The Rest Is Classified - 168. Trump's New Director of National Intelligence and the CIA's Missing Gold Bars

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

Who is Trump's new Director of National Intelligence? Is the US Intelligence Community becoming increasingly politicised? And what's the story behind the CIA officer who has allegedly stolen millions of dollars in gold bars? Listen as David and Gordon head inside some of the latest news stories coming out of the world of intelligence in the US. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see David and Gordon live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 4 September: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/the-rest-is-classified-live/⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign⁠-up⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the declassified club at the rest is classified.com. What is going on with the Trump administration and the US intelligence community? And how did a CIA officer wind up with $42 million in gold bars stashed at his Virginia home? Well, welcome to the rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey.

And this is a special kind of bonus newsy episode, which we're going to release both to our club members, but also to the general audience as well. So do sign up if you want to hear more of this kind of thing. But we thought we'd have a little look at what's going on inside the US intelligence community. David, we do this now and again. Because there's been a lot going on, it's fair to say. Some little questions about politicisation and some big appointments at the top. But also this bizarre question.

which I did think of when I first heard about it, this new story, about gold bars. And I can see some of them behind you, David. That's right. That's right. Whenever you leave the CIA Gordon, you're given 303-1-kilogram gold bars and told to keep them safe, you know, for the rest of your life. And in this case, you know, one of these guys just he didn't keep them safe. No, it's a, this is an insane story. and I would encourage anyone listening to this to just Google the name David Rush and Gold Bars.

And you will find some headlines that I think they're the sort of headline I come across occasionally, where I think if I included this in a novel, my editor would say, this is too much. No way. This is unrealistic. This is unrealistic. I did think it was a bit of a joke when I first heard it. It's like one of those spoof onion headlines. or something like that, because you used to think, no way could someone steal that much money from a highly secure organization and highly competent organization like the CIA and get away with it, David. Well, it wasn't like an Italian job heist courted.

It wasn't like he came in like Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible. It was sort of roping into this secure room at Langley. And I guess maybe it's worth setting up. Yeah, let's explain what happened. What has happened is that on the 19th of May, so a few weeks ago, a senior CIA officer, and there's a little bit of confusion, I think, in the press about whether he was currently employed at CIA or whether he had just left. But at any case, a CIA officer named David Rush was arrested at his home in Virginia after FBI special agents searching his home seized 303 one kilogram gold bars, market value around 42, million dollars. And alongside the gold, there was a couple additional million in foreign currency

and 35 luxury watches. And David Rush, and this is the crazy part, Gordon, and we'll get into this, is that David Rush also seems to have committed some time card fraud while he was at CIA. And that is what he's been arrested for. So he has not actually yet been arrested for. For the gold in his house, for the watches, for the currency. He's been arrested for fraudulently claiming $77,000 of compensation on his time cards over a decade-plus CIA career. It's wild. This episode is brought to you by HP. In intelligence work, it's rarely the obvious problem that causes failure. It's the overlooked detail or the flaw nobody quite solved. The kind of vulnerability, intelligence services look for. And running a business is the same, especially

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Hello, mid-sized business. We see your big ambitions, but how do you achieve the wins you want when your technology is holding you back? SAP Grow is built to grow with your business, no matter its size, with AI embedded at its core, working across every system, all ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud, ERP for any size business. Are you going to explain now about time cards? I imagine this is like, is this like Factory workers, like you see these old films from Britain in the 50s where they had to punch in and punch out. It's not a physical punch in, punch out. You do have to fill out a time card, though. You don't have to do that when you go to Langley. It's called a time and attendance card.

It's like a school. I remember having to fill these out regularly. You fill about every two weeks and there was, you know, emails would go out to say, get your TNA in. This is the number one reason why people get fired from CIA is time and attendance fraud. And the reason for this, I guess we'll just do this now because I think it's, I think this is an amazing part of the CIA bureaucracy is, okay, you are paid for an eight hour day. If you are staying late for something, and let's just talk about the world of Langley here, not the field. If you're staying late for something, you're writing a PDB, president's daily brief article, and you stay till two in the morning, you can then claim overtime, which is paid, you know, I think a time and a half or something like that. You can claim overtime. If you are overseas, you can be in localities where you're getting danger pay, a bonus kind of supplement on top of your regular time. And in the case of David Rush, he was claiming to be on military leave as part of the Navy reserves.

When, as we'll see, he was not still in the Navy. And he was claiming this bonus time. So basically, he's not working his real job. He says he's away on his Navy Reserves gig, and he's claiming that time, but in fact, he's just lounging at home in Virginia or something. So that's why he's been arrested so far. $42 million of gold bars, that's fine. But you mess with your hourly rates and your time and attendance. That's what gets you in trouble.

