August 28, 2026 • 62 mins
Spoiler: it's kind of difficult to get a job with the CIA. This pre-eminent spy outfit has high standards, exhaustive background checks, and a mandate to do everything it can to keep foreign forces from compromising it. So how did one career CIA officer manage to steal millions in gold, currency and luxury watches from his employer -- after more or less fabricating his entire resume? In tonight's episode, Ben, Matt, and Noel dive into the bizarre saga of the mysterious David J. Rush.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
A production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hello and welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 4 (00:29):
My name is Noel.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
They call me Ben. We're joined, as always, with our
super producer, Dylan, the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
they don't want you to know. Thank you so much
for tuning in, fellow conspiracy realists. As we say, one
thing we love about our weekly strange news program is
(00:51):
that it can inspire people an episode in the future.
And guys, this is one of those cases. Remember when
we first ran into the story of David Rush?
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Yeah. Gosh. Why does it feel like it was this year?
Was it this year back in June? When did we
talk about it for the first time?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
I think we talked about it earlier this year. But
we'd have to look back into it. It may be
a name that Kind of tickles your memory as you
hear it. David J. Rush. Kind of like when you
hear a name and you think vaguely of an actor
you had seen before or something.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
Well, you probably remember David Grush, who was one of
the major whistleblowers during the whole UAP thing and congressional
hearings and looking into that. So, I mean, that's when
I hear his name, that's what I think of.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
I'll tell you what my mind goes to is David Koresh.
That guy.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Oh.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
Remember him?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Unrelated.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
Both of these are unrelated. It's just about the way
things ring bells in our brains. But, Ben, I know
precious little prior to digging into your research about David J. Rush,
the former CIA officer, who had some very interesting shenanigans
going on around the middle of this year.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Yes. Yeah. And I think of, you know, I think
of the band Rush.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
Also true.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
I've been auditioning to be an old person apparently, but
also it is.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
Our boy Trevor loves rush.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
The young kids love rush.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
Rush is hot.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
I got tickets, baby.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah, you do.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Just really quickly.
Speaker 4 (02:35):
I can't, I'm so charmed by this pavement line. I
can't remember. I think it's in stereo or he's talking
about the voice of Geddy Lee. Does he really sing?
How does he sing that high? Does he talk like
that in person? Then the other guy chimes in. Oh yeah,
he does. I've talked to him. It's like a little,
And you're my fact-checking cuz. Now you're my fact-checking cuz!
That's the one.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Hey, Dylan, when are you going to see Rush?
Speaker 3 (02:55):
November, around Thanksgiving.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Phenomenal. But I was going to say that in addition
to reminding me of Rush, I think it is fair
to note that David J. Rush, indeed, in his own way,
is one heck of an actor. We just have to
figure out what kind of role he is playing. This
is a weird one for us, folks. It is an
(03:18):
ongoing story. So the full we're cooking live. The full
ending is not written yet. Welcome to the strange saga
of David Rush. You'll see that there's a lot of
stuff we simply do not know.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
One thing we do know, though, is that we are
heading back out with Virgin Voyages doing this thing called
Stuff at Sea this year. Tell about it, guys.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
Our home is the sea.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
That's right. October 2nd through the 7th, we will be
joining forces with our good friends, Stuff Mom Never Told
You and Stuff You Should Know for the Stuff at
Sea Cruise with Virgin Voyages.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
Guys, I just took a look at some of the...
This is not me shilling for Virgin. Genuinely, I think
we all had the most fantastic time when we went
on a similar cruise last year that was true crime related.
But some of the... the shore experiences they're offering this year. Dude,
like snorkeling with turtles. I saw one that was like,
there's all these like catamaran voyages and I'm going to do,
(04:16):
I'm going to do all of them guys. I'm going
to do all of them.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Their boats apparently have some glass bottoms and I cannot
wait to look down into the ocean.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
I love a glass bottom. We'll be right back. Here
are the facts. First things first folks, You probably have
heard of this news story, but you will be surprised
by the directions the rabbit hole will go in when
you start digging into this. We don't know a ton
(04:48):
about David J. Rush's early life, other than his name,
and we only know the middle initial based on the
public records, and the fact that he was born in
the United States. It's tough to find too much more
verified info, almost as if Somebody was purposely scrubbing it
(05:09):
at some point.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
Scrub-a-dub-dub.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
For example, we also don't know the guy's exact birth date,
which is pretty strange here in 2026.
