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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
by Radle 4mo ago
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.
- derefr 4mo ago> 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?
- unsupp0rted 4mo ago> Or are you imagining he'd go bury the gold in a hole in the woods somewhere? Why not?
- phendrenad2 4mo agoWhy 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.
- esseph 4mo ago"as a frail office worker" They could be CIA SAC/SOG, aka Ground Branch.
- Aurornis 4mo agoWhy 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?
- fc417fc802 4mo agoA 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.
- nickphx 4mo agoflock or any number of cameras that contribute to flock would see you.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoThey 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.
- lionkor 4mo agoThere are some on hiking trails :)
- derefr 4mo agoBecause, 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.
- keybored 4mo agoThe security scrutiny is really so thorough that taking up a new apparent hobby gets flagged? That’s impressive.
- tommica 4mo agoThe answer is probably "Yes" if you work at CIA
- colonwqbang 4mo agoI don't think you know what you are talking about.
- ajam1507 4mo agoHow would they know you went out to the woods?
- GoblinSlayer 4mo agoSmartphone will report it.
- valvar 4mo agoJust leave it at home.
- GoblinSlayer 4mo agoIf FBI see you go without a phone, they will know you're a criminal.
- formerly_proven 4mo ago> 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.
- colonwqbang 4mo agoIt'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...
- phlipski 4mo agoMr. Rush clearly did not watch Breaking Bad... But how did the CIA not check on whether or not he had graduated from one of the three different colleges he listed as graduating from the three different times he applied for a job at the CIA?!?!?
- Aurornis 4mo agoEveryone is a criminal mastermind after reading about someone else getting caught: You only have to say you wouldn’t do the thing that they did and you can smugly imagine yourself getting away with it. He didn’t acquire 300 gold bars and the other currency at once. He was getting these over a long period. He works for an intelligence agency, so he knew that his actions were going to be investigated. If he was doing any of these routines suggested in the comments like buying a rural plot of land to bury them or taking up camping (alone, by himself) these are all going to raise suspicions and become another thing that could give me away.
- 93po 4mo ago> he knew that his actions were going to be investigated I disagree - my take when I first read this was that this was likely a pervasive thing that senior people all did, and they all knew about it. This guy pissed off the wrong person and so they took him down. Same for the lying about credentials - I am sure everyone is like "hey Jim, did you want to apply for that promotion?" with the response of "I can't because I didn't serve long enough", and the final reply of "oh just make up the numbers, everyone does and they don't check".
- Aurornis 4mo ago> 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?
- fc417fc802 4mo agoThe 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.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- bandrami 4mo agoCIA recruits a lot of square pegs who didn't quite fit in to other parts of government
- rbanffy 4mo agoBut it still vets them. This is very odd.
- blitzar 4mo agoI think they are a couple of standard deviations more fucked up than the average person still.
- e40 4mo agoVetting 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.
- hypeatei 4mo agoDHS is not the same as the CIA. The former is heavily politicized and the latter kinda just does its own thing and I'm pretty sure they haven't paused vetting (ICE agents don't require TS/SCI clearance like CIA officers)
- rbanffy 4mo agoAll you need to join ICE is being a certified neonazi, so background checks would only jeopardise that policy.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
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- saghm 4mo agoHonestly 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?)
- expedition32 4mo agoWho watches the watchers?
- brookst 4mo agoFlock
- gosub100 4mo agoThere's more to the story they aren't letting on to.
- brookst 4mo agoI would hope so. It would be very odd if they shared every detail of the suspect’s life, the investigation, the evidence, and all tangential but interesting facts as part of the arrest.
- pjc50 4mo agoProbably a mini Iran-Contra. Get approval for paying $40m to [SECRET] to carry out acts of pro-US terrorism. Steal the gold. Tip off the enemies of the group so they fail/are killed/arrested. Then report to your superior that the mission was a failure due to enemy action.
- 542354234235 4mo agoOr get approval for $5m, run operation for $2m and pocket the rest. Operation has provable, demonstratable effects, and the falsified payoffs are mixed in with the real ones. If people check up on you, you can point them to assets still on the books to confirm a payoff or funding for equipment. Rinse and repeat. Its just embezzlement, but in an environment where the assets are supposed to not be traceable. Rinse and repeat.
- rubyn00bie 4mo agoPlanting 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.
- seanhunter 4mo ago> 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.
- lab14 4mo agoI mean, you see smart people all over the world talking to imaginary, supernatural, all powerfull beings asking for favors via prayers, like that would have any effect on their lives.
- paulryanrogers 4mo agoGuessing the downvotes are because you said 'imaginary' about things folks consider very personal and are mostly unfalsifiable.
- troyvit 4mo ago> Obvious plant $40 million in gold bars is about a thousand pounds of gold. That would be hard to plant.
- harambae 4mo agoNot that it matters, but I think it's closer to 600 lbs. $40M /( $4.5k / oz) and then (1 lbs / 16 oz)
- bell-cot 4mo agoFor precious metals, the units of measure are a bit different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_weight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_weight
- troyvit 4mo agoYou see, this is what I get for relying on AI. Kagi did catch that it was in Troy (hey that's me!) ounces, but I didn't check its numbers.
- SG- 4mo ago>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?