An interesting arrest that might warrant some background material prior to today’s events. Keep in mind there are several indicted individuals from Venezuela and Mexico now said to be cooperating with the DOJ and federal law enforcement.
In addition to former Venezuela dictator Nicolas Maduro in the Southern District of New York, we should also note three Mexican officials connected to the Sinaloa cartel previously turned themselves in to U.S. federal officials and are said to be cooperating.
Earlier this month, Gerardo Mérida, a retired Mexican army general who served as public-security secretary in northwestern Sinaloa state surrendered in Tucson, Arizona. Enrique Inzunza Cazárez, who is also facing drug trafficking and weapon charges, was taken into custody in San Diego by the DEA. Sinaloa businessman Enrique Diaz Vega – another name from the SDNY indictment – also turned himself into U.S. authorities in Arizona.
As you read this story, also keep in mind the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, falls under the authority of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and that agency oversees a background check program, known as “continuous vetting.”
According to NBC News a 20-year veteran manger within the CIA named David Rush has been arrested on suspicion of embezzlement and theft. The CIA operative was reported to have been referred to the FBI by CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
(VIA NBC) WASHINGTON — A former CIA senior officer with top secret-level clearance has been accused of secretly stashing millions of dollars in gold bars in his home that he said he needed for “work-related expenses,” according to court documents and two people familiar with his employment history.
David Rush, who held a management position, was charged with criminal theft of public money in a complaint filed last week in the Eastern District of Virginia. His lawyer didn’t respond to a request for comment. He was also accused of lying to his employers about his background for nearly two decades.
Asked about Rush’s case, a CIA spokesperson said in a statement joint statement with the FBI that the FBI had arrested a person after a referral from the agency.
“After a CIA internal investigation identified potential violations of the law, CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred the information to the FBI for a law enforcement investigation,” the written statement said. “The FBI is working closely with our partners at the CIA and the Department of Justice as we continue to investigate this matter fully. We are committed to following the facts, ensuring accountability, and pursuing justice in accordance with the law.”
[…] It wasn’t clear how the investigation into Rush began, and it also wasn’t clear when he left the CIA. His home was raided just last week.
From November through March, Rush made several requests for funds, including for foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars, according to an affidavit filed in federal court by an FBI agent investigating the case.
In a storage space near his office, investigators found only a portion of the funds. On May 18, federal agents searched Rush’s home and seized roughly 300 gold bars worth more than $40 million, court documents said. Agents also seized about $2 million in U.S. currency and 35 luxury watches, mostly Rolexes, according to the affidavit.
The affidavit alleges Rush knowingly took part of the money he requested for work-related expenses to his home for personal gain.
The court filing didn’t specify which agency employed Rush, but the two people familiar with his employment history said he was with the CIA. (link)
Separate allegations in the complaint accuse Rush of falsifying his background over nearly two decades in dealings with government employers.
Best and brightest.
Top. Men.
Top, top men.
I want to see said ‘cooperation’ resulting in the reveal of the vote steal via Dominion. As I understand it, it originated in Venezuela.
I long ago gave up on the arrests are coming line, but with Trump’s display of his strategic timing in takedowns in his second administration, I believe that he has events and actions pre-scripted with the order of them timed for maximum effect.
Could I be wrong? Of Course, but his delivery of jabs and punches so far demonstrate that he has been either exceptionally lucky, or that he is operating under a well thought out plan.
I’m going with the whole “attempt to put him in prison for the rest of his life” thing–and later the kill him thing, pi$$ed him off and he is now executing his takedown that he had at least four years to plan; that he is indeed the counter puncher that he claimed he is; and that his knockout punch will come shortly before the mid-terms.
Trust in Trump.
From your lips to God’s ears.
Hello,… E. Jean Carrol is now under DOJ investigation for false statements under oath in her sex abuse claims against Donald Trump. He has caught this ‘useful idiot” Liar.
She allegedly lied under oath about who help fund(Reid Hoffman) her civil case against Trump. Trump has appealed this case to SCOTUS. One more attempt by the Democrats to affect the 2024 election.
Evidence in support of my assertion to Trust in Trump.
I also believe he is very trustworthy, The main thing that sometimes still makes it look like he isn’t on top of things, I think, is that he still has to conceal a lot of what is going on, especially from leaders of other countries.
I think your right on this.
She is probably best friends with the lying Christine Blasey Ford. Why don’t these people go to the police and file an assault report when the statute of limitations hasn’t run out? Ford sends a letter to her US Senator?! Carrol files a phony lawsuit?! They are both crazy women who were manipulated by the Left to do their bidding.
The reason is that nothing happened.