Speaker 4 (05:16):
Yeah, his day and age, right?
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
We do know he was around 49 years old in
the middle of 2026 when the story started to reach
the public.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
Well, and I mentioned mid-2026 as being the source of
his shenanigans. This is when the public became aware of
these shenanigans, not when they were actually taking place. We
also know that depending on whom you ask, who you ask,
it doesn't matter either or. He has a long and
a very storied career in public service. So we're going
to give you kind of the longstanding official version of
(05:50):
who this guy was, what he got up to, and then.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
The real version, I guess. Maybe I should.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
official and no quotes around real.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Yeah. Because we've been able to confirm that he did
genuinely enlist in the United States Navy in 1997. And
records show he was an information systems technician. There's no
record of a dishonorable discharge. There's no record of a
(06:21):
notable scandal. So He was, we can assume.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
He was honorably discharged in 2015.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Right, yeah. And he got an officer commission in 2004.
And so he served like a decade or so as
an officer before being honorably discharged. Again, no scandal, no
dishonorable stuff. He also claimed to have a background in academia,
qualifications from Clemson. And help me pronounce this, guys. RPI, Renneslaire.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
Rensselaer? Oh, what a weird one. Yeah, I don't know.
Your guess is as good as mine. Quick question. If
you're honorably discharged, that means you didn't necessarily finish your
term for what you signed up for. It could be
for a number of reasons, like being injured or what
have you, right?
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Yeah, it means that the individual has completed their commitment
to whatever their bid was in the armed forces.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Got it.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
I think I'd always had in my head that it
meant you ended your service prematurely, but for like, you know,
honorable reasons so that's thanks for the clarification.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
For sure yeah we we know that um this uh
background that he claimed this undergrad from clemson and this
other degree a master's from rpi was something that he
was very proud of he definitely talked about it a
lot and we know that while many people end up
going into private industry after serving their time in the
(07:47):
armed forces Rush continued government service. He eventually became an
employee for the CIA. And over the course of 17 years,
he rose to a senior level executive position in an
outfit called the Directorate of Science and Technology. And for
everybody playing at home, this is one of the more
(08:08):
interesting arms of the CIA. They're the ones who create
technical tools of espionage.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Sort of like Q from James Bond, right?
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Yeah, very similar. It's where technology and the spoopy dupes meet.
And it's been around for quite a long time. If
you go to the Central Intelligence Agency, you can find
a little thing they wrote about two years ago, August 12, 24.
Where anything is possible. Origins of the Directorate of Science
and Technology. And in that article, you will see this sentence.
(08:39):
The lithium iodine battery, advanced medical image processing techniques, and
Google Earth can all be traced back to CIA Technical Research,
which would all fall under this little outfit, the DS & T,
or Directorate of Science and Technology. And this thing, I mean,
we would highly recommend you look at the history of it.
(09:00):
We can get into it a little bit further in
this episode, but it is definitely a program built within
the CIA as a response to Russia or the Soviet
Union launching or testing nuclear weapons and um upping their
arsenal in a way that was dangerous and this thing
(09:22):
is supposed to figure out all the advanced technology to
be able to stop them from doing that and also
to be able to continue the government of the united
states in case nuclear weapons get you know thrown our
way yeah they do a.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Lot of cog stuff continuance of government uh and If
you're looking at David at this point on paper, it
appears like he has a typical standard of trajectory for
a career member of the CIA. Yeah, your military service,
you have a background in higher education. And keep in mind, folks,
that at this level, by the time you get to
(09:58):
where Rush was, you have had... background investigations up the wazoo.
