So by weight, footballs are "worth" 12 times the price of gold.
Joe Burrow weighs 215 lbs and makes $55 million per year. That makes him worth his weight in gold x4.
I'm still researching the average weight of a football field. Depends if it has rained recently.
Ehh, more like Rush would've been found dead like Abbott after declaring "I'm a patriot" to internal CIA. What's tantalizing about Bourne is something about who we are and capable of, regardless of conditioning... both good and bad.
I can't read the full article, but the subtitle says :
> The only charge lodged against David Rush is that he inflated his academic credentials and obtained military leave pay worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Is this guys just very good at saving gold for CIA/personal reasons and it's still his or is this gold in related to some crime ?
This could easily be an episode from Snowfall (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6439752/), the rather excellent TV show about the early days of the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles during the beginning of the 1980s. The CIA feature prominently and regularly acquire large amounts of cash & narcotics in order to run their operations.
He just needs to profess his love for our country (the president, you know how Trump says attacks on him are attacks on the whole country) and may be say he has dirt on the deep state or hasan piker or something. Trump will be inviting him to the white house where he can steal from the government and tax payers in a more sanctioned way.
Watches are the commodity of choice for corruption in some circles. I know people in jewelry and a significant portion of their transactions are watches to Chinese businessmen, formerly through Hong Kong, now through Singapore. They're high value items with razor thin margins.
I collect watches worth >$100k and I promise you that most collectors in this range are just watch nerds that have more money than they know what to do with.
Singapore is a big watch market because it has a very tight knit and wealthy collector community.
Margins on most watches in this range are around 10% on the low end. I wouldn't call that razor thin.
Collectors are the end buyers, who ultimately create the value; but the existence of collectors as a predictable sink, permits the trading of the thing they collect as a medium of exchange and (short-term) store of value.
Similar to fine art. For every purchase of a painting by a collector who's actually going to display it, there are 10-100 being purchased by people who're going to keep them in freeport awaiting resale.
Basically like commodities futures. You don't buy onion futures because you have anything you would personally do with multiple tonnes of onions.
What's the appeal of collecting high priced watches? Is it kind of like art collections, where its a decent store of value while maintaining a collection of something you are personally interested in? Or is it more for "love of the game"?
Not saying its not a cool thing to collect, well made watches are a very cool piece of engineering, I'm just curious if there's any "special" appeal outside of "i like this thing and have the money to enjoy it" :)
> What's the appeal of collecting high priced watches?
You can carry them on your person through airports and other places reasonably unmolested in a way carrying a bunch of cash isn't so easy.
> Is it kind of like art collections, where its a decent store of value
Art doesn't store value: It trades whatever number the parties exchanging it want it to have, so those parties can manipulate their total annual revenues, which might be confused with value if you cannot think of why else someone would want to tell other people they made more or less money in a year, but is not valuable to anyone else.
> It trades whatever number the parties exchanging it want it to have
I'd argue that that's the very definition of (economic) value. Someone puts a cost on a good/service, and someone who values and can satisfy the cost gets said good/service.
Sure it is, but that's not a way to store value (what economists specifically call store of value if you want to read more about it), which is a little different:
If you buy a €100k rolex, you probably can't be sure you can sell it for more than €100k anywhere at anytime in the future.
You probably can't even find a bank that would take that €100k rolex you just bought as collateral for €500k on a 30y mortgage.
That's why a €1m watch collection is never going to be worth €1m unless we're talking raw materials.
Most of the time you can wear a watch through customs and move $250K without anyone blinking an eyelid. If it has a box and papers you mail those ahead of you. (Don't have them in your luggage)
> From last November to March, the court papers say, Mr. Rush asked for, and received, “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.”
- "I need these bars to pay off this Russian spy who will tell us Putin's nuclear codes password"
Comes back a week later
- "His password is 12345"
- "How do we know the story is not fake?"
- "What am I going to get a signed receipt from him? Duh..."
Weirdly the CIA actually does require case officers to get signed receipts from their assets for payments. Whether they verify the signatures is another question...
It is an eternal problem with human intelligence. GRU and FSB spend serious resources on provoking their own agents, aimed at a range of problems including this one.
Maybe this is part of the shadow money. CIA has been working with business people since the beginning of Cold War and I wouldn't be surprised that they have deep roots in the financial world -- after all both Intelligence and Finance need globalization.
There's a book that ties into this sort of thing - Gold Warriors [1]. It about how, post WWII, the US recovered a bunch of Gold looted from China and used it to set up an anti-communist slush fund.
I don't think it's connected to this specific event, but there's a lot of lore about the CIA moving gold in/out of Afghanistan, Iraq and others during war time.
I used to read a lot about Michele Sindona who was supposed to be connected to the Mafia and the intelligence community. His currency trading firm was one of the first to trade the Eurodollar contracts back in the 60s, IIRC.
I think intelligence and finance really go hand in hand. It makes so much sense -- you see, the intelligence community really hates the congress or whatever to snoop around its operations before approving the budget -- wouldn't it a lot easier to just earn your own $$? And with all the information the intelligence agencies control, it is almost trivial to make quick money in finance. Last but not the least, wouldn't banker be the perfect cover for spies? They wear nice suites, too.
From Rockefeller to Sheldon Adelson (only naming dead ones), oligarchs have had an extremely close relationship to the CIA, and although the CIA probably gets something out of it, I think it goes more the other way.
They want globalization to make their jobs easier. In no sense do they "need" it. Whether we want a world where the desires of intelligence and finance are blindly prioritized is an open question. For my part the answer is obviously no.