I believe this take down strategy was planned long ago. Trump’s first term was to identify unknown characters, now that they have been identified, the plan has moved to execution phase.
You could absolutely be right.
I disagree. I think the first term was ineffective because he really had underestimated the depth of the Deep State and how evil it was. he also did not have nearly enough qualified people he knew he could trust for the number of positions he had to fill, so he had to use recommendations from people he also didn’t know if he could trust. I am sure he spent a lot of his four years in exile finding out who he could call up and trust. He also seems to have figured out something that I hope comes out in a book before too long, what is it that motivates most of the Congressional and Senate RINOs. He plainly has had a deal with all but the worst ones, part of it seems to be that he doesn’t go after their seats until and unless the base pushes him to.
Spot on. Prosecution and litigation takes time and with no guarantee of success. President Trump is focused on the strategic wins.
I think you have the right idea, but I suspected early on that a lot of things had to wait for certain other things to have been done. Prosecutions were not smart to start until relevnt positions in the FBI and DOJ, as well as the judiciary, had been ‘turned’.
I am pretty sure that timing for the midterms was not the major hold-up.
Yes!
Dominion headquarters, and where all paths lead to is in the Denver Tech Center of Colorado. Voting data was illegally transmitted to servers in Venezuela for manipulation and sent back as what the criminals wanted us to see.
Gatekeepers enforce every technicality to keep those of good character in the lowest front line positions. But those with relatives and connections are exempt from scrutiny. This gem was in the Senior Executive Service (SES). No one i ever respected ever got promoted into rhe SES.
NOT surprised at all by this. Tip of the iceberg….
To paraphrase (and to correct) George Carlin: It’s a small club, and you should not want to be in it!
Is it any wonder why so many career gov’t employee’s are against the Trump administration, and the sunlight it brings on their schemes and dirty deals?
I was a career federal employee and voted for Trump all three times. Even gave money.
Ditto
If there were some way he could run for President again, I would vote for him again, given the chance.
same
So … Give us some insight on what that was like? Were you persecuted, shunned, etc? Just curious.
Yes. Something the Framers understood but didn’t spell out was that any group that achieved long-term power would eventually see the purpose of government to be to serve the persons with power in government. That is a feature of human nature.
I think they would have been surprised by one aspect though, they didn’t seem to think the bureaucracy itself could be the center of the corruption, which I think it is in our republic, the only historical examples before their time came from Byzantium and China, and not much was known about the history of those places in their time.
The solution starts with putting term limits on bureaucrats. There must be no such thing as a ‘lifelong government employee’. Fauci had been head of that cute little multibillion dollar agency for 50 years, and the FBI cabal that framed Trump had all been coworkers for about twenty years.
This is exactly what can happen when you have virtually no oversight and you hide behind terms like trade craft, sources and methods.
This doesn’t strike me as weird necessarily. CIA uses bribes and informants etc. Maybe this is part of the ‘sources and methods’ side of being a spook. Maybe these guys running ops have gold bars etc for bribes. If you had to go back to your green visor cia banker types and ask for $10k every day…your life would be a grind. So maybe some of these guys do have a little personal slush fund to dig into so that they can run more independently of home office types.
Well, certainly all the spy novels had the concept of bug out bags, cash stash, various IDs and off shore accounts for when they had to go dark… the agency has billions in. Dark money ops, no doubt
Yeah, I hear ya….but were talking about over $266, 666 per day for 5 months(150 days) in just the 300 gold bars alone.
That be a wee bit more than having “a little personal slush fund“, don’t ya think? Gee Whiz, that’s over $97 Million a year!
You are on the right track, but CIA is supposedly very meticulous about the money they hand out to their people. So, the important thing about David Rush may turn out to be who helped him fake operations that would get him that much treasure — was it a higher up? or an enemy agency? Or both?
TWENTY YEARS and the resume that got him in the door in the first place was full of lies. He had help.
With his record it would be easy to get him to do “things” that someone without such blackmail bait hanging over his head would refuse to do. The Rush home is very nice — on the outside — then I saw that it was in Loudon Freakin’ County VA! He probably had an Abigail Spamburger yard sign planted on that nice lawn;-) Lightbulb just came on:
Governor Abigail was employed by CIA for c. 10 yrs. Maybe she was acquainted with Mr. Rush and received campaign donations in the form of gold bars or something. Sounds crazy, I know.
We’ve been getting raped for decades…..
A starving government is a complacent one…
The one we have is a MONSTER….
It’s long past time to chop the greedy hands off the Government thieves….
Burn it ALL down….
NO MERCY!
The amount of fraud, waste, and abuse that goes via the federal government is much worse than any of us realizes.