The security clearance is no joke. If you are tuning
in and you have undergone some version of this process,
you know that it's safe to say that if you
did something, the investigators are going to find out. At
(10:18):
least that's how it happens. But in this case, it
appears that someone, possibly multiple people, somehow dropped the ball.
So that's like Noel was saying, that's our official story
of his career. That's what he said. But it's not
quite the same as the real story, because the real
story reveals this official narrative has more holes than Swiss cheese.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Oh, yeah. This guy was a storyteller as much as
he was an actor.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah, that's a good way to think of it, Matt.
We're leaning heavily on an affidavit that was filed by
an FBI special agent named Matthew T. Johnson. This is
freely available online. Please do check it out if you're interested. Johnson,
who is a crackerjack investigator, gives lie to a lot
(11:10):
of Rush's claims. This dude was spinning tall tales. He
was able to verify that Rush did enlist in the
Navy back in 97, but he saw something curious. David J.
Rush's apparent academic credentials kept changing over time.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
Right.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
Rush applied for the U.S. government service on three separate
verified occasions. In March of 2006, his purported background included
that Clemson undergrad degree you were talking about earlier, Ben,
a Bachelor of Science in Math and Information Systems. from 2000,
as well as a Master of Science in Computing Technology
(11:51):
from RPI in 2004. That difficult-to-pronounce Polytechnic Institute you mentioned
as well, Ben. In addition, he also had a Master's
of Science in Computing Technology from the Naval Postgraduate School.
Upon his second application in November of the same year,
he omitted that supposed Master's from the Naval Postgrad School.
(12:15):
Third time, was the winner. He applied again in 2009.
This time, his undergrad was a Bachelor of Science in
Mathematics from Clemson, Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering from RPI,
and an, quote, undated aircraft test and evaluation certification from
the United States Naval Test Pilot School. This one, like
(12:38):
I was saying, was successful, but it really shouldn't have been.
It does feel like we're having some shifting truths. as
he's putting in these applications, right?
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, first off, usually when people
go to the trouble of getting a master's degree, they
bring it up when they apply for jobs, right? They're
not going to try to obscure that kind of thing.
And if you are a pilot, you would probably mention
it in your first two applications, right? To this level
(13:10):
of government service. Agent Johnson says, Rush told investigators or
employers that he was a Air Force test pilot. He
had graduated test pilot school, that he was the director
of testing for a 145-person testing organization that was run
(13:32):
by both the Army and the Navy in conjunction. And
he said that he was doing this currently as he
was talking to these employers about despite the fact that
we know he left the Navy in 2015. Oh, and
then also he said he was a thesis and dissertation
advisor at the Air Force Institute of Technology. None of
(13:55):
this was true.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
We also know from stories out of NBC News that
from 2011 on to about the time that he got
hired in a new position that we'll talk about, he
joined the Ashburn Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department in Northern Virginia.
And to all of those firefighters, he would spin yarns
(14:19):
about the things that he ended up writing in these applications,
that he was a naval pilot, that he flew Tomcats, F-14s,
in a bunch of different places, that he was forced
to jump out of two of those Tomcats. And in
a third one, which the cockpit caught on fire, he
had to land an emergency aircraft He told all these
(14:39):
tales about being basically from the movie Top Gun. But,
you know, in even more dire circumstances than those fictitional
pilots faced. And you can just, it really makes you wonder, like,
where does the imagination begin for this stuff and to
what end? Is it so that when, Ben, I'm imagining
(15:03):
that if he's applying for these things, right? He's applying
for government, I'm assuming a CIA job most of the
time here. It just says government service, so I guess
it's multiple different things that he applied for. But at
least one of those was for the CIA. Yeah. And
if you're applying for that, what happens? What do they do?
(15:23):
Who do they call? Everyone.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Everybody, you know what I mean? What's your second grade
teacher doing, right? What about that first girl you kissed?
You said you kissed her, but did you?
Speaker 3 (15:34):
So the real people in David's life that they would
have been able to get in touch with would say,
oh man, he never stops talking about flying those tomcats, right?