I think most ordinary people would say No, but most of us do not have a say in any important things. They put up the facade of voting while all the important stuffs are decided within the circles.
I think it really makes sense to consider ourselves to be just intelligent cattle -- they still tolerate us because they need us to turn natural resources into machinery, weapon, insights and other stuffs they need, but once AI and robots keep up, they can probably get rid of 90% of us.
> I think it really makes sense to consider ourselves to be just intelligent cattle
That's too misanthropic for my tastes.
> to turn natural resources into machinery, weapon, insights and other stuffs they need
It's easy to live in our world and ignore the maintenance staff.
> but once AI and robots keep up
This is nowhere near happening. Your seeming rush into anticipatory compliance is exceedingly premature.
> they can probably get rid of 90% of us.
It's the same moronic death cult that's been active since the 1860s. They would like to believe this, more importantly they would like /you/ to believe this, but a sober examination of the facts shows it to be a mixture of bluster and folly designed to intimidate you into transferring your personal wealth into their profit.
That's their post hoc, uncorroborated claim. It's easy to imagine many other possibilities; it could just be face saving. It could be Rush is taking the fall. etc.
Sounds like he was most likely involved in some serious shit that was off the books and somehow it came to light. His boss is probably aware of what it was but no one will admit shit. It went awry and he is left holding the bag.
Gold and money for an operation that could have been to anything from funding armed rebellion to god only knows.
$40m+ in an expense account based in gold bars is absolutely crazy. CIA agents must have access to untold resources if this is seen as a somewhat regular 4 month spend. Seems it is, given that they seemingly weren't concerned about the $40+ million being taken out, but where it was being held.
Or, someone decided they wanted to redirect the flow of black money through someone else, but couldn't do it internally for some reason; so they called in their FBI friends to make a ruckus. While the guy is busy defending himself, they have an excuse to pick someone else to receive the new stream of gold.
Is it fragmenting? The FBI has always been in charge of investigating other agencies. The article even notes that this particular investigation was initiated when the CIA director made a referral to the FBI.
Archive.ph/archive.today failing me to bypass paywall, is everyone commenting on the title? Or you all have NYT subscriptions? Or you know of some other bypass?
A couple of weeks ago there was a story that the CIA raided the office of the director of the NSA and seized information regarding the CIA. Trump was in China at the time. About a week later the NSA director resigns. I waited for it to turn into a major story and get some kind of explanation, but silence.
It seems like an extraordinary story and I don't understand why there isn't a hullabaloo. Did I hallucinate it? Who runs this country?
Anna Paulina Luna is the only one claiming that the CIA raided the office of the DNI. No other trustworthy sources are reporting this and there's been no independent verification. Anna Paulina Luna is a lunatic who says outlandish things with no regards to truth.
The FBI raided the home of John Bolton who was a former National Security Advisor for the first Trump administration. (not directly part of the NSA and definitely not the director of the NSA). Bolton has become a vocal critic of Trump since he was fired in Sept 2019.
Trump's DOJ has a track record of prosecuting Trump's vocal critics. eg. Former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James
> Trump's DOJ has a track record of prosecuting Trump's vocal critics.
And many Americans claim they have freedom of speech!
(Of course the little guys speech is "free", they aren't important. But the moment the little guy critical of Trump is in a position of power or influence, watch how quickly he is silenced.)
I'm guessing they decided they don't like the guy anymore? The CIA is very corrupt as an institution and things like this run rampant. Billions of dollars go unaccounted for a year at the CIA.
DoD <--> defense contractors (military-industrial complex) is pretty close to the same. Never passed an audit and contractors were ripping off the DoD while creating scrap metal that was used by the Taliban. Trillions and trillions wasted.
The CIA legitimately engages in bribery and hard asset payments. Note that the CIA approved his request and gave him these assets (or at least many of them - the paragraph below doesn't specify the amount).
> From last November to March, the court papers say, Mr. Rush asked for, and received, “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.”
Possibly the question here is, why did Rush take them home. It's always possible Rush was just sloppy and undisciplined, which would also reflect a cultural problem. Many people have been found with secret documents in their homes.
Its nickname since the 1970s has been Criminals in Action, when they were smuggling heroin out of the Golden Triangle to fund covert actions during the Vietnam War.
This is different than that and scant on pertinent details
It says he received it as compensation for expenses, not that it was ever in some government vault. This is additional gold and foreign currency that an agency had, not the reserve.
It then says
> When the C.I.A. conducted a review of where the gold and currency were stashed
Why would they do that if it was compensation for expenses
He wasn't charged for that, and the phrasing doesn't suggest it was supposed to be remitted to the government
if the CIA didn't have a history of being involved in shady shit like this that already explains everything, this would be weird
instead it looks like he's got burned over his necessary use of fibbed identity
Mysteriously only 39.12 million dollars is accounted for, The FBI is carefully monitoring the remaining 38.25 million dollars of gold, for a hearing later this week where the fate of the 36.5 million dollars of gold will be decided.
None of those points match bitcoin. What you are describing is more like tornado cash or similar stuff which are really really banned when interfacing with banks or similar institutions.
From last November to March, the court papers say, Mr. Rush asked for, and received, “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.”
Obvious plant nobody would be that stupid to store the valuables at home within the first six months after the „acquisition“.
——
Also the CIA was unable to confirm his discharge with the navy earlier? As if people aren’t properly vetted every time they switch jobs within the agency. (Especially considering his CIA career was on an upward trajectory)
I have no clue what Mr. Rush actually did but it was neither of these two things which earned him ire.