Let's do who this guy is, because I just think, I mean, his whole story of who he is and the backstory, I mean, it raises lots of really interesting questions to be. No offense, David, about who they let him. into the CIA and, you know, what kind of people get in? And I mean, I should know from having worked with you for so long that only people of the highest standards could possibly ever work for CIA. But this, in my mind, suddenly raises some interesting questions. Yes. After working with me, Gordon, you've just thought, you know, these are the most brilliant people with the highest sort of moral rectitude. That's exactly what I thought. How did this guy slip through the cracks? And honestly, I've had, I've had a lot of conversations with CIA officers.

current and and former about this case to get ready for this episode. And everybody, the initial reaction from everybody, is just complete shock. There's no sort of like, oh, yeah, you know, this makes sense. I mean, it just, it, there's so many levels on which it doesn't make any sense at all that, that it is, it's been shocking to everyone I've spoken to. So, let's give a little brief on what the FBI, is the FBI is actually put out. There's a publicly available affidavit from one of the special agents involved in this case that gives us some more information about who Rush is and and why he has, why he has been caught with so much, so much gold in his home. So according to this affidavit, late in 2025, so last year,

Rush requested a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for what he described as work-related expenses. And what he seems to have done, done, and we'll get into this in more detail, is he has created a fake special access program, which is, it's called an SAP, and it is a program that, for example, you know, when I was inside the agency, I had a top secret, you know, what's called a TSSCI clearance, top secret, you know, sensitive or special compartmental information clearance, right? That doesn't mean you get access to everything. Yeah. Does it mean like you just get the, all the stuff?

What is common if there's a really particularly sensitive source or a sensitive technical collection program or a covert action program is that these are put into special access programs that people are read into on a case by case basis. And the advantage of that, obviously from a, you know, sort of protecting sources and methods viewpoint is you limit the number of people who could potentially leak that information. So it's highly compartmented. You can see how if you were using a special access program to embezzle millions of dollars, it would also be a very useful vehicle because very few people would have insight into what's

actually going on. And we'll come back more of the mechanics of that. So he has set up the special access program and claimed that the gold, the watches, the currency were payments associated with that program. And what's wild, though, is that you would think, Gordon, that the presence of 303 gold bars at your home would be the thing that gets you caught. Yeah. It's not.

What initially started raising flags was credential fraud. And what seems to have tripped up rush and brought him to the, the attention of the FBI, is that aspects of his biography and experience, the way he had portrayed himself to the agency, turned out to be false. His CV. He made up his backstory. Okay. That's right. Not the gold bars. Okay. That's right. And the FBI affidavit goes into some detail on the false claims that Rush made throughout his CIA career. So he claimed that he had a bachelor's degree from Clemson University. This is not true. He does not have a bachelor's degree from Clemson University. He claims he has a Master's of Science from Rinsular Polytechnic Institute in Computing

Technology and Electrical Engineering. He never attended. His first, what's interesting is Rush actually applied three times to the CIA, twice in 2006 and then again in 2009. On his first application, he said he had a master's from the naval postgraduate school. Yeah. This was dropped from subsequent applications because he does not have one. Okay. This part, I think this is even better. So he claims to be a pilot, a Navy pilot, that he had been in the Navy

prior to joining the CIA. A review of it, and he had been at the Navy, but he was not a pilot, right? He has no pilot's license, and he never underwent any pilot evaluation. during his naval career. Wow. He claims to have been a U.S. Air Force test pilot school graduate. This is false. And he claimed that he had a current director of test position.

He did this on an application to get into the senior executive service at the CIA. Because he was a very senior officer, by the way, very senior officer at the CIA. And he claimed to be director of test for a 145 person, 18 aircraft, joint Army Navy weapons test organization as late as 2018, but he had actually left the Navy in 2015. Now look, I've heard of people slightly embellishing their CVs,

you know, slightly exaggerating their accomplishments. But this is something else. And I'm afraid, David, this raises little questions about the CIA and its employment procedures, which is, does no one check? I mean, does no one do, check these things? I mean, they don't strike me as that hard to check if you're the CIA. What would not think so? And I will say that I think the two big questions that come out of this,

this is the first one is, how does a serial fabricator actually even get in? Right? Because shouldn't someone have checked or called Clemson and said, did he actually graduate? Oh, wait, no. Well, what is this diploma you've given us? Because I'm pretty sure he, I think he, he faked a diploma and submitted that as part of his application. So you're right. I mean, I think a big question is, how does someone like this get in and stay in? He was probably polygraphed at least three times over the course of his agency career. I mean, it suggests he's a very, very good liar, which you could say makes him perfect for the CIA in some ways. Well, well, I actually, I actually think, you know, I mean, not to go all armchair psychologist on you, Gordon, but I think if you

are a sociopath, the stress indicators that the body normally gives off when you're lying, sweat, heart rate, breathing, all this kind of stuff that can trip the polygraph, don't, they don't happen. You're fine with it. Yeah. You're totally comfortable with it. You're not stressed by lying. Right.

Yeah. It's the George Costanza thing. You know, it's not a lie if you believe it, right? I mean, that's, I think, how this happened. When you get into the sort of mechanics of how the CIA brings someone into the organization and how they do these checks, it's interesting to me because Rush would have joined around the same time than I did. I joined in 2006.

He got it in 2009. So we went through a very similar process. One of many parallels, yeah. Yes, one of many, including the gold sitting behind me. So, you know, on this question of, well, how would someone get in? So when Rush applied, as I did, you know, you fill out this massive form, which is called an SF86, on which you basically catalog your entire life, where have you lived, your education, your employment history, you know, foreign ties, foreign travel, all of your relatives, you know, obviously if you have any criminal history, drugs, whatever it is, it's a massive form. It's very invasive. You fill this whole thing out. and then the CIA runs a background investigation on you. And this is a very, it's not just like a quick background check that's done digitally. The CIA, these aren't CIA officers, I think they're contractors.