I have some perspective on this because I spent almost 25 years working for the Government Accountability Office. I cut my teeth in GAO’s fraud task force in the mid 70’s.
Fraud, waste, and abuse of taxpayer money takes place at all levels of government and anywhere that money flows.
🎯‼️
And the feckless GOP still hasn’t codified any of DOGE’s work.
Senator Tinkerbell (SC) is at Disneyland with his bubble-wand; Senator Chucky-cheese (NY) is grilling rare burgers; Senator McTurtle (KY) is being carried around to maintain the illusion of life; while the majority leader organizes dog shows for the rest of the bunch. These fellows have a full schedule and are too busy to focus on fiscal matters.
And he’s likely one in a thousand crooks in the agency.
Crook or spy- agent? Who signed off in the requisitions, or he is paid by outside sources. Hmmm, 20+year as supervisory- managerial spook…
A sewer swamp
Deguello
The story says one of the first indications of a problem was when Rush requested hundred millions of dollars in gold bars. Did I read that right? Where within the CIA is this repository of hundreds of millions of dollars with of gold bars that agents can request like a certain amount of corporate golf swag?
Rush was just a bagman. There are higher up people pulling his strings. Will he sing or go down with the ship?
I’m surprised that he’s still alive at this point, and not ended up like Epstein.
His lawyer might still be well advised to issue a statement that “Mr. Rush is not suicidal.”
He still might get 86’d.
A bagman that took his cut??? Holy moly that’s a ton of government cheese!
Sen. Gold Bar was a piker.
Didn’t get a single Rolex, as I recall.
Wonder how many of these ‘investigators’ need investigating themselves. No wonder the US was in a decline.
This should come as no surprise, considering the kinds of people that join the Clowns In Action.
TSSCI clearances folks used to be reviewed every 5 years but the government switched to continuous vetting. There is no way in hell he could pass the vetting without getting flagged somewhere or someone looked the other way.
Clearances have become like getting a parking lot pass.
A dime a dozen. Clearances were rejected if you had a DWI a few years back. Now that is not even a blip.
Well well well. THATS where all that gold went. My gas is still $4.89 a gallon, my groceries are through the roof and looks like war(s) won’t end. Throwing up my hands and giving all of this to Christ my king!
god bless everyone here. Y’all are gonna need it.
Make sure your Spiritual house is in order and that you’re Saved. Better to be taken up in the Rapture than endure the Tribulation!
Saved lol
Catholics argue that the question “Are you saved?” promotes a false understanding of salvation by implying it is a one-time event that cannot be lost, a doctrine known as “Once Saved, Always Saved.” This view is not biblical and not historically Christian.
Thank you Maga Man!
” I have to check each time , is it a King James Bible or a Catholic Missal I’m reading”, I’m not Catholic, but have been in Catholic services where the Catholic Priest talked about being saved” Soooo, guess when we die we will know, without the interjection of man. Like I’ve said before, if I’m wrong ,I have lost nothing, if I’m right, I will loose everything. I always keep it between the lines….good advice for many…..
I would say the more “Catholic” response is to endeavor to “enter by the narrow gate”.
If anything can pry me out of the hand of my Saviour, then the Bible is a lie. It is not so.
What else is slipping through the cracks at the CIA?
They’ve pretty much closed themselves off from effective oversight (on the claim for national security).
My guess, more of this kind of thing is going on in the CIA than anyone might suspect.
Can I prove it…NO.
And….this is just ONE person. I’m so dang angry about this. Can’t even imagine the scope of this. I worked in a bank many decades ago and the money I handled just became an object. My boss said it was just “other people’s money”. Now I know what she meant.
Slipping through the cracks is a program, not an oversight.
The quiet shock to me is that NBC broke this story.
Biting the hand that feeds it?
Why wasn’t this reported when it happened two weeks ago?
Reported that he had exactly 303 gold bars.
The weight of each bar reported to be 1 kilogram.
Each kilogram is 2.2 pounds.
303 gold bars x 2.2 pounds per bar = 666.6 pounds of gold.
Interesting…building a golden calf?
“Rush made several requests for funds, including for foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars”. Imagine that, someone in the CIA is corrupt and has access to unlimited funds. That’s the American Way. This practice has gone on for a very long time. Now is New Army, thanks to DJT.
Daycares and learing centers in Minnesota, CIA employees, and any other government-funded agency employees all seem to have fraud and theft of taxpayer dollars as a central activity.
I get the impression that a large portion of GDP is coming from fraud and theft from citizens by the people who are supposed to be working for us.
What happened to DOGE?
”Public service” doesnt mean what those words mean.
They have always been working for themselves.