Maybe he’s a traitor and the gold + foreign money are bribes. If the CIA doesn’t want to explain what he‘s been bribed for the charges make a more sense.
> nobody would be that stupid to store the valuables at home within the first six months after the „acquisition“.
But where else would you keep it? A safe-deposit box at a bank?
I think, if I received illegitimate gold bars and figured the FBI might look into that, I would choose to keep them somewhere where a judge would think twice before issuing a search warrant for. Judges don't generally just issue search warrants for residences willy-nilly (because there can often be collateral damage); they're much more blasé about issuing search warrants for safe-deposit boxes.
Or are you imagining he'd go bury the gold in a hole in the woods somewhere?
> Or are you imagining he'd go bury the gold in a hole in the woods somewhere?
Why not?
Because, for someone with any kind of security clearance, suddenly going out to the woods, if you don't normally go out to the woods, would be a major outlier from your highly-scrutinized and documented regular life; and so could easily lead the FBI to finding your buried gold, without having to get any kind of warrant.
How would they know you went out to the woods?
Smartphone will report it.
Leave it at home obviously, or carry a burner, or just turn it off and put it in a metal lunch box etc. Solutions galore. This would only be a problem if every CIA employee is under surveillance.
So does your car now, if it’s made after 2018.
Just leave it at home.
Isn't the FBI investigating deaths and disappearances of people with critical access to sensitive material and only found out about it from a newspaper? How much resources do you think are put into monitoring every aspect of the lives of people with access to sensitive info?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/deaths-disappearances-scientist...
Those deaths and disappearances is a big non-story if you actually look in to the details of the cases. The media is making a big deal out of it because the headline grabs eyeballs. So since the media is making a big deal about it the FBI now has to say and do something.
They are under the impression that the FBI and CIA are still functioning bodies of government
Nonsense the cost of physical surveillance is extremely prohibitive.
The security scrutiny is really so thorough that taking up a new apparent hobby gets flagged? That’s impressive.
The answer is probably "Yes" if you work at CIA
I don't think you know what you are talking about.
Why not carry 600 lbs of gold bars out into the forest and bury them, then hope nobody thought it was suspicious to see someone carrying a shovel into the forest on any one of the trips necessary to do it?
A small plot of forested rural land without utility service doesn't cost much at all. Go car camping at your new private getaway for a few days. This isn't rocket science.
Also if you drive out to a remote part of the US who is going to see you? There are some very empty places in this country. Not quite on the level of Canada or Russia but still.
flock or any number of cameras that contribute to flock would see you.
They would see you driving out into the sticks to go camping for a few days. That's entirely normal isn't it? We haven't (yet) made it to the level of flock cameras on gravel logging roads.
There are some on hiking trails :)
Flock brand?
Let's not give them any ideas, please.
See you do what? Nobody's suggesting you go bury gold in front of a Flock camera.
Do you ever debate with intellectual honesty?
Nobody aside from you said “carry”.
Why not make multiple trips to carry extremely heavy metal, as a frail office worker, into the woods, which are full of hikers and hunters, on country roads in a suspicious-looking sedan, with a shovel in hand? And then do it all over again whenever you intend to retrieve these gold bars to do whatever it is you want to do with them? Why indeed.
"as a frail office worker"
They could be CIA SAC/SOG, aka Ground Branch.
> Judges don't generally just issue search warrants for residences willy-nilly
What are you on about, searching homes is the #1 criminal investigation technique once you're able to name a suspect.
It's funny, some people commenting here seem to be a bit lost.
It's also obvious from the article that his home was indeed searched.
The idea that the government would not obtain a warrant if they suspect you of stealing millions...
Honestly I'm just trying to wrap my head around the fact that you can just ask for $40M in gold bars as a CIA agent and they don't have a better way of figuring out if you pocketed it than looking for it later (and apparently taking a while to think of checking his home?)
CIA recruits a lot of square pegs who didn't quite fit in to other parts of government
But it still vets them. This is very odd.
Vetting has been put on hold in cases where there are labor shortages. Don’t remember where, but I read an account of a military guy applying to ICE and they did no vetting at all, and had he accepted the jobs with a sizablebonus (he did it to see what their process was) he would have been deployed without training. At the time the source and person seemed credible.
This is what happens when a new administration fires the incumbent experts and hires by loyalty tests.
I think they are a couple of standard deviations more fucked up than the average person still.
Planting drugs would be wildly easier, both logistically and conveniently. Gold bars have got to be among the least easy ways to manufacture evidence to throw someone behind bars. Hell it could even easily explain the gold bars…
There’s zero reason to assume this is anything but exceptional incompetence, and looking at the current administration that’s wildly easy to believe.
> Obvious plant nobody would be that stupid to store the valuables at home within the first six months after the „acquisition“.
This is an entertaining conspiracy theory because you'd have to believe that the CIA was so smart that they would completely manufacture a story to get someone arrested, yet so dumb that they'd make up a story that raises questions and makes them look like they did some stupid things.
If a powerful organization hypothetically wanted to get someone arrested by planting evidence, do you really believe this is the best idea they could come up with?
The idea isn't that they manufacture it from scratch but rather that they contrive a convenient explanation for the physical reality that already exists. In that scenario the evidence isn't planted but rather misattributed.
There's this one guy who's apparently also insider and he and his family earns a lot of money because of market manipulation with his decisions. Maybe FBI should get into him as well?
Nah, he’ll just get some deal where the FBI can’t investigate him and his family for anything ever. Yay for democracy and rule of law.
“$40 million…a small fortune” — inflation has gotten out of hand!
