You might remember the story of CIA senior officer David J. Rush, 49, of Ashburn, Virginia, who was indicted after an FBI investigation found gold bars, cash in dollars and euros as well as luxury cars and dozens of luxury watches.

Today the DOJ announced that Rush has plead guilty {pdf SEE HERE} in a deal where he will admit to one count of wire fraud, and that will permit the DOJ to finish prosecuting the case without revealing extremely sensitive information about the CIA operations Rush was involved in.

Rush stands accused of manipulating more than $195 million in wire transfers to his own accounts, after setting up covert fake CIA operations centered around unknown foreign intelligence efforts.  When you read the plea agreement that stipulates the facts of his activity, it certainly sounds like David Rush was able to execute the fraud under the auspices of Ukraine operations.

To be clear, there’s no mention of Ukraine, but the scale of the money involved, the timing of the activity, the location of the real estate and the attributes of the money and gold (as described) sound very Ukrainian-ish.

DOJ PRESS RELEASE – […] On May 19, 2026, the FBI searched Rush’s residence and recovered 298 gold bars, approximately $2,106,550 in cash, €104,795, and numerous luxury watches. Rush had obtained the gold bars at an approximate cost to the government of $46 million. Pursuant to the plea agreement, Rush has agreed to forfeit the gold bars and currency found at his home, the fraudulently obtained properties, 30 watches (many of which were Rolexes), and two 2026 BMW Alpina vehicles, at least one of which is valued at approximately $172,000. 

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The case against the former head of German Intelligence, August Hanning, is seriously sketchy.

Hanning, 80, was arrested in Bad Toelz-Wolfratshausen in southern Germany. His former Chief of Staff, Manfred D., was also arrested Tuesday in Steinfurt in western Germany and has been charged with aiding and abetting attempted treason and treasonous espionage.

Police were investigating Hanning in 2025 in relation to his involvement in organizing a kidnapping plot.  When police searched his residence, they found documents outlining his activity in receiving state secrets from inside German intelligence and selling classified analysis to a foreign government (not Russia).

Apparently when Hanning left as head of German intelligence, his chief of staff “Manfred” remained at work.  Manfred then continued to give Hanning information from inside German intelligence, which Hanning then used to sell his services to foreign enterprises.

The information Manfred gave Hanning related to intelligence on Russia and Iran that Germany gathered from partnerships with the USA and Israel.  In essence, Hanning was selling 5-eyes secret intelligence on Russia and Iran, to foreign interests.  Hanning was receiving the intelligence from Manfred, his former chief of staff.

GERMANY – A former German spy chief was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of espionage and treason, an embarrassing case at a time when the country is seeking to broaden the powers of its intelligence agencies.

August Hanning, who ran Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency from 1998 to 2005, is accused of espionage, treason and working for foreign intelligence services, federal prosecutors said.

They did not say which foreign powers were involved. However, AFP understands it was not Russia.

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Susan Kokinda delivers a great contextual overview for the IRGC letter to the world asking everyone, anyone, to help protect them from President Trump’s strategic operation against Iran.

Kokinda opens with the 26-page open letter Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps addressed to the American people weeks before the midterms, which the State Department dismissed as desperate and the Daily Wire read as a call to vote Democrat. She argues the letter tells a bigger story than anyone is reporting: it names the CIA, Israel and the military-industrial complex, but never once the British. After President Trump’s “easy way or the hard way” remark on Iran, and his statement at the U.N. that the election won’t influence his Iran policy, the episode revisits the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, whom the letter calls an “Americanophile,” after he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, today’s BP, and cites National Security Archive documents showing the British Foreign Office approached the Truman administration in late 1952 to propose a coup.

Her review then then turns to a Foreign Affairs newsletter citing the 1956 Suez crisis as a parallel to the war with Iran, President Eisenhower’s refusal to back Britain and France at Suez, and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1955 Foreign Affairs article on how the British ran Egypt. It closes with Richard Haass on Morning Joe, the morning after Trump’s U.N. speech, calling it “the end of 80 years of American foreign policy,” Chatham House director Bronwen Maddox on Europe having to defend itself against the U.S., and Mark Carney telling the New York Times he spent the past year preparing for the “extreme tail risk” of U.S. military action against Canada.  WATCH:

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I don’t want to focus too much on this, because there are multiple angles still at work.  However, against the backdrop of the non-coincidental coincidences that followed the August 2025 Alaska Summit, the Lukoil story looks strategically interesting.