They actually send people out to go and visit with people that you have listed on the SF86. So when I went through this, they sent people to my college to talk to my college friends about me. They sent people to my neighborhood. It is actually deeply upsetting to my neighbors because this guy came out quite literally in a trench coat. And he walked up and down the street on which my childhood home sits. And he asked neighbors about me. And they were very creeped out. Yeah, I bet.

Like, I think they thought that I had committed some kind of crime. First of all, how do they... I've got lots of questions about this. In the UK, it's developed vetting is the same thing. And it was quite controversial because we had it with Lord Mandelson, who had been appointed Ambassador Warren. Washington, had it been properly vetted and all these questions. But when the guy was walking in the trench coat down your old childhood street, does he say,

oh, by the way, David's planning to join the CIA? I mean, how do they... But is they kind of obvious? Because, like, why else is a guy to trench coat asking about this? So they're definitely not saying CIA. Okay. But a government job, they might say. Maybe.

Maybe. I mean, I'm not even sure if they do that. But he's, you know, this guy apparently was asking, I remember a couple instances of this. the neighbors, apparently there was a lot of conversation about whether I had caused problems in the neighborhood or thrown parties or things like that. And I was young, obviously, at the time, and still have. And he was very concerned about, you know, sort of youthful indiscretions. When he went to my college campus and spoke with one of my friends, apparently it was this big question about foreign travel because I have been on a trip to France with this friend.

Wow, France. Yeah. Right. Right. Very exotic. And he was like trying to figure out, okay, well, what, you know, when were you there? Did you go to other countries? This kind of thing.

Because obviously what he's trying to do is he's trying to match those dates against what I put in the SF 86, as well as get kind of an overall, you know, character assessment or something like that. So the point is that it's a pretty in-depth process. And one would think that the massive number of fabrications that David Rush would have made on his SF86 would have been caught. But here's the thing. Today, the agency, as do most big corporations, has fairly sophisticated software that it uses, obviously commercially available stuff, to run a check on the SF8. F-86 against the digital footprint that most of us make, you know, online, right? And to do a lot of this stuff to kind of flag applications where there might be a higher risk of, you know, fabrication.

This was not done in 2006, 2009, right? This is a manual process, which means that the investigators, the contractors that were looking at David Rush's application took the... And I don't know what the procedure was, but it means they took the Clemson diploma and they never checked. Maybe they put in a request to Clemson and never heard back and they said, whatever. And I do think, you know, it's interesting. Like at the, what we did the Snowden series last year, there was a this kind of dropped handoff between the CIA that had real concerns about Snowden and the NSA when he was working on a contract at the NSA. Whereas like the CIA was basically like, I think, I think it was put into the system called scattered.

castles, which oversees a lot of the clearances, and kind of is like a supposed to be a centralized repository for what, you know, who has what clearance and who, and basically Stonon was flagged by the agency in scattered castles. Like, don't give this guy a clearance, but the NSA missed it because they didn't, they didn't, you know, the contractor didn't check in scattered castle. So like, I actually think with the Navy, it must have been a similar dropped ball where like the investigators that were doing this just didn't check with the Navy. They just took it on faith. They just took it on face value in the SF86. And obviously, Rush would control the references on the SF 86. And if he's lied to his neighbors and friends about what he's doing, which he did,

then everyone's going to have the same story about him. And so it's all going to check out. Yeah, it's all going to check out. But he'd worked at a fire department as well, hadn't he? The Ashburn Volunteer Fire Department. That's right. But again, there, I mean, there's, This is a very good NBC news piece from Rich Shapiro, who's gone and interviewed some of the colleagues. And it sounds like, again, there there's this kind of record established of being some kind of, I mean, fabricator, fantasist, I don't quite know. Everyone that Shapiro interviewed, and by the way, I'd highly commend this piece because it's, it's fantastic. What a great piece of journalism. This guy went out and went to the volunteer fire department where Russia had served.

Everybody there thought that Rush was a top gun fighter pilot. And he'd flown sorties over Iraq and Afghanistan. Apparently, when Rush joined, he was also, he was in great shape. He said his call sign in the Navy had been dumpster. And then he got the name because he got drunk once and wound up in a dumpster. I think that's, I mean, that's a great call sign, I think. Definitely top tier. Yeah, if I was going to pick a call sign, I would not pick dumpster.

I mean, Maverick, you know, Iceman, Dumpster. So here's the thing is Rush had been in the name. in a technical role that I think did obviously deal with aircraft. And so he could speak in a compelling way to other people about his, his experience as a naval fighter pilot. And he looked, all these guys in the Ashburn Volunteer Fire Department said he just, he kind of looked apart. And he wasn't, he was sort of soft spoken about it in a way.

Like he would open up about it once he was pressed, but he wasn't out there trying to advertise this to everybody. So he came across to everyone there, like, really credible. He looked apart. He could, you know, talk the talk. And everyone assumed that, oh, why would this guy make this up? He seems to be, of course, this is what a top gun fighter pilot looks like. Okay.

So that kind of tells us how he managed to get in CIA. But I think the next question is the gold bars. is how do you how do you possibly justify without wishing to give anyone in CIA any tips how is it possible

to get 42 million dollars of gold bars stashed at your house we don't want to give it you know we don't want to encourage this kind of behavior but I'd quite like to know

how we did it so when I put this question to a lot of my contacts they all had the same the same answer that Rush came up with which is you create a fake special

access program. You create a highly compartmented program that needs funding is what you do. And what it, what it seems like he did, and I'm reading a little bit between the lines here in some of the reporting, and there's still a lot that I'm sure is going to come out. I think his special access program may have been under Department of Defense auspices. And he was a CIA liaison to this, or overseeing it as part of his work with the Pentagon. Right. But that would be because the Pentagon has a much larger budget and because he was sort of sitting at the seams of the CIA at the Pentagon,

I think it's very possible that neither leadership group had full awareness of what he was doing. Now, I'm a little bit reading between the lines here. But what I find fascinating, though, is the, special access program, because initially where my head went when I saw the headlines on this, was like, that seems hard because if you were, for example, let's say you're doing what Bill Hayden was doing in Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, and you've created fake agents. Yeah. Right.

At some point, there's going to be case officer turnover. Like, you don't get to just handle these cases in perpetuity. And so you could create, you know, a network of fake agents or really, really primo fake agent that seems to be. And you write the intels that come in and they're really, really good and everyone's excited about it. But, like, that is not going to last. It's not sustainable, is it?

It's absolutely not sustainable. Because you're right. You hand over an agent to a new officer every couple of years. So unless you were, unless you were bringing them in, it just wouldn't work. And also, what's the intelligence and, you know, where is it going? But also, $42 million in gold bars seems like a lot. I mean, that's no agent or even, I mean, maybe, you know, that seems like a lot. Yeah.

Well, that's the other thing that my, you know, former colleagues have flagged is just, there's a level to this that obviously Rush was exceptionally greedy and or sort of a compulsive, like he was getting he was getting sort of his kicks out of the con and maybe the fact that these gold bars like by all accounts his home in Ashburn is pretty modest

he doesn't seem to have been living outside of his beings I do wonder again armchair psychology here if this was just like the thrill of the con was what he was in it for. He's a hoarder. Yeah and it wasn't about spending the money it was about taking the money if that makes sense.

But the special access program is really interesting that he seems to have set up because it was a continuity of government operation, which is basically it's a contingency plan for keeping the American government functional in the event of like a massive catastrophe, nuclear war, you know, another pandemic. And it's a big question. In a nuclear war, how do you keep American intelligence functioning? Yeah. What if the banking system is taken down, for instance, by a cyber attack or by, in the event of a nuclear explosion or something like that? Now I'm starting to understand a little bit about why gold might play a role, because that's, you know, rather than just stacks of cash or something else. Continuity of government makes more sense, doesn't it? Because if the question at the heart of that program is how do we maintain some kind of skeleton intelligence function, if the banking system goes down, or if three cities are obliterated in an opening strike of, you know, what becomes a nuclear conflict with the Russians or the Chinese, you could start to see how having a stockpile somewhere, like having a site and having gold to, you know, continue to conduct operations, make some sense. Now, it's also the case.

I mean, it is also the case, obviously not this amount of money. But in some, you know, geopolitical environments, we pay agents in gold. Like, it's very dense. It's obviously, you know, you can transport it fairly effectively. I thought it would be diamonds, little balance of diamonds. Sure, it could be either. Yeah. It could be either.

Yeah, that's what I was imagining. Okay. It could be either. So the idea of payment in valuables is that's a thing. I mean, when we did the Tolkachev episode, I think they paid him in, they went and found some, you know, really expensive jewels at like a Russian boutique jeweler in the States and then brought those to the, you know, the Soviet Union to pay him with those. So is there a gold vault inside Langley? And then again, asking for a friend because I think

there's a kind of gold finger style heist movie, which could be done, breaking into the gold vault at Langley. Do they, do they have like a massive storage? No. No. No. So here's the brilliance of what he did, because if that was the case, there's going to be somebody somewhere who has paperwork that says David Rush has checked out $42 million in gold. But if you have a special access program like this that has been set up for continuity of government operations, and if you have a line item inside it that says there needs to be a certain amount of funding for this, let's say, a gold stockpile that we'll use an event of whatever XYZ could What he seems to have done is he read in a few other colleagues, one of whom was in a position

to approve the transfer of millions of dollars into this special access program. And then he drew up a fake contract and tendered it to a defense contractor who then supplied the gold, allegedly to fund his operations. And that gold ends up at his home in Ashburn. So it's not coming out of a CIA, Fort Knox. Gold Vault. It's a contract that a defense contractor had to go out and procure this gold. Wow. We should say none of this is normal, you know, as far as I can tell. This is not like, oh, the daily business of the agency has sort of bubbled up and made it into the press.

I mean, this is not a common thing. To your point on the on the payments, though, it is, it's not common, but also not unheard of for payments to be made to, assets and maybe only a few people in the organization or maybe only one person in the organization has ever met them. Once you're in, and I think this is the part that's so, I actually think the credential fraud in many ways is the much more troubling problem here, because it suggests an absolute failure of the CIA's sort of internal threat processes over the course of like a decade plus. Once you're in, there's a high degree of trust. I like the way you think making up something in your CV is more worrisome than being able to sneak out $42 million of gold and hide it in your house.

That's a very CIA way of looking things. I think most people would go like the latter is the slightly more surprising thing. But maybe in the world of the CIA's. The fake bachelor's degree was not caught. That's my number one concern here. You're outraged at that. But, you know, large suitcases of cash, it's fine. That's the way it goes.

Well, it was interesting because I had this, you know, I'm fascinated by these kind of questions of like, okay, are there examples where a case officer is going to make a request for funds? And nobody else in the organization has met the person. And sure enough, you know, was I kind of pinged my network. I found examples of this, right? And I mean, I won't go into any amount of detail here. But there are cases where, you know, for example, we purchased a property for someone. and the only person in the org who had met this, you know, potential asset was the case officer.

Nobody else had met up. So in theory, this case officer could have made this thing up and got that money and used it for something else. I mean, there's, you know, case officers do handle very significant sums of cash. I mean, in the, you know, I think it was the second series we did on the CIA in Afghanistan after 9-11. Suitcases. Yeah, millions of dollars. Those key officers were going in with millions of dollars to pay off warlords, millions of dollars. Could they have taken $100,000 out of one of those sacks and put it in their own pocket?

Maybe. I think you probably could have if you had wanted to. And the great quote I got from one of my friends was, you know, the old saying is you don't know if it's a recruitment until you turn the case over to somebody else. And because again, in that example of, let's say you've been given money to purchase a property for an asset that you invented, that case turns over in two years. And all of a sudden, you know, the case officer takes it over says, there's nothing here. You're going to prison, right? I remember hearing talking to an MI6 officer, I'll be discreet about who took over as in a station overseas. It was a long time ago, 50s, maybe early 60s.

And when they took over, they realized that the previous guy, had just made up a whole network and was just filing reports based on what was in the newspapers. Because in those days, no one back home would have access to the local newspapers and language. He was just kind of writing up, you know, all these kind of sources and agents. And that was it. But I still can't, I can't imagine anyone from MI6 would have millions of dollars in gold bars. No, never. Never.

Although if there is anyone out there listening who knows of such a case, then please write in. The rest is classified at goldhanger.com. Happy to look at the story. But it does seem curiously CIA. I mean, he does sound like a character. We should say he wasn't a case officer either, was he? He wasn't running agents. But he was quite senior, David Rush.

That's what's so interesting about him. You know, it's not some junior guy. No. So he was an officer in the Directorate of Science and Technology. So he's not a case officer, not an analyst. Apparently, you know, from everything I've heard, had a lot of friends on the seventh floor, like, well-liked. He apparently, although there have been quotes denying this, he apparently was very close with Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, with whom he had worked on a sensitive program related to China. So this guy, David Rush, was, you know, I think part of part of the reason he got away with it for what seems to be quite a long period of time was that he had.

he had friends in high places who probably just, you know, they trusted him, right? And saw him as a competent, you know, capable guideout. I will say there's some interesting kind of interagency shot in fronta because the DO people that I have spoken to. Director of Operations, yeah. Director of operations. I guess there's a little bit of a buzz of like, this is what happens when the DS&T people try to run ops. This is the kind of, you let them run ops. And they're going to steal millions of dollars. Next time someone asks for gold bars, there might be some more questions, I think.

That's to fill out some paperwork maybe next time they. Well, and that's, well, I guess we should say, that's the thing. He filled out paperwork. It's just that he obviously, and this, I guess, we'll be watching this story in the months to come. Because I think we might, he's in custody, obviously. I think we might be headed toward a very interesting trial. And we'll, of course, cover that if and what we do. But that's the crazy part is that this guy,

probably also had some witting or unwitting accomplices inside the organization. So a lot of this, you know, there's going to be some house cleaning at Langley and maybe the Pentagon that'll bring more of this to light. So yes, lots to watch there and questions for the CIA. And I think they might be a little bit of house cleaning there. And speaking of house cleaning, there's also been some changes at the top of the US intelligence community. So let's take a break and afterwards we'll come back. And we'll see what Donald Trump has been getting up to with his spies. See you after the break. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update.

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nothing else is Rees's. Welcome back. Enough on gold bars now to the subject of politics and Donald Trump. And what's going on, David, inside US intelligence? Because we've had some kind of really interesting shifts back and forth about who's going to be the new director of national intelligence. And we thought it might be an opportunity to give people a little bit of an update on what's going on there. And this issue, which we have been trying to watch quite closely, which is, is there politicisation? Is there a risk of. politicization, what's going on inside Washington and the intelligence world? I guess we should say that the chronology here starts because last month in May, Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, announces that she is going to resign effective June 30th. Her husband has a rear bone cancer, and she wants to be able to be with him through his treatment. Trump then announces that he's going to name a guy named Bill Pulte to the DNI role. Now, Pulte runs the federal housing finance agency, which is obviously a natural jumping off point to being the head of the U.S. intelligence

community. He's basically the government's mortgage advisor. He chairs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are these two massive mortgage giants that facilitate the mortgage market in the state. He's the mortgage man. He's the mortgage man. There is immediately a high degree of alarm and consternation in the Senate because of the Pulte nomination. I think in part because he has no experience and also in part because in his role as the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte has developed a reputation as a political hatchet man for Donald Trump. And there was fear on both sides of the aisle in the Senate that he would bring that mentality to the DNI role, which is supposed to be, we'll talk more about how it's changing, supposed to be a, you know,