Every job I have ever applied for I had to submit official transcripts. How do you walk 40 gold bars out of the office ?
By not walking more out than your boss.
What?
A CIA boss can just “requisition” 300 gold bars?
Did I just read that right?
I’ve been wondering that myself. Who signed off on this guy’s requisitions?
Remember the scene in Zero Dark Thirty when they bribed some Arab who looked like some Sheik with a Lamborghini? The Arab was wearing one of those head dresses the Arabs wear while the CIA operative was talking about driving the convertible around and getting “wind in his hair.” The Rolexes are like pocket change bribes. It is either our money, or it is drug money from the black budget funds that paid for it, but, since money is fungible….
So he didn’t self report his newfound affluence? Or he was embezzling Clowns In America bribe material at his house?
Continuous vetting? How can anyone say that with a straight face when his lies were so bold faced, easily verified and obviously not checked out intentionally ” overlooked “
Just $40 million? 35 Rolex watches? Sounds like a proud patriot doing Brennan’s bidding, errr Biden’s bidding?
So—-who’s toes did he step on??
If Rush was winding up a 20-year stint with the CIA, he would have been hired in 2006 during the George W Bush administration. If he had already been rejected twice through normal channels, he may have been ushered in as someone’s “special hire.” General Michael V. Hayden became the CIA director on May 30, 2006. Could that be how Rush made his way into the CIA?
IF Rush was preparing to retire, wouldn’t there have been a final accounting for all of the CIA’s property that had been issued to him?
Could that be part of the story?
Then again, think about the gold in the context of the Maduro cabal.
Venezuela has one of the largest, if not the largest, gold reserve on the planet. People usually think of the oil and narcotics and forget about the gold.
Maduro, his wife, her family members and a few others have been sanctioned by the OFAC since at least 2017. If Rush was working with the Maduro crowd, he could have requisitioned gold for CIA purposes and used that gold to create confusion or a cover for a black market gold trade out of Venezuela. If he had his hands on legitimate physical bars (he did), new Venezuelan bars could have been minted with the same serial numbers and markings and injected into the gold market or used for whatever purposes. Some bars could have been melted. Getting past the hump of the documentation could have made life easier for entities with bad tendencies.
Even back in the 1980’s or so there was a detective story that included freight containers with duplicate markings used for smuggling.
Just a thought.
What a coincidence! OFAC was what Maduro uttered when our guys captured him!
LOL
David Rush? C’mon man.. what’s his real name?
I am a bit suspicious when the ENEmedia takes great pains to explain who he is not, instead of revealing to us who this man actually IS, and how one who holds such a sensitive government position could possibly get away with all his exploits for so many years.
Boy and Obama walked billions out of somewhere and flew it to Iran. There are a lot of people between his illegal operation and Mr Rush that got a piece of that pie I’d bet.
Who is “Boy?”
I took it to mean:
Boy!! And Obama walked…
Kind of like “Wow, and Obama walked…”
The Democrats have been sweeping up xCIA employees to run for political office. What once was an asset is becoming a negative. Spanberger and Slotkin come to mind and perhaps even Sherrill may be influenced
One down….the rest to go.
“Not a smidgen of corruption”
Maybe he’s related to Gold Bar Bob Menendez.
The post is reporting it was in kilo bars. That could imply a lot, as those are easily obtained on the retail market.
And we are surprised?
Press this scumbag to reduce his sentence, and name names of higher ups.
30 years reduced to 5 years sounds good to me, if I were a criminal.
Ever hear about the murder of Army Green Beret Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar in Mali on June 4, 2017, was committed by four fellow U.S. special operators, including two Navy SEALs?
Sordid affair, I hear there was money on the table, the dead man was honest. In the final judgement it was sold as a “Hazing”, some don’t believe it.
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/01/25/navy-seal-gets-10-years-in-strangulation-death-of-army-green-beret-staff-sergeant/
Falsified his background and they couldn’t figure that out for 20 years until now. That’s their story and they’re sticking to it. For the life of me, I don’t know why we’re so forgiving. I would have torched them all. But then again I’m known to burn bridges….
Does the CIA have a supply room stocked with gold bars? And people can just show up with a requisition?
How did David Rush transport about 600 pounds of gold out of the office and into his home?
So many interesting unasked, unanswered questions.
Hat tip to Jeff Childers for prompting this thought.
What Government employee approves a request for $50 million dollars in gold bullion that is “needed for “work-related expenses,” ?
What Government employee processes that approved request? We’re talking about a TON of gold a month for 4-5 months by the same person?
What Government employee actually rolls the cart out there to his vehicle and loads it?
Investigate and arrest those people.