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.
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?
Why not?
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?
but yeah, I imagine that a job which requires keeping secrets and breaking laws tends to attract people who keep secrets and break laws.
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.
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
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.
They're on record as happy to barter guns and drugs also.
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
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.
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.
Or isn't anyone allowed anymore to mention "Black" in the context of Epstein?
I guess the gold bars aren't uniformly sized, which would agree with your ~280kg number.
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.
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.
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.
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" :)
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.
> What's the appeal of collecting high priced watches?
- "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..."
Shel: "You robbed the U.S. Mint on your own? The CIA thought it was too crazy?"
Vince: "Too risky."
Dad: Public or private sector?
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249237.Gold_Warriors
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.
Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc all have Global Security branches.
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.
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?
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
American Thought Control.
Crazy crackpot schizos aren’t the only ones listening to the voices in their heads.
Gold and money for an operation that could have been to anything from funding armed rebellion to god only knows.
> [he] asked for, and received, “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.
> 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.
Make up some sources, pretend to pay them, cash the payments.
He probably just got sloppy, and it got too obvious.
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.
Hey, handing over millions of $$s to local warlords is a business expense...
Fair enough.
EDIT: it's 240. but still, they were worth a lot less not that long ago...
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
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...
Literally none of these is true of Bitcoin.