apolitical intelligence and national security job that's given to someone who has deep national security experience. Because the claim, the allegation was that actually in his mortgage role, he'd been reaching into the mortgage system to pull out records of Donald Trump's political enemies. That was the allegation to be used against them, effectively, to start investigations against people on the, you know, the Federal Reserve, the bank. banking organization, you know, people in New York who've been prosecuting Donald Trump. So I guess the worry was that he would bring the same techniques into the even more sensitive world than mortgages of the intelligence community and reach into the intelligence community

and kind of pull out information that could be used against enemies and also, I think, be a hatchet man in the sense of cutting the place and, you know, kind of going after and sacking enemies and sacking people with the intelligence world as well. You can see without why there'd be a bit of uproar, which there was. There was. And then, so Trump then walks the Pulte nomination back and says, well, he's just going to be the acting DNI until I find a permanent replacement. Now, Pulte could have banned the acting DNI into like January. And because there was so much concern on the hill about Pulte's nomination, Trump eventually says,

okay, wait, no, Pulte will not be the DNI, nor the acting. DNI. I'll name this guy named Jay Clayton to be the DNI nominee. I also think another factor in this was that the House did not extend Section 702 of the FISA Act, which allows, we covered this in our Snowden episodes, but that allows the government to compel U.S. tech companies and telecommunications companies to turn over communications from foreign nationals. And there can be incidental collection of U.S. persons under that. It's actually a very controversial authority. And the House decided not to extend that, in part to put pressure on Trump to fully withdraw Pulte and to put another nominee in. And that's how you end up with Trump

then nominating Jay Clayton to be the DNI. Now, Clayton is the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. It's one of the most powerful positions in the Department of Justice. He's also the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in that role, he'd overseen a number of high-profile cases, including the prosecution of former Venezuelan president, Nicholas Maduro. And it seems like CIA director John Ratcliffe is the one who suggested Clayton to Trump. Yeah, I read that, that John Ratcliffe had suggested him being the right person, which is very interesting, because once again, it suggests that Ratcliffe behind the scenes is quite influential.

And in this case, has kind of extended his influence even to the DNI where there's been, I think, you know, we might come back to this, some tension between the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA over whose kind of top dog and who gets to pick who's chief of station in, you know, various overseas capitals. So there's a, so it's interesting because this, you'll be pleased to hear, David, given your love of the organisation, is another win for the CIA is what it makes it sound like bureaucratically. It seems to be quite good at fighting bureaucratic.

bureaucratic battles. But I guess also, I mean, we should say with the fact Pulte was withdrawn shows to some extent some of the checks and balances of Congress do work, I mean, maybe only at the more extreme cases. But in this case, it does seem to have worked. The system kind of forced Trump to pull back from something which, you know, people said this is, this is too far. Yeah, it is a seemingly kind of rare. occurrence these days to have Congress actually flex its muscles and put a check on the executive branch. But that's exactly what happened here. And I really do think there's the fact that the D&I statutorily, it needs to be someone who has a, quote, extensive intelligence or national security

experience, which obviously- Bill Pulte didn't as a mortgage-a-bizer. Bill Pulte did not. Now, you could you could make the argument that Jay Clayton does not have that either, but Jay Clayton does not have the same reputation that Bill Pulte has for being essentially a political enforcer and for, you know, as Pulte has, for there to be allegations swirling around him that he has misused or abused his powers as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency for political ends. Like, there's none of that swirling around Clayton. So even though Clayton, I think would probably be, in terms of the intelligence and national security experience, probably the least qualified DNI that we've ever had in that respect. He will not have the same aura as Pulte had.

Pulte's nickname was literally little Trump. So Clayton's not the same. But I think both Democrats and Republicans have expressed a desire to confirm Clayton really quickly as a result. Yeah. I mean, it's worth just maybe a quick moment just to say, for those who don't know what the DNI does, the Director of National Intelligence, part of the post-9-11 reforms. And they are the manager of the intelligence community. So they're not operationally running things like the CIA and intelligence collection or the NSA.

But they oversee it, don't they? And they also lead the process of briefing the president. And they often brief the president themselves. But also, I mean, it's been interesting to see the role evolve because we've had Tulsi Gabbard. in it, who is, I think it's fair to say, was a controversial pick in her time and has not been particularly influential either. I mean, she was pretty much marginalised over Iran, Venezuela, a lot of the big events this year. She's not played a major role, which I think is one of the other reasons, you know, almost everyone thought she was on her way out. So it is interesting because

it's felt like there have been instances of politicisation and pressure perhaps, but also of marginalization, different structures, a kind of fluidity to the US intelligence community under Trump, which this is another sign of. I mean, how worried do you think people are, people you speak to, about that, about the turnover, about who's getting these jobs, about whether they're political hatchet people, or whether they're going to politicize the agencies? I think the answer to that question depends a bit on where you sit, because I wouldn't want to create the impression that Tulsi Gabbard or more broadly, the way that the Trump administration has interacted with the intelligence community, none of those things have prevented it across the board from doing its job. It's not like it's all the sudden not functioning.

And so when I talk to people who are still inside, a lot of daily life, it just goes on as it did before. because these are really big bureaucracies, right? I mean, there's 18 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. And the CIA, you know, has upwards of 20,000 employees, not to mention all the contractors. So these are big, big places that, to some degree, have an immunity to the whims of what's going on at the highest levels, right? that said, my sense is what's happening, and you can kind of see this in the way that Trump has leaned on John Ratcliffe, for example, the CIA director, to be the guy in the room when they're making decisions on Iran, on Venezuela. Ratcliffe is the one who's sharing the podium with Trump when that downed airman is rescued in Iran. and this interesting piece of CIA tech that we talked about is used to locate him.