That's only like 8 houses in mountain view.
Or one house in Beverly Hills.
Not even a decent jet.
My daughter is spending more than this on her birthdays.
nearly retired
In a weird reversal to Conway's law, the organizational structure of the US government has started to resemble the software it uses [0].
[0]: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...
You can get the president of the United States to work for you for way less money than that.
How porous is the CIA's interview process that they couldn't validate the guy's military discharge status?
The type of people Intelligence agencies need and use to accomplish their goals are also the type of people who tend to do these things.
Exactly, honest people would fail at such missions. A few million lost here and there is the cost of doing business
imminent danger pay
True, but hiring someone then, later, accusing them of lying in the admission forms that should have been verified before hiring them is bizarre.
I’m sure the CIA could come up with a better excuse.
> is bizarre
Only under the incentive structures you’re used to considering.
It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.
It’s reasonable to assume they knew it from the start he was getting money illicitly from the Navy and they might have enabled it. This was part of the leverage they had on him, to be used if he ever became a liability.
> It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.
Iran–Contra? Their cyber espoinage tools getting swiped? The self-admission from the US administration that the CIA failed to properly recognize and prepare for the tactics used in 9/11, in spite of ample forward warning?
Like most intelligence agencies, their unaccountable power often gets mistaken for actual intelligence. That power makes them dangerous, but it doesn't make them smart.
They also totally missed India's second round of nuclear weapon development and were blindsided by the tests:
U.S. Intelligence and India's Nuclear Tests: Lessons Learned
~ https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-672.htmleh. the shady people are supposed to be the assets; the handlers are supposed to be squeaky clean (on paper, at least.)
but yeah, I imagine that a job which requires keeping secrets and breaking laws tends to attract people who keep secrets and break laws.
They are not supposed to break laws in the US.
They're not supposed to operate in the US at all. I'm practice I imagine that's mostly aspirational
Let’s say it should be avoided.
The mindset of law breaking probably carries across jurisdictions.
It’s all about professionalism.
In their minds, when (not if) they break laws, they should avoid getting caught... because that's all that matters.
I reject the the idea that these types of people are needed. It's probably that most of the people in the CIA happen to be like that because they're power-hungry and they're just selecting their kin and justifying their choices as "right kind" because they narcissistically believe themselves to be the right type... They're probably the wrong type. Especially if they all share narcissistic or psychopathic traits; it's too many, it cannot work.
Confirmed. CIA hires people with sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies and tries to hire them so they're mild rather than criminal in nature.
What a disingenuous way of thinking. Not falling for this is the basis of much religious text by the way. Splitting baby in the middle, etc.
But on the other hand, being a useful fool that blindly does anything for profit, Do seem in line with the people working in tech for the last decade.
Yes, the CIA is a corrupt today as "tech". And no that is not ok nor required, or it ever was like that.
the CIA is literally tasked with breaking (other countries') laws. tradecraft is a very similar skillset to being an effective criminal.
think about it: shell companies, lockpicks, bribes, theft, blackmail, hacking, forgery. two kinds of people do those things: spooks, and the mob. the difference is why you're doing it and to whom.
also, if anything the CIA is far tamer today than it was in the '60s.
MKUltra would have been a bizarre horror to experience
lol "the extralegal spy agency has become as corrupt as the search engines!"
They have funded each other since the beginning of the search engines, so I'm not sure the distinction is very important.
spies (and specially counter spies*) have a place in a State.
My point was about the populous eating up the inevitability of those entities being above the law by default.
* but is is sad we destroyed the most important part we can't even catch lowly thieves like this
All spies are bastards. That's sort of their job. In the CIA it might speak more ill of the guy who was arrested that he was arrested than that he (allegedly) inflated his credentials and might have bilked the military for leave pay.
Yeah, that's why in a functioning State you have means to control the damage. But now we seem to have accepted it is a free for all and just throw ours helpless hands in the air and hope we are next to enjoy the criminal bonanza at some point.
Don't worry, this happens in functioning states, too. Well, the bastard spies part, at least.
For some specific jobs, not all of them, you need sociopaths. Still, the agency should always provide them with adult supervision.
When it comes to stories involving intelligence agencies I generally assume that I’m not getting the whole or accurate story.
Yeah, the CIA is all about CYA.
Much like most office jobs
Not really, but all about manufacturing a story that fits whatever version the country needs pushed. It’s covering the country’s ass.
How porous is the approving manager/chain that someone can request 300kg of gold bars and no one knows why and they just approve it any way.
I imagine a big difference is at most jobs the worst that will happen is you get fired, at the CIA you go to jail for the rest of your life.
I think that if you embezzled $40M at just about any job, you'd be looking at some serious jail time
That is why this story feels fishy.
Imagine if government approvals were that easy for things the country actually needed, like safe nuclear energy and bullet trains.
The CIA is a cash only business.
Oh, please.
They're on record as happy to barter guns and drugs also.
the CIA told him to make that part of his identity and then burned him with it
isn’t it obvious?
not being charged for the forty million dollars in gold and foreign currency missing, no explanation on why they are even looking for something that was rightly paid out as expenses, no explanation on what kind of expenses those could be to begin with to incur this much, no explanation on why the government wasn't using US dollars to pay a government employee expenses. Its a complete red herring because some client state is paying off a debt, CIA just needs this guy burned
> no explanation on what kind of expenses those could be
I think it's pretty obvious the gold was to pay a bribe. The only thing I'm surprised about is the value. That's A LOT of money for a single pay-off or bribe. It seems more than what would conceivably be paid to an individual at once because spy agencies tend to prefer to pay-as-you-go with individuals. Each round of documents, actions or whatever gets a payment.
