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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.
> Obvious plant nobody would be that stupid to store the valuables at home within the first six months after the „acquisition“.
Whenever you say "nobody would be that stupid" you have to pause and take a deep breath and realise that however dumb something is, there are for sure people who are stupid enough to do it.
Example 1 from personal experience: I was at my aunt's house and she had to rush a friend's husband to get medical help because he had drilled a hole in his own stomach with a hand drill while trying to put up a bookshelf.
The friend had been reading a book on medieval medicine so (rather than rushing her husband immediately to hospital) decided to try a medieval remedy on him so fed him some soup to see whether (in line with the medieval diagnostic routine) she could smell it after he had eaten it. She could indeed, because it dribbled out of the hole he had drilled in his stomach.
Now. You might reasonably say: "Noone would be so dumb as to drill a hole in their own stomach" or indeed "noone would be so dumb as to see a loved one who had drilled a hole in themselves and decide to feed them soup" but I can tell you from direct personal experience there are people dumb enough to do this.
Example 2 from personal experience[1]: A friend of my dad who was a highly capable chemical engineer and generally very practical guy (eg he made a motorcycle for his kids to play on using salvaged parts including a lawnmower engine and a frame he welded together himself) was a hobby parachutist. He broke his spine because he decided to modify his parachute himself on his wife's sewing machine in spite of having no previous sewing experience.
However dumb something is, there are people dumb enough to do it and even otherwise smart people have blind spots that make them incredibly dumb under the right circumstances.
[1] Just in case you think smart people can't do incredibly dumb things.
> 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?
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
$40 million in gold bars is about a thousand pounds of gold. That would be hard to plant.
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
> 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?
>As if people aren’t properly vetted every time they switch jobs within the agency.
have you seen the criminals elected to run your country and the ones they've put in important policy decisions?
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.
I read a book by a CIA officer. A big part the job is carrying around tons of cash for shady people. It’s understood that if you take the cash for yourself, you go to prison.
The ironic thing is the money usually goes missing. It gets given to some VIPs brother, who is supposed to give it to VIP, but doesn’t.
The important thing is it not go missing while you are watching it. It can go missing later - just not on your watch.
“$40 million…a small fortune” — inflation has gotten out of hand!
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?
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.
The article says "A senior C.I.A. official was arrested last week after investigators found hundreds of gold bars worth over $40 million stashed in his Virginia residence, a small fortune that he apparently brought home from work, according to court papers."
The same article also says:
"When the C.I.A. conducted a review of where the gold and currency were stashed, the agency was “unable to locate the gold bars or significant amounts of the foreign currency,” according to court papers."
The NY Times fact checkers don't seem to have seen this article.
That's ~280kg of gold if anyone wonders
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...
The gold bars and foreign cash thing seems normal. They have to pay off warlords, drug dealers, foreign dignitaries, informants, assets. You can't be filling out requisition forms, going through multiple banks in foreign nations, carrying gold bars and cash in and out of banks, etc to pay off a secret government informant. Somebody will see the money trail, tip off the bad guys, and your op is over (and the informant is dead)
But of course it's also bad because not only can the money easily be stolen, there's basically no transparency into how intelligence agencies use taxpayer money. I have no idea how much corruption is in intelligence and military, but it's probably a lot, considering just how easy it is to steal or misappropriate these funds
If this were a Jason Bourne movie, it was the CIA that put the gold bars there.
There's a surprising number of CIA and secret agent experts in this comments section.
You don't take possession of 600 pounds of gold without a plan. Putting it in a hole isn't putting it to work. Sell it to a country where jewelry is manufactured, that at least gets it into the banking system. Lebanon loves gold. So does India. If this guy is under investigation, everything linked to him will be discovered. He can't really spend it. Aldrich Ames bought a Jaguar and was caught.
Guy sounds like a dragon. What's the deal with the watches though?
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.
> 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..."
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.
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.
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 ?
CIA: Corruption Institute of America
I’ve walked off with a few of my employer’s pens over the years. Is this really so different?
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?
Huh. I’m actually glad to see the IC fragmenting like this.
> millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.
Hey, handing over millions of $$s to local warlords is a business expense...
The In-Laws:
Shel: "You robbed the U.S. Mint on your own? The CIA thought it was too crazy?"
Vince: "Too risky."
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?
this being the C.I.A - this guy is being railroaded or is being made a fall guy.
he will serve a short jail term but at least he will live.
remember folks - C.I.A is the only gvt org that self funds itself & can run entirely without gvt money.
Did Scott Rudin already option it? "Gold Rush"
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.
How quickly can we get the movie?
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.
By the title only, having gold bars is bad? There it goes my plans of buying some.
Really? Gold? Mr.Rush? … unbelievable what a surname can inflict on you
okay now the Director!
Should’ve used Monero or something lmao