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Old, old tomcat rush. That's what we call them. Yeah,
so that can help. It's like that unethical thing people
sometimes do when they have a rental application where they're
trying to get a job, they make up a reference
and the phone number is their buddy's phone number. And
so you call them and like the employer calls our
(16:07):
former boss and it's Dylan doing a cool Dylan voice.
And he's like, oh yeah, these guys are great.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
You mean Dylan's voice?
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Exactly.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
I've had follow-up calls from folks who have listed me
as a reference on apartment rentals. I mean- what did
he think was going to happen here in terms of
like the vetting process? He was like, nah, it's cool.
Surely they'll just believe my, my tales.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
Well, one of the members of that fire department guys
was an, an army veteran. So like an actual facts
army veteran who heard these stories and said, spoke to
NBC news and others that they fully checked out. The
guy knew jets. He knew, he knew the planes. He
knew the operations. He knew the stuff going on. inside
(16:51):
the planes and about the planes, the jets rather. And
he fooled an army veteran, like on the ground in
front of him face to face. So you just imagine like,
that's some pretty high level ability to lie, stick with it,
and then just continue that narrative throughout years of service.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, the consistency is key there, right? Like making a
good souffle of deception. The problem is that when you
say you have attended a university, they're usually going to
be records of that. In fact, there are entire departments.
There are people whose whole job is to get calls
(17:34):
and emails that say, did this person go to Georgia
State or what have you? So in this investigation that
our FBI agent is doing, he finds that there's no
proof Rush even attended Clemson at all, much less got
a degree. The same with RPI. The same with being
(17:54):
a pilot, because he asked the Navy about that. Oh,
and he claimed that he attained the rank of captain.
This was also untrue, and these were things that were
very easy to verify. Oh, and then he falsified a
ton of time cards.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Oh, yeah. The university stuff, the education stuff, reminds me
a lot of Bob Lazar. And the stories that he
would tell about the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a
master's from Caltech, I think it was California Institute of Technology. And,
you know, that never could be verified by anybody. But,
(18:31):
you know, there are then claims from the people originating
these stories that, oh, well, the records have been scrubbed
purposefully for nefarious means, you know, by a government agent
of some sort. I don't think you can apply that
same kind of even skepticism of that to David's thing.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
Or maybe we should.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
And we're, am I discounting that?
Speaker 4 (18:54):
I don't know, man. But I mean, I get the
ability to, you know, absorb information, recall it on command
when you're talking to somebody, being good enough at that
to fool an Army veteran. But how did he, how
in the heck did the CIA not clock all this
stuff that was so easily verifiable? Because he did make it.
past all of these clearances.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
He did? Yeah. I think Matt and I are having
the same instinct. Like, maybe the CIA already had an
interest that would compromise your typical background check.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
We don't have any proof of that. They saw a
purpose for this man and his certain set of skills, perhaps.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
I thought it was maybe they saw somebody who was
really good at fooling the people around him.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
And they went, Oh, this guy is a freaking liar.
Oh my God. This all looks legit.
Speaker 4 (19:44):
He's our people.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
And so it's like, Hey, should we, should we call Clemson?
And they're like, Oh, come on. Don't be a. stick
in the mud. Let's roll the dice. Let's see how
far he gets. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
Yeah. Of course he didn't go, but man, this is
exactly the kind of we need here at the CIA.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
He passed the polygraph test and someone's like, yeah, those
are also like, yeah, I know, but he's got, I
like his vibe.
Speaker 4 (20:08):
He's got the cut of his jib.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
And he did have a physical good cut, according to
the fellow fireman. And you can read all about it
in some of these NBC articles. It's just about how
chiseled this gentleman was.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
He looked the part. He looked believable. So we have
to ask, you know, Johnson in the affidavit, which we
can't recommend enough. Johnson says, OK, having higher education credentials
in government service will typically equate to higher pay. from
the jump. So maybe this guy is mythologizing himself just
(20:42):
to get that pay bump. But if we want, even
if we try to exercise the most open-minded perspective possible,
it beggars imagination to think that this was a series
of mistakes on this guy's part. He was bluffing, he's
doing it on purpose. He did get top secret compartmented
information clearance, a TSSCI. So the bluff worked. Until it didn't.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
Well, the other thing that kind of begs credulity, I
suppose you could say, is like, was this a series
of mistakes and oversights on the part of the folks
vetting him? You know, I really like you guys' perspective
on that, that maybe this was like considered a feature,
not a bug. And they decided to push forward, you know,
looking at these things as almost like their own kind
(21:30):
of weird, twisted credentials. But I do think it's important
to mention, too, that these agencies aren't infallible. We know
that mistakes are made. So it's, yeah, the truth is
maybe somewhere in the middle.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
We also know that con men like this guy are
very good, adept at meeting someone, maybe having some one-on-one
conversations and building that person up, making that person believe
in the con man and making them feel good about
themselves as they're hearing these things and, you know, getting
in with somebody. And so somebody else wants this person.
(22:07):
via their little magic that they pull, the smoke and
mirrors that they just, you know, poof in your face,
getting you to want good things for them. I like
this person, this guy, I like the cut of this
guy's jib. We need to get him in a high
level position.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
There's also, you know, the human element can always be
compromised because imagine you have that in-person interview as a
background investigator and And you say, well, this guy knows
his stuff. He knows his Tomcats. The timeline that he's
giving me makes sense. We have a good rapport. This
is the easiest background investigation I've done this whole summer. So,
(22:50):
you know, he's making my job easier. I met Dave.
I don't need to follow up with all this paperwork.
That's possible that it could happen.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Well, if you have pressure from above, Ben, so I'm
imagining if there's somebody high level that he met with.
that really likes him. You might be able to pull
some strings and get past some of that bureaucratic junk.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Yeah, it happens with presidential administrations all the time. It's
happened with this current administration. People who would normally have
to go through some pretty serious checks to attain their
position have been, like the wheels have been kind of greased.
That's a great point. But what I was getting to is,
(23:30):
even after you pass that first threshold, that first investigative Rubicon,
you are going to have routine evaluations. They're still part
of the system, right? And it's going to be a
different person conducting that background check the next time. So
it's not always the same person you have rapport with. Now,
of course, if you have someone higher up who is
(23:54):
looking favorably upon you, that can definitely influence things to
a degree. But why are we talking about this now?
Why did the FBI dedicate resources to re-examining everything Rush
said in the past? We'll tell you after a word
from our sponsors.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
And we've returned. Just to stand this for one second,
I'm thinking more about the background checks and polygraphing and
all the fun things that the CIA and FBI and
various government intelligence departments do to their folks, like force
their folks to go through just to verify that everybody
is on the up and up. I didn't know that
a background check would be replicated once you've been hired on.
(24:43):
I always thought it was more of a one-on-one polygraph
kind of thing you had to do on a regular
basis just to confirm for everybody's satisfaction that you're not,
you know, a double agent and or you're not meeting
with specific people. and you have to report that somebody
has spoken with you about specific things. I just didn't
(25:07):
know they would do a full background check again. That's
new to me.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
It'd be more like a routine evaluation. What are your
finances like? Serious travel? Have you met people, as you're mentioning?
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Got you.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
We'd have to learn more. We'd love to hear from
any professional experts investigators who do those background checks. We'd
love to hear the nuts and bolts of how those
evaluations work. But here's where it gets crazy. In this
affidavit from Johnson, we see that he writes, on or
around November 2025 through on or around March 2026, Rush
(25:50):
made several requests to the United States government to obtain
a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions
of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses. What a
cool thing to do at your job. Imagine having a
(26:13):
job where you can go to someone and say, hey guys,
stuff's coming up. I can't tell you because there's a
secret program, but I'm going to need millions of dollars
in hard gold Also, how many watches do we have
in the Petty Watch Fund?
Speaker 3 (26:30):
Wasn't it like 30-something?
Speaker 2 (26:32):
32. Wasn't it a crazy number? 32, 35. Lots of Rolexes. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Noel, how much does a Rolex cost?
Speaker 4 (26:40):
I'm the guy that knows this.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Well, no, you told us once about a watch show
or watch channel.