So I suspect this was intended to either buy a one-time, career-ending action from someone very senior or, more likely, the ongoing cooperation of a company, gang or small nation-state. It's hard to guess but looking over major events in that time frame, Venezuela might be a good bet. The odd part is that the gold was in his house. Aside from the dumb trade craft of keeping it in the very first place anyone would look, why is the gold even in CONUS?
And why gold? Bulk gold is one of the worse ways to transfer that much money. It's big, heavy, and easy to trace until melted down (which is hardly trivial for most people). But the thing I'm stuck on is the places you can walk into and get cash for even one kilo of gold, much less over 300 of them, is extremely limited - and half of them will be under some form of "Know Your Customer" reporting, especially in North America, and the other half might prefer to "Kill Your Customer" and keep the gold. Diamonds, bearer bonds, offshore numbered account, even good old Benjamins seem far better. I think the amount and medium both narrow down the sort of person or entity the intended recipient must be.
One imagines the sort of folks who'd actually prefer to receive payment in that much gold bar all reside overseas where they might control a national bank or have their own precious metals smelting operation. That's why I'm struggling to picture the fake scenario this senior executive used to plausibly convince anyone at the CIA he personally needed to take possession of more gold than several people can comfortably carry and do so in the vicinity of rural Langley, VA. I mean, he can't carry it on any commercial flight and It's not like he's going to schlepp it himself in his family sedan to put it on a secret CIA cargo flight. The CIA has people for that. Also, someone that senior isn't generally doing any direct case officer work. They manage case officers who manage field assets.
So many interesting questions we'll never get answers to.
Even more tantalizing is that it was probably a domestic bribe he was tasked with. Traveling internationally with hundreds of kg of gold is not very reasonable and I'd assume they have access to resources in other countries as needed.
And we'll get all the answer, it'll just take 50 years, and then everything will probably make a lot more sense. Maybe even sooner if an administration finally gets the courage and brains to get rid of the CIA. So incompetently destructive to US interests, and an overall abhorrent organization.
> it was probably a domestic bribe
I did consider that for a minute but if it really was the CIA acting in any domestic capacity, I think they would have taken him down on some other pretext. Not that the CIA doesn't quietly do domestic spying, they just wouldn't let anything get to the media that might lead in that direction.
It’s funny to see how "normal" people talk about 40 million in gold and like a few million in foreign currency.
That’s really nothing in the theatres the CIA operates in. They simply gave it to him and followed up only after the agency’s bureaucrats couldn’t find it during auditing half a year to a year later.
To bribe a nation-state, you’re in the billions. https://www.jfeed.com/middleeast/qatar-iran-bribe-deal
To gain at least some loyalty from a warlord-based Middle East militia, the US was willing to spend 500 million in cash, plus another 200 million in weapons.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-blocks-iraqs-dollar-shipmen...
If you wanted to bribe a high-level drug trafficker, 40 million would get you laughed out of the room or put in a barrel and shipped around for other associates to laugh at.
According to the 2012 annual report of Sos Impresa, the total annual turnover of money by criminal organisations operating in Italy would be valued at €138 billion, with a net profit of €105 billion.
What’s 40 million to someone moving billions in product?
https://unicri.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/UNICRI_Organi...
You’re also wrong about the gold. Gold is easily moved in the hawala system. You give the gold bars to a hawaladar in the US, they give you a piece of paper with a few numbers and you can take it out of the network minus the agreed fees at a different physical location within the network within a few hours in local currency or gold.
https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/AOTP/Hawal...
There is a good example in that report.
Witnesses testified that the trafficker kept track of his drug transactions using relatives who were hawaladars and who recorded the drug transactions and profits in ledgers.
The ledgers were seized and presented as evidence at trial. One ledger, covering the year 2006-2007, contained a series of money transfers linked to opiate and precursor chemical transactions. Another contained financial records of heroin transactions, arranged by a trafficker, covering the period March 2006 to March 2007. Analysis of the ledger determined that the defendant produced and sold over 123,000 kg of heroin, worth more than USD261,000,000: this represented over 19 per cent of the total amount of heroin produced worldwide in 2006, based on UNODC figures.
My bet is he is probably responsible for Middle East-related activities and saw an opportunity in this Iran mess to gain some pocket money while simply squeezing his contacts in the Middle East for whatever favour the CIA needed and keeping the money for himself. Not the first time this happened.
This usually either surfaces because the contact tells someone on a tapped phone that he got his balls squeezed by the CIA and not even got any money for it or when someone in CIA finance says, “Hey Lisa, I need to make this report where the billion for the Iran stuff went and how much we spend and for what and we’re missing six paperclips and 40 million in gold and a few mil in foreign currency. Did someone take it home with them again to make Breaking Bad Ka$h bed photos for their Instagram?”
The CIA as an illegal and fascist organization tends to hire the illegals and fascists. Drug killers, torturers, and psychopaths.
There's even a Tom Cruise movie about it called American Made.
https://archive.is/9Qb1K
That's ~280kg of gold if anyone wonders
It would make such a fantastic set of barbell plates.
Or a really cool scuba diving weight belt.
More like 20+ weight belts, you go underwater with a 280kg weight belt you're not coming back!
Or a huge gold statue of Trump and Epstein partying and raping children.
It is our fiduciary responsibility to put this resource to it's highest and best use.
Black humor.
Or isn't anyone allowed anymore to mention "Black" in the context of Epstein?
I prefer “dark humour”. After all, it allows some colours to come through.