So Ratcliffe is taking on this job as sort of the principal advisor to the president for intelligence. It's John Rackleff. It's the CIA director. It's not the DNI. The DNI role has, I think, turned into under Trump a much more political job in which, the role is to confirm the policy, to promote the policy, not to inform the policy. I think that is what's happened to the DNI role under Trump. And the DNI itself is an organization. You know, we should say one of the failures, I think, of that, you know, the post-9-11 intelligence reforms

was the DNI was envisioned as the true leader of the U.S. intelligence community with control over budgets and personnel, that never happened. So the DNI job turned into this kind of coordinating managerial layer that would sit notionally above all of these other agencies, but without any practical budgetary control, for example, over the CIA. The DNI doesn't appoint the CIA director. The DNI doesn't appoint the chief of station overseas. That is the kind of the chief U.S. intelligence rep in a particular country. Like the DNI doesn't do any of that. And so what instead you have in the Trump 2.0 world, I think is a DNI that has sort of morphed into this increasingly kind of political, almost strategic communications role. Yeah. Rather than someone who is, you kind of in the weeds advising the president on intelligence matters.

Yeah. They're not kind of operationally managing the intelligence community. But you're right. It's interesting, isn't it? Declassification as a tool of. politics and of communications, that's where the DNI has been used. Because you've seen these pushes to declassify lots of things. I mean, everything from, I mean, COVID-19, of course, we've been talking about lab leaks and things like that. We talked a little bit, didn't we, about how we've seen declassifications of that, JFK files, and of course files on Trump-Russia investigation, also Havana syndrome, something I think we're going to look at soon on the podcast. these issues which they basically want to declassify things to say often the previous administration was wrong, was guided by its own politics, had politicized the intelligence community itself, kind of this sense of a deep state hiding things or twisting things, and now we're revealing the truth and we're going to declassify through the DNI. That seems to be the way in which it's been used primarily.

Exactly. And I, you know, I think the Trump administration has been pretty consistent on two big themes related to the intelligence community. One of them is that it's too big. It needs to be downsized. And you can see that impulse in the way Trump was talking about Pulte's nomination. You know, Pulte was kind of there to further make cuts. I mean, Tulsi Gabbard herself would already cut the, you know, office at the DNI down considerably. It seems like when, you know, I don't know if this is going to be Clayton's mandate, but Trump won't. wanted Pulte to do something even more drastic. You know, you could see this when Trump took office with the attempt to basically offer a buyout to agency officers who wanted to leave, right? So pay people to exit the organization in an attempt to make it smaller. But the other piece, the political piece, the second theme, is that the intelligence community is in need of a cleansing, I would say. It's in need of a political correction that the intelligence community itself, whether it was, as we're talking about this week on the pod, whether it was its analysis on the COVID lab leak theory, whether it was its analysis on Trump and Russia, that the intelligence

community was itself politicized and therefore is indeed of a political correction. And the declassifications that Tulsi Gabbard made this week about U.S. funding for biolabs all over the world and in particular in Ukraine, the declassification has done exactly in that spirit of this was covered up before this wasn't released. I, Tulsi Gabbard, have now releasing this information. And so you have this very interesting circle where I think it becomes very hard to pin down. Did the politicization start inside the intelligence community and the administration is correcting that? Or is it, in fact, that the administration is taking a very political lens to the business of intelligence and infecting, at least right now, the kind of upper echelons of some of these agencies,

in particular the DNI, with much more politics than we've seen over the past couple decades. Yeah. I mean, it does feel as if on an operational level, the impact isn't necessarily that big. And I've been speaking to people here in London and elsewhere who say, on a day-to-day operational level, things are still going okay between, for instance, the UK and the UK. in the US in the intelligence space, but they are worried. People are conscious of what's happening at the top. And I do think there is a point of which

when the political headwinds get really strong and really difficult, that will feed down whether it's into morale, whether it's into staff retention and who stays, whether it's in whether I'm going to put my head above the parapet and say this is wrong or I think this is right when you know that the politics is heading in a particular direction. all those things you can see the potential for it, even if we're not necessarily seeing, I think, a deep politicization at the day-to-day level at the moment. Do you think that's fair?

I think that's fair. I do. But, you know, I think it's probably, I think it's interesting to maybe pull out one example of what I would argue is a pretty egregious example of politicization that occurred under Tulsi Gabbard and kind of look at it. at this and maybe pull out some of the implications of it for what you, for some of the themes you just mentioned. Because I think the best, the most egregious example that has kind of bubbled out into the open of politicization in this administration was an assessment that was done on Venezuela prior to the raid that captured Maduro. This is early 2025. There's an assessment produced by the National Intelligence Council, which is kind of the premier

analytic body in the U.S. intelligence community. They were looking at the connections between the Maduro regime and this transnational gang, Trenda Aragua. And the question was there because the Trump administration wanted to show that the Maduro regime had a kind of commanded control structure over top of this gang in order to be able to label the Maduro regime as a narco-terrorist organization and use that as the legal justification for a whole bunch of covert action programs then eventually to go and kidnap him and arrest him effectively in Venezuela. And the National Intelligence Council looks at this question. and they conclude that any kind of this coordination between the Burtura regime and Trenthe Iroagua, it's pretty unlikely.