Speaker 4 (26:48):
Uh, yes, correct. And I'm just, I've become a bit
of a watch nerd. Uh, I think the cheapest Rolex
you can get is in the $ 10, 000 range if it's new,
but you can get like vintage older ones for a
little less depending, but yeah, about, about 10 grand.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Do they go up like way, way up?
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Oh, gosh, yes. Oh, heck yeah. And they're, they're also,
some of them have like diamonds and all kinds, there's
all kinds of options and they can go up to
the hundreds of thousands of dollars range.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Yeah. And they're also very useful as an alternative currency.
Depending on the situation.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
They hold their value more than just about any other
watch brands, Rolex in particular.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
Can you imagine guys having any kind of transaction where
a part of it is a $ 200, 000 watch that you
just slide across the table or you just put it
on somebody's wrist?
Speaker 4 (27:32):
I also picture like throwing it in the chip pile
on the blackjack tables. You know, that's like the ultimate
baller move when you're tapped out and you just throw
the watch on there.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Well, think about Putin's watch collection. We're going to be
doing an episode on Putin very soon, and he's got
an enormous watch collection.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Ben, speaking of Russia, I have been unable to verify which, quote,
foreign currency was in David Rush's possession. Do we know
which country that currency was from?
Speaker 2 (28:00):
We do not know. We know that it was the
equivalent of two million US dollars, but we don't know
if it was a single foreign currency or foreign currency, geez,
I'm getting all America here, or if it was a
mix of differing foreign currencies. It also doesn't stop there
because they said, oh, because they raided his home in Fairfax, Virginia,
(28:25):
and they also raided a storage unit of his on
May 18th, 2026. And shortly after that raid, they also
alleged he stole millions of dollars through a scheme, to
make a special access program up out of whole cloth.
And to understand why that's a big deal, guys, I
(28:48):
think we have to talk about what a special access
program or SAP actually is.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
Dude, we're talking about dark money here. Talking about a
black hole where funds go in and nobody gets to
know about it.
Speaker 4 (29:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
This is the need to know stuff you hear about
in fiction and film. It's, super restricted, think of it
kind of like the above top secret stuff, having your
regular old clearance, even if it's a fancy one, is
not enough to get you through the door for a SAP,
a special access program. Like you and your coworker might
(29:24):
both have top secret clearance, right? You might even share
the same office, but if your coworker is read on
to one of these programs and you are read on
to another one, You will coexist in the same space
without anything. breathing a word about these SAPs. You have
(29:46):
to get read on in a specialized way one at
a time to these programs. So they can't just give
you a blanket access to SAP. You have to get
read on to one, And then maybe later you go
to a different one and you can be on multiple ones,
but it's the, it's still a process that has to
(30:08):
be repeated because like you were saying, Matt, it's high
level stuff.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Yeah. It's really high level stuff. And it is, it's
so secret. It's so, I was going to say it's anti-American.
It's anti-government to have these things, guys. I feel like
some of these SAPs and the folks who work on them,
They might be anti-American.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
I could see it being anti-American, but it feels very
in line with how governments work because it's– Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
But not the people's government because the people don't get
to know about it.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
You're being a little cheeky, buddy. You're being a little cheeky.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
I'm trying to make a parallel.
Speaker 4 (30:47):
I think it's intensely American. I think it's what they're
getting at as well. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
It's American as SAP.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yeah. SAPs for the SAPs. That's what David does. There
are three broad categories, acquisition, SAPs, intelligent SAPs, and operations
and support SAPs. They're pretty much self-explanatory. The acquisition is
R & D and building new toys. Intelligence is the
(31:15):
high-risk espionage, right? The human, the SIGINT collection operations. And
then operations and support, obviously, logistics and planning.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
Can we just say, Ben, these are the contracts that
Rage Against the Machine is talking about. Absolutely. These are
the government contracts, the secret money. It's literally secret money
because you cannot know what it is being used for.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Yes. And in general, this is a very smart system,
but it has a deep flaw. It has an Achilles heel, right,
on a massive level because... the framework that makes this
secrecy possible is simultaneously its greatest weakness. And this is
(31:57):
what Rush exploits because he's high level enough where he
will handle sensitive assets, including foreign currency, including valuable materials.