Donald Trump Wants His Blue Blazer "Black" | Friends
Gold is pretty soft. You would have to cut it to 10 carat, so there’s be even more to go around!
Nah literally crushing plates would feel so good. Worth the effort to melt it again every few sessions
Having to handle the plates with care and the damage they’d take regardless would add to the charm.
This whole thread renews my faith in humanity
I’ll spot you!
You could encase them in plastic to prevent damage and mask them for some run off the mill equipment. Nobody would suspect anything without prior knowledge.
> Nobody would suspect anything without prior knowledge.
The weights being nearly twice as heavy for their expected size would be a bit of a giveaway to anyone who has ever been in a gym.
But they feel nice to touch.
1kg gold bars are tiny.
The article says "approximately 303 gold bars, each of which weighed approximately one kilogram"
I guess the gold bars aren't uniformly sized, which would agree with your ~280kg number.
Or the chain of custody lost some 20 bars?
~ 617 lbs.
~681 American footballs. At 27 balls per team per NFL game, an average of 17.8 games per team per season, and an annual salary cap of $301 million, those many balls are equivalent to a salary of $481 million. So by weight, footballs are "worth" 12 times the price of gold.
Joe Burrow weighs 215 lbs and makes $55 million per year. That makes him worth his weight in gold x4.
I'm still researching the average weight of a football field. Depends if it has rained recently.
~ 44 stones
~5.3 Emma Stones
~1 billion freedom units
If this were a Jason Bourne movie, it was the CIA that put the gold bars there.
I was just looking for something to watch tonight. Thanks for the recommendation!
Ehh, more like Rush would've been found dead like Abbott after declaring "I'm a patriot" to internal CIA. What's tantalizing about Bourne is something about who we are and capable of, regardless of conditioning... both good and bad.
I can't read the full article, but the subtitle says :
> The only charge lodged against David Rush is that he inflated his academic credentials and obtained military leave pay worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Is this guys just very good at saving gold for CIA/personal reasons and it's still his or is this gold in related to some crime ?
This could easily be an episode from Snowfall (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6439752/), the rather excellent TV show about the early days of the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles during the beginning of the 1980s. The CIA feature prominently and regularly acquire large amounts of cash & narcotics in order to run their operations.
He just needs to profess his love for our country (the president, you know how Trump says attacks on him are attacks on the whole country) and may be say he has dirt on the deep state or hasan piker or something. Trump will be inviting him to the white house where he can steal from the government and tax payers in a more sanctioned way.
Guy sounds like a dragon. What's the deal with the watches though?
I imagine watches are more liquid than gold bars
also they seem to be a virus that wealth-chasing people catch on to
Gee I don't know, they look pretty solid to me, unless they're Dalí watches /s
Watches are the commodity of choice for corruption in some circles. I know people in jewelry and a significant portion of their transactions are watches to Chinese businessmen, formerly through Hong Kong, now through Singapore. They're high value items with razor thin margins.
I collect watches worth >$100k and I promise you that most collectors in this range are just watch nerds that have more money than they know what to do with.
Singapore is a big watch market because it has a very tight knit and wealthy collector community.
Margins on most watches in this range are around 10% on the low end. I wouldn't call that razor thin.
Collectors are the end buyers, who ultimately create the value; but the existence of collectors as a predictable sink, permits the trading of the thing they collect as a medium of exchange and (short-term) store of value.
Similar to fine art. For every purchase of a painting by a collector who's actually going to display it, there are 10-100 being purchased by people who're going to keep them in freeport awaiting resale.
Basically like commodities futures. You don't buy onion futures because you have anything you would personally do with multiple tonnes of onions.
What's the appeal of collecting high priced watches? Is it kind of like art collections, where its a decent store of value while maintaining a collection of something you are personally interested in? Or is it more for "love of the game"?
Not saying its not a cool thing to collect, well made watches are a very cool piece of engineering, I'm just curious if there's any "special" appeal outside of "i like this thing and have the money to enjoy it" :)
> What's the appeal of collecting high priced watches?
You can carry them on your person through airports and other places reasonably unmolested in a way carrying a bunch of cash isn't so easy.
> Is it kind of like art collections, where its a decent store of value
Art doesn't store value: It trades whatever number the parties exchanging it want it to have, so those parties can manipulate their total annual revenues, which might be confused with value if you cannot think of why else someone would want to tell other people they made more or less money in a year, but is not valuable to anyone else.
> It trades whatever number the parties exchanging it want it to have
I'd argue that that's the very definition of (economic) value. Someone puts a cost on a good/service, and someone who values and can satisfy the cost gets said good/service.
Sure it is, but that's not a way to store value (what economists specifically call store of value if you want to read more about it), which is a little different:
If you buy a €100k rolex, you probably can't be sure you can sell it for more than €100k anywhere at anytime in the future.
You probably can't even find a bank that would take that €100k rolex you just bought as collateral for €500k on a 30y mortgage.
That's why a €1m watch collection is never going to be worth €1m unless we're talking raw materials.
What people can actually do is buy a watch then return it in another branch in another country after paying a "restocking" fee.
It's very blatant and below that range. They got many orders for the exact same model that's around $50k.
Most of the time you can wear a watch through customs and move $250K without anyone blinking an eyelid. If it has a box and papers you mail those ahead of you. (Don't have them in your luggage)
There's a surprising number of CIA and secret agent experts in this comments section.
I've seen From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball I'll have you know.
That's MI-6
Burn After Reading
I saw a John Kiriakou book on a shelf once.