And that finding runs very contrary to the administration's narrative on the connections between Baderow and Trentheiragua. And internal emails later show that Tulsi Gabbard's chief of staff had instructed the National Intelligence Council to revise the assessment. so it could not be used against the DNI or against Trump. A revised version softens the language a bit, but it preserves the original analytic judgment, which is we think this kind of coordination is unlikely. Details then get leaked to the press. And in May of last year,

this revised assessment ends up getting declassified and released through a Freedom of Information Act request. So it's embarrassing because it should, It shows that the intelligence community has said to the president, look, this is the reality of the situation. And the administration's talking points are totally contrary to that. Gabbard's, of course, furious. She fires the chair of the National Intelligence Council and his deputy. And then on social media characterize the officials as Biden holdovers, which I find really particularly galling because I know both of these people.

and they were long time and very well-respected analysts who had been at the agency like since before I joined, right? I mean, so they had served multiple presidents and multiple parties. It's like, it's crazy. And Tulsi said they were removed for politicizing intelligence, which is, which is this kind of opposite of what they were doing in some ways. Weird do loop of the politicization claims. Yeah. It makes it so hard to pin down what's going on. But then Tulsi moves the National Intelligence Council, which had actually said.

sat at Langley at CIA headquarters. She moves it out to a DNI facility and installs a kind of unspecified somewhat amorphous review group that's going to have a look at these National Intelligence Council assessments before they go out. And I think this example is a great one because we've talked a little bit on the pot about how hard it is to pin down politicization claims. But I think here we have an actual fact base to show the mechanics of an egregious example of it happening. And then you think, you think, think about the implications of this. If you are commissioned to write a piece of analysis about how is the war going at Iran? Is it going, are we, are we witting or losing? And now,

now you're going to put that piece out. Do you want to put your head up and say we're losing and produce something that the administration doesn't want to hear? That is the question, isn't it? Is whether you've got people in the room who can speak truth to power, whether when there's a policy shift towards saying, you know, when the Iran war, the recent war was starting, is there someone in the room who can say, well, look, the intelligence assessment is the Iranians are going to shut the straits of Pormuz and that, that's going to be a problem for you. If people aren't willing to put their head above the parapet, because they know they're going to get sacked for doing it if they don't pursue the policy, then administrations, presidents make

mistakes because they're not getting honest, unvarnished advice. So that's the risk, isn't it, with politicisation? in a sense is you lose what the intelligence community is there for, which is to give you an unbiased assessment of what might happen. And I mean, just to just to finish up, I mean, with Pulte as D&I, that would have been maybe a worry. I mean, I don't know. Do you worry about it now? Is it an issue now with Clayton, with Ratcliffe? I mean, a little bit maybe, but not as much as it might have been, I suppose. But it's something to watch. The way I would describe it is it doesn't seem like the intelligence community or the CIA.

I think I might have a separate thought on the office of the DNI right now. But if you look at the actual agencies themselves, I would say that they don't seem structurally politicized. But it's there have been enough instances of political pressure and outright politicization where it's a growing. risk. And there have obviously have been cases in the second Trump administration of individual agency officers, as we just talked about in this example with the National Intelligence Council, losing their jobs over basically standing up and saying, this is the world as I see it, and getting fired for it, pushed out. We had the examples early on of the administration of, you know, the officers who were doing, who had been kind of seconded to work doing diversity,

equity and inclusion type roles who were basically taken out to the CIA visitor center and fired and told to leave. So you have you have examples of very significant consequences for people who find themselves standing kind of in an awkward and visible role that is politically contrary to what the administration wants. And I think that the effect of that can be very chilling. and also very invisible because this Venezuela example

is visible and there's a fact base to demonstrate it but a lot of politicization kind of it can come down to memos and pieces that are not written. Yeah, things which are not said as much as things that are said. Things that are not collected on

because they're not a priority. Because you don't want to risk the political heat that will come from it. And if you walk it all the way sort of upstream. It's the people who are not, who decide not to apply to the CIA or to the NSA or wherever because they see it as a increasingly political entity. And so I think you actually do have a real, there's a talent problem in here too where you have people who don't apply, or people, frankly, like, you know, I have friends who've done this who basically said,

you know, they've been in for 15 or so years. This is. is an opportunity to just go do something else, right? And so they have all this experience. They've been trained by the agency. They're highly valued, you know, and valuable employees, and they take that expertise elsewhere because they don't want to deal with it. They might never, they're never going to appear in a data set. They're never going to give an interview and say, this is why I left. They're just going to go and take a job at a contractor that pays them more money, and they might not have to deal with this. So the problem is, you know, is systemic in that way. And it's not visible, which is why it's so hard to talk about. Yeah. Well, I think it's something we

should keep an eye on for the future. We might come back to it, do some more of these extra newsy little episodes. And of course, we've got a live show coming up September as well on the South Bank. You can still get your tickets for that for us on the Friday. And then I think with the mooch on the Saturday, Bletchley Park tickets are on sale as well. There's more information in your So I'm going to let you go back to polishing your gold bars. I'm wearing, I'm wearing, you know, 10 of the Rolexes. Yeah, exactly. Got them on my person.

Right. Yeah. So you've got a busy day ahead. But anyway, thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes?

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