A former C.I.A. officer who 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.
Mr. Rush 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 — one that only a few people were permitted to know about — 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.
That sum was transferred from government coffers to a holding company to facilitate the purchases, Mr. Hakala said. Mr. Rush planned to also have expensive renovations done on the properties so they could be resold for profit, the prosecutor said.
Separately, in 2025, Mr. Rush “knowingly disclosed” top secret information about the existence of a clandestine source of intelligence to a “foreign government official,” Mr. Hakala told Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Prosecutors did not explain further, and a portion of Mr. Rush’s guilty plea was conducted under seal.
Mr. Rush also orchestrated a scheme in which he arranged to take roughly $1.8 million in private charter flights, paid for by the government, that had no legitimate purpose, prosecutors said.
After prosecutors recounted his crimes in open court, Mr. Rush, wearing an olive green prison jumpsuit, agreed that he had committed those acts.
A lawyer for Mr. Rush declined to comment outside court. His sentencing was scheduled for January.
Officials say they learned about the full details of Mr. Rush’s schemes after he was arrested.
When F.B.I. agents first searched his house, they said they found 303 gold bars. In court on Tuesday, prosecutors said that the correct number was 298 gold bars, and that they had cost the government more than $46 million to obtain. As part of the scheme, Mr. Rush told colleagues that he had given the gold to others as part of the secret program, when in fact he had taken them from his office in Loudoun County, Va., to his home nearby.
“The program did not exist,” Mr. Hakala said in court.
People familiar with the investigation had said Mr. Rush’s fake program to obtain the gold bars was supposedly related to “continuity of government operations.” That term usually refers to the government being able to operate during a national disaster or an attack.
Mr. Rush “read in” two colleagues to the program in a manner that prevented them from talking to others about it. Then he persuaded one of them to transfer millions of dollars to the program via a fraudulent government contract, the people said.
According to court documents, Mr. Rush requested 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.
A public trial of Mr. Rush was always unlikely, given the sensitive nature of his work.
At the time of his arrest, he was at work on highly classified programs for both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon that government officials wanted to keep under wraps.
Mr. Rush had worked closely with Stephen A. Feinberg, the deputy secretary of defense, for years. Before the C.I.A. fired Mr. Rush, the two had collaborated on a highly classified program focused on spying on China.
When the C.I.A. began investigating Mr. Rush, Mr. Feinberg reached out to the agency to vouch for Mr. Rush’s work for the Pentagon.
The investigation of Mr. Rush, according to people briefed on the events, began with the C.I.A. opening an espionage inquiry. That work eventually uncovered the fraud that led to the charges and the plea deal on Tuesday.
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