> From last November to March, the court papers say, Mr. Rush asked for, and received, “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.”
- "I need these bars to pay off this Russian spy who will tell us Putin's nuclear codes password"
Comes back a week later
- "His password is 12345"
- "How do we know the story is not fake?"
- "What am I going to get a signed receipt from him? Duh..."
Weirdly the CIA actually does require case officers to get signed receipts from their assets for payments. Whether they verify the signatures is another question...
It is an eternal problem with human intelligence. GRU and FSB spend serious resources on provoking their own agents, aimed at a range of problems including this one.
Maybe this is part of the shadow money. CIA has been working with business people since the beginning of Cold War and I wouldn't be surprised that they have deep roots in the financial world -- after all both Intelligence and Finance need globalization.
The cover of national security has allowed a certain type of organized crime to proliferate to the point it's breaking society.
Son: dad, I’m thinking of getting in to organised crime
Dad: Public or private sector?
There's a book that ties into this sort of thing - Gold Warriors [1]. It about how, post WWII, the US recovered a bunch of Gold looted from China and used it to set up an anti-communist slush fund.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249237.Gold_Warriors
I don't think it's connected to this specific event, but there's a lot of lore about the CIA moving gold in/out of Afghanistan, Iraq and others during war time.
I used to read a lot about Michele Sindona who was supposed to be connected to the Mafia and the intelligence community. His currency trading firm was one of the first to trade the Eurodollar contracts back in the 60s, IIRC.
I think intelligence and finance really go hand in hand. It makes so much sense -- you see, the intelligence community really hates the congress or whatever to snoop around its operations before approving the budget -- wouldn't it a lot easier to just earn your own $$? And with all the information the intelligence agencies control, it is almost trivial to make quick money in finance. Last but not the least, wouldn't banker be the perfect cover for spies? They wear nice suites, too.
From Rockefeller to Sheldon Adelson (only naming dead ones), oligarchs have had an extremely close relationship to the CIA, and although the CIA probably gets something out of it, I think it goes more the other way.
This also applies to tech now.
Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc all have Global Security branches.
They want globalization to make their jobs easier. In no sense do they "need" it. Whether we want a world where the desires of intelligence and finance are blindly prioritized is an open question. For my part the answer is obviously no.
I think most ordinary people would say No, but most of us do not have a say in any important things. They put up the facade of voting while all the important stuffs are decided within the circles.
I think it really makes sense to consider ourselves to be just intelligent cattle -- they still tolerate us because they need us to turn natural resources into machinery, weapon, insights and other stuffs they need, but once AI and robots keep up, they can probably get rid of 90% of us.
> I think it really makes sense to consider ourselves to be just intelligent cattle
That's too misanthropic for my tastes.
> to turn natural resources into machinery, weapon, insights and other stuffs they need
It's easy to live in our world and ignore the maintenance staff.
> but once AI and robots keep up
This is nowhere near happening. Your seeming rush into anticipatory compliance is exceedingly premature.
> they can probably get rid of 90% of us.
It's the same moronic death cult that's been active since the 1860s. They would like to believe this, more importantly they would like /you/ to believe this, but a sober examination of the facts shows it to be a mixture of bluster and folly designed to intimidate you into transferring your personal wealth into their profit.
It’s almost certainly grift. If it were official, the arrest would have been scrubbed.
sometimes i wonder if the left hand knows what the right is doing. it looks like we arrested our own spy in this case: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/25/american-journalist...
The CIA director requested the FBI intervene. This is almost certainly not a fuckup.
That's their post hoc, uncorroborated claim. It's easy to imagine many other possibilities; it could just be face saving. It could be Rush is taking the fall. etc.
This could also be internal politics intentional designed to burn someone for pissing off the wrong people. That shit happens.
Sounds like using an official position to make money.
A guy I used to know, a retired USAF Maj. pilot, acquired a bunch of racing cars, motorcycles, and a non-flyable MiG-21 through shady characters.
More than likely individual people try to get away with doing shady shit on the side rather than it being a grand UFO conspiracy.
The In-Laws:
Shel: "You robbed the U.S. Mint on your own? The CIA thought it was too crazy?"
Vince: "Too risky."
Really? Gold? Mr.Rush? … unbelievable what a surname can inflict on you
Sounds like he was most likely involved in some serious shit that was off the books and somehow it came to light. His boss is probably aware of what it was but no one will admit shit. It went awry and he is left holding the bag.
Gold and money for an operation that could have been to anything from funding armed rebellion to god only knows.
$40m+ in an expense account based in gold bars is absolutely crazy. CIA agents must have access to untold resources if this is seen as a somewhat regular 4 month spend. Seems it is, given that they seemingly weren't concerned about the $40+ million being taken out, but where it was being held.
The "resources" are off the books, it must be just the tip of the iceberg.
$40M is a trivial amount of money to everyone involved in this matter. It’s only a few hundred 1kg bars.
You're thinking in pre-covid peasant dollars. $40m isn't that much anymore, and frankly never was to these people.
Nobody’s talking about how much money it is to them,
to some degree, that’s our employees and often our money - it’s our concept of how much money is okay to fuck around with that matters.
I thought this was baseless speculation, but from TFA:
> [he] asked for, and received, “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.
Or, someone decided they wanted to redirect the flow of black money through someone else, but couldn't do it internally for some reason; so they called in their FBI friends to make a ruckus. While the guy is busy defending himself, they have an excuse to pick someone else to receive the new stream of gold.
Yeah, this reads like right out of "Burn notice".
Huh. I’m actually glad to see the IC fragmenting like this.
Is it fragmenting? The FBI has always been in charge of investigating other agencies. The article even notes that this particular investigation was initiated when the CIA director made a referral to the FBI.
> article even notes that this particular investigation was initiated when the CIA director made a referral to the FBI
Fair enough.
Archive.ph/archive.today failing me to bypass paywall, is everyone commenting on the title? Or you all have NYT subscriptions? Or you know of some other bypass?
I get 24 hour access through my local library. Here, have a gift link https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/us/politics/fbi-arrest-ci...
I had no idea this was an option. Libraries are the best.
oh man i just discovered that i have access to a lot of publications through my local library! thanks for this!
Thank you!
Many community libraries offer free NYTimes access to their patrons.
A couple of weeks ago there was a story that the CIA raided the office of the director of the NSA and seized information regarding the CIA. Trump was in China at the time. About a week later the NSA director resigns. I waited for it to turn into a major story and get some kind of explanation, but silence.
It seems like an extraordinary story and I don't understand why there isn't a hullabaloo. Did I hallucinate it? Who runs this country?
Anna Paulina Luna is the only one claiming that the CIA raided the office of the DNI. No other trustworthy sources are reporting this and there's been no independent verification. Anna Paulina Luna is a lunatic who says outlandish things with no regards to truth.
There might be a mix up on the details.
The FBI raided the home of John Bolton who was a former National Security Advisor for the first Trump administration. (not directly part of the NSA and definitely not the director of the NSA). Bolton has become a vocal critic of Trump since he was fired in Sept 2019.
Trump's DOJ has a track record of prosecuting Trump's vocal critics. eg. Former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_of_John_Bolton
There has been no legal action taken against current NSA director General Joshua M. Rudd or his recent predecessor, William J. Hartman
> Trump's DOJ has a track record of prosecuting Trump's vocal critics.
And many Americans claim they have freedom of speech!
(Of course the little guys speech is "free", they aren't important. But the moment the little guy critical of Trump is in a position of power or influence, watch how quickly he is silenced.)
Because nobody reputable reported on it?
Reputable reporters know that publishing those stories leads to break-in burglaries where everyone is killed and nothing is stolen.
Or with hands tied and two gunshot wounds to the back of the head and its ruled a suicide (Gary Webb)
You think that reputation was earned without submission to intelligence agencies?
The DNI, not the NSA.
> Who runs this country?
American Thought Control.
Crazy crackpot schizos aren’t the only ones listening to the voices in their heads.
I'm guessing they decided they don't like the guy anymore? The CIA is very corrupt as an institution and things like this run rampant. Billions of dollars go unaccounted for a year at the CIA.
DoD <--> defense contractors (military-industrial complex) is pretty close to the same. Never passed an audit and contractors were ripping off the DoD while creating scrap metal that was used by the Taliban. Trillions and trillions wasted.
Should’ve used Monero or something lmao
The CIA legitimately engages in bribery and hard asset payments. Note that the CIA approved his request and gave him these assets (or at least many of them - the paragraph below doesn't specify the amount).
> From last November to March, the court papers say, Mr. Rush asked for, and received, “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.”
Possibly the question here is, why did Rush take them home. It's always possible Rush was just sloppy and undisciplined, which would also reflect a cultural problem. Many people have been found with secret documents in their homes.
If he still has them, it’s probably ‘garden variety’ workplace embezzlement.
Make up some sources, pretend to pay them, cash the payments.
He probably just got sloppy, and it got too obvious.
Someone's gotta pay for the mortgage at 7327 Georgetown Pike, McLean VA
"Legitimately" is a nonsense word in that sentence.
> millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.
Hey, handing over millions of $$s to local warlords is a business expense...
Yes? Also children of Russian or Iranian generals or deputy ministers.
CIA: Corruption Institute of America
Its nickname since the 1970s has been Criminals in Action, when they were smuggling heroin out of the Golden Triangle to fund covert actions during the Vietnam War.
So we have this, and the Google employee polymarket trading:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302822
I'm totally not surprised, except that Trump's admin is actually catching and prosecuting these people.
I assume that means this is just the tip of the iceberg, and the grift is so predominant that they can't help but catch some people.
okay now the Director!
This seems absolutely crazy. Probably Fort Knox should be inventoried, might indeed not be anything there!
This is different than that and scant on pertinent details
It says he received it as compensation for expenses, not that it was ever in some government vault. This is additional gold and foreign currency that an agency had, not the reserve.
It then says
> When the C.I.A. conducted a review of where the gold and currency were stashed
Why would they do that if it was compensation for expenses
He wasn't charged for that, and the phrasing doesn't suggest it was supposed to be remitted to the government
if the CIA didn't have a history of being involved in shady shit like this that already explains everything, this would be weird
instead it looks like he's got burned over his necessary use of fibbed identity
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
So what is that, like 10 gold bars?
EDIT: it's 240. but still, they were worth a lot less not that long ago...
According to the article, 303 gold bars worth about $40M.
Mysteriously only 39.12 million dollars is accounted for, The FBI is carefully monitoring the remaining 38.25 million dollars of gold, for a hearing later this week where the fate of the 36.5 million dollars of gold will be decided.
Gold is the "bitcoin" of yesterday, in the sense that it is untraceable, anonymous and yet high value enough to be worth it.
And it can be made to disappear in a hurry, if you have to: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/10/03/140815154/d...
None of those points match bitcoin. What you are describing is more like tornado cash or similar stuff which are really really banned when interfacing with banks or similar institutions.
> untraceable, anonymous and yet high value enough to be worth it
Literally none of these is true of Bitcoin.