The New York Times is looking at Lukoil from the perspective of President Trump organizing financial gains for people close to his administration, specifically Witkoff and Kusher.  {GO DEEP}

That aspect is nonsense, total nonsense; however, if you pull back and look at the background story without the Trump derangement overlay, there’s a potential here for something very good to come out of it.

As the story is told, Russian President Vladimir Putin has inquired about the potential for the U.S. to remove sanctions against Lukoil, a quasi-private energy company based out of Russia.  Before, getting too weedy about it, remind yourself of the statements that surfaced during the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, August, 2025.

You might remember that both the U.S and Russia spoke of strategic partnerships surrounding the energy sector.  Obviously, this makes sense when we consider the “west” is actually fractured on the topic of energy.  There are two competing interests that overlap in the financial side of the issue, the ‘trillions at stake’ aspect.

On one side you have the “climate change” team, those who are fully invested (literally) in the financial mechanisms of the climate change, green new deal, build back better talking points.  The Green Energy team in the west.  The Paris Climate Treaty and carbon-trading proponents et al.

On the other side you have the pragmatic energy team in the west.  These are the Trump-minded and aligned western perspectives that look at oil, natural gas (LNG), clean coal and nuclear technology.  These are the “all the above” aligned voices in the more pragmatic view of low-cost energy production and development.

In the middle, between both sides of the fracture, are the banking and finance systems.  This is the BIG MONEY play, with the Climate Change team supported by banking ideology inside the city of London, while the Carbon Use team is constantly having to assemble finance and insurance from outside the banking control mechanisms.

The Climate Change team have support based on ideology within the finance system.  However, the Carbon Use team have the advantage of low-price outputs, global dependency and actual profits as leverage.  This is a fight essentially inside the larger energy sector, and we are all very familiar with it because it has been happening for decades.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is currently the main tool deployed by the Climate Change team on behalf of the London finance system.  Carney’s main opponent is U.S. President Donald Trump.

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UPDATE BELOW:

According to CNN, current Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton is likely to be appointed the AI/SI Czar.  If that is accurate, and not a leak trap – which considering the source is sketchy, then that leaves the DNI position open again.

(VIA CNN) – President Donald Trump is expected to pick Jay Clayton to be the White House’s new czar of artificial intelligence, two sources familiar with the discussion told CNN.

The president could announce his decision about Clayton, who is director of national intelligence, as early as Friday, one of the sources said.

Trump announced last month that he was planning to create an “AI Force” and name an AI czar as the government faces growing calls to impose guardrails on the technology’s rapid development.

Trump gathered several AI and technology CEOs at the White House on Tuesday for a meeting that culminated in the signing of a new commitment aimed at better “self-policing” their companies’ AI models. (read more)

If it is accurate that Clayton is going to the Super Intelligence Czar position, and considering the sudden reappearance last week at the White House, is there a possibility of someone returning to the administration as DNI?

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President Trump delivered impromptu remarks to the press today as he departs the White House for an event in Texas.  The assembled press pool asked a variety of questions based on current events.

President Trump is heading to Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio, Alabama and Nebraska for campaign events. WATCH:

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Most people will not read the Inspector General Report in full [SEE PDF HERE].  But if you did, you might come to the same conclusion as myself.  The entire FED and IG Michael Horowitz should be fired, arrested and prosecuted for corruption at a level that is simply jaw dropping.

The issue is really simple if you cut through the fog of the report.  The FED Board awarded a no-bid contract to the contractor, without an agreement on the building renovation project and the construction costs associated with it until President Donald Trump began drawing attention to it.  This is gross corruption at a massive scale.

