A former C.I.A. officer who the authorities say stashed hundreds of gold bars in his home admitted in court on Tuesday to a far larger web of deception, including a $145 million scam involving luxury real estate and providing sensitive intelligence to a foreign government official. The shocking details of the case were revealed in federal court in Alexandria, Va., where David J. Rush pleaded guilty to a single count of wire fraud, which could earn him up to 20 years behind bars.
The new details of his crimes, however, far surpassed what had been previously known about the unusual case, even as they in some ways deepened the mystery of an episode at the heart of America’s intelligence community that has been cloaked in secrecy. Those crimes included his admission in court that he had shared the identity of a human source with a foreign government, a grave violation of what is among the C.I.A.’s most highly protected secrets.
John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, said Mr. Rush had “abused his position and betrayed the public trust and should be held fully accountable for his actions.” Mr. Rush, a 49-year-old former intelligence officer, was arrested in May after investigators found roughly 300 gold bars stashed in the basement of his Virginia home. U.S. officials have previously said he created a fake classified program that allowed him to accumulate the bars, worth more than $40 million.
In court on Tuesday, a federal prosecutor, Kevin Hakala, described far more sweeping and potentially consequential crimes beyond the gold bar scam. In all, the schemes totaled more than $193 million in fraud. In October 2025, Mr. Rush used his “position of trust” as a senior C.I.A. officer to create a fake secret government program to purchase roughly $145 million worth of “luxury real estate in South Florida,” Mr. Hakala said. All the luxury properties were in the Palm Beach area, according to court papers.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing