A senior CIA officer pleaded guilty to wire fraud Tuesday after fabricating classified programs to funnel nearly $194 million in taxpayer money into gold bars, luxury real estate, and fine watches — and he also admitted exposing a secret U.S. intelligence source to a foreign government official.
David Rush, 49, copped to one count of wire fraud in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, and faces up to 20 years at his January 28 sentencing before U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff. But the staggering dollar figures only tell half the story. According to NBC News, Rush also disclosed "certain descriptive information of a U.S. government clandestine human source" to a foreign official in late 2025 — information that could endanger the source's life and jeopardize America's ability to recruit informants who depend on "the U.S. government's assurance of absolute secrecy." The Guardian and the New York Post made no mention of this disclosure.
Rush worked in the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology with a top-secret clearance, serving as liaison to the Pentagon. NBC News reports he collaborated closely with the Defense Department's second-in-command, Steve Feinberg. He fabricated a "highly classified" program to justify moving roughly $145 million to a holding company he controlled, then used those funds to buy four luxury properties in Palm Beach and Hobe Sound, Florida. He concocted a separate "sensitive government activity" to acquire 298 gold bars — roughly 600 pounds — stashed in his Virginia home alongside about $2 million in cash and 35 luxury watches.
"Rush effectively acted as his own approving official, enabling him to expend substantial amounts of United States government money without meaningful scrutiny," court documents say.
The same spy agency that demands ever-expanding budgets and blind trust from Congress couldn't be bothered to verify whether one of its top officers actually graduated from Clemson or Rensselaer Polytechnic, or served as a Navy pilot. He did neither. Rush enlisted in 1997 and was honorably discharged from the Navy reserves as a lieutenant in 2015, according to the FBI. He also fraudulently claimed tens of thousands in military leave compensation, the Guardian reported.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said Rush "abused his position and betrayed the public trust and should be held fully accountable." Attorney General Todd Blanche touted the Trump Administration's commitment to "rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government." Rush's defense attorney, Jessica Carmichael, previously dismissed the gold bars as "basically a non-issue" and "nothing more than a sensational tidbit," insisting her client properly obtained them and kept them locked in a basement safe. "Mr. Rush never claimed they were his," she said.
The intelligence community's inspector general is now separately investigating how Rush evaded detection for years. The question worth asking: what does it say about the oversight apparatus that it took finding 600 pounds of gold in a staffer's house to notice something was wrong?