To use the terminology of the report, start with this aspect:

…”the Board selected a different project delivery method, construction manager at risk (CMAR), for the Eccles-1951 renovation project. A well-managed CMAR contract allows a building owner—in this case, the Board—to transfer certain construction risks, including those related to cost and schedule performance, to its construction manager (also known as a construction manager as constructor, or CMc). To effect this risk transfer, a CMAR contract provides for the owner and CMc to agree on a guaranteed maximum price (GMP) for the project, usually around the time construction begins or building design is substantially complete. Once the GMP is set, the owner has greater cost certainty and the CMc is incentivized to carefully manage costs. If costs exceed the GMP, the CMc absorbs them with limited exceptions, such as when the GMP may be increased to account for change events like owner directed changes or other adjustments like unforeseen site conditions“… {Source pg, 5}

So, the FED board established, at least with themselves, that they would have an agreement on cost for the project.  However, if you go to page 60 of the report you find this:

…” in connection with a multibillion-dollar contract, the Board did not ask its CMc for a construction cost estimate or a GMP until December 2025—about 3.5 years after construction began and after the Board had already awarded more than $2 billion. Specifically, the Board did not take advantage of several key opportunities to request a cost estimate from the CMc”…. (Source pg, 60}

It wasn’t until President Trump drew attention to the FED having spent over $2 billion, that FED Chair Jerome Powell, and the FED board requested the construction manager and construction company to provide a cost estimate.  This is unreal, especially considering that IG Michael Horowitz finds no unlawful decision-making in the overall fiasco.

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The departure of U.S. forces and equipment “marks a transition from a wartime coalition mission to an Iraqi-led security effort,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement Wednesday. “The orderly departure of Coalition forces and equipment from Erbil Air Base marks the successful conclusion of the military mission that defeated ISIS in Iraq.”

TRUTH SOCIAL – “Today, I am pleased to announce, that the last American Forces are leaving Iraq! It has been a long time, with very bad decision-making that got us involved in this quagmire in the first place, but soon, that will be part of History. This is a Great Day for America and, importantly, we leave with Iraq having a wonderful new Prime Minister, Ali al-Zaidi, somebody I supported from the beginning and fully endorsed. He won an Election that he was not expected to win, and did so, in a landslide!

Launched in 2003 under the presidency of George W. Bush, and continued under the Administration of Barack Hussein Obama in 2014, and Sleepy Joe Biden, Operation Inherent Resolve ends in 2026 under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump. This Day is a victory for the United States, a victory for Iraq, and a decisive victory over ISIS, which has been completely decimated by the Trump Administration, First Term, along with other very bad and dangerous players.

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In a remarkable series of events, Canadian TV (CTV) is reporting that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is likely to win the Nobel Prize for Peace, the Time Magazine Person of the Year Award and public veneration by Pope Leo XIV to culminate a year when the European Union is now meeting to decide which capitals will host the monuments and statues.

All of these timed accolades are related to Carney’s spectacular position as the world’s leading opponent to United States President Donald J Trump. No single person has ever won such incredible distinctions in a single year. The Associated Press is now reporting the news:

TORONTO — Mark Carney built a global profile in 2026 by standing up to U.S. President Donald Trump. If some prediction-market traders and prominent admirers are right, the Canadian prime minister could end the year with the Nobel Peace Prize and Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Carney briefly became the favourite Monday for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize on Kalshi, a U.S.-based prediction market, when traders on the exchange put his chances at 14 per cent. His odds later fell, illustrating the highly speculative nature of the wagering.

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Earlier today, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley released explosive whistleblower documents showing how former Special Prosecutor Jack Smith demanded the records of donors to President Trump from December 2019 through August 2023.  [Press Release Here] – [Donor Records Here]

Records provided to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) via legally protected whistleblower disclosures reveal Smith’s team acquired at least 4,782 checks from Americans who made mainly small-dollar donations to President Trump between September 2019 to August 2023. The checks reveal the donors’ home addresses, bank account and routing numbers, and signatures.

Smith’s team acquired the checks as part of its “Arctic Frost” election case against President Trump, allowing the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to gain access to nearly 5,000 Americans’ highly sensitive information, including 42 Iowans. There may be additional subpoena returns that include more donor checks. Whistleblower records show the checks were routed to former FBI Special Agent Walter Giardina. (more)

Senator Josh Hawley confronted Jack Smith on his lies during former testimony to congress. WATCH:

Republicans and President Trump have accused Jack Smith of pursuing a politically motivated case against the president. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, referred Smith to the Justice Department for possible prosecution, alleging that Smith made false statements during an hours-long closed-door meeting with lawmakers in December.

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