And his level was so high that it didn't just
allow him to participate in specific SAPs, It allowed him
(32:18):
to make them, to create them on their own. That's
exactly what he did.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
He was given that go-ahead, or he just kind of
took it upon himself?
Speaker 1 (32:30):
I just, wow.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
Ben, can we verify what that senior level CIA position was?
I can't find it anywhere. There's no CIA website that says, hey,
here's all of our top guys. Because they're CIA officers.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Even the affidavit just says government service a lot of times.
Kind of like, yeah, it's weird. It's your point, Noel.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
So in addition to not knowing what his exact title was,
they just call him a high level executive position. Uh,
we also, we're kind of assuming that he, he made
the pitch. Like he was proactive about this program. And
then somebody said, okay, yeah, you're a good guy. I
(33:18):
like you. You've got rapport. You've been working here for
17 years. Uh, you know how the, uh, butter gets spread.
Jam gets spread. Sausage gets made.
Speaker 4 (33:30):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
There we go.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
There's just no information in the reporting because every journalist
that I've seen writing on this doesn't have the ability
to get the information legally to even talk about specifics
on it.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
The New York Times article is a banger on this,
and they're a little bit cheeky. There's a little bit of,
I mean, they don't mean it as a teasing tone.
But there are a couple moments in that reporting from
the New York Times specifically where they're saying there are
things we can't print. Like we can verify this part
(34:06):
of the story, but due to national security concerns, we
can't say anything else other than our sources have verified
it's legit. And that's because the secrecy is so easy
to weaponize. And it helped him get away with it
for a while.
Speaker 4 (34:22):
It did.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
NBC News calls him, quote, a liaison to the Defense
Department for a sensitive nuclear submarine program.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Okay. And he did multiple things, too, because he was
working there for quite some time. He had a lot
of connections. And Here's the clever twist. Ethics aside, here's
the operationally brilliant part of his conspiracy. When some of
his colleagues started raising suspicions, why are you asking for
millions of dollars? What do you want all this gold for?
(34:56):
How many watches does a guy with two wrists actually need?
When they started asking him about this kind of stuff,
he would read them onto the program. And when he
read them onto the program, That meant they felt like
they were getting the information they needed. It was a
COG program. And they also, at the same time, would
(35:18):
now be legally prevented from talking to anyone about this,
including their suspicions.
Speaker 4 (35:27):
Can you imagine?
Speaker 3 (35:28):
Just that meeting. He goes through the whole thing. You
know the guy's got a giant notebook and a PowerPoint
presentation and brings you into the skiff. starts telling you
about all that stuff and at the very end is like, oh,
and by the way, none of this is real. Here's
a gold bar.
Speaker 4 (35:44):
Now go on your way. I mean, I just, I
can't help but like, you know, think about how this
siloed kind of Matryoshka doll level layers of insulation from
other branches and how, you know, so much of the
kind of ability to sort of bob and weave and
do what needs to be done for the situation is
(36:05):
kind of the very nature of some of these agencies.
It just kind of feels like this guy was able
to take that and weaponize it to his own ends
in a pretty remarkable fashion.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
Yeah. Again, weaponizing the secrecy. He used this SAP read-on
process as a way of his colleagues further and further as,
as we can tell from the scant sourcing we do have.
And at this point, guys, I think we can, I
think we can consider his colleagues victims. But originally when
(36:41):
all this broken, we'll get to how it all, how
it all shook out. Originally, those colleagues were getting looked
at as possible co-conspirators. It just, it would make sense
to think of them that way. But yeah, He made
a sap for the saps. The joke is right there.
And I hope he thought about it before he got arrested.
(37:04):
Because this is so surreal, you guys. This is a heist.
It is taking place in spoopy-dupe territory, which is already
so close to the land of make-believe. We don't know
his specific program. At least we don't know what he
told people the program was. But we know in general,
(37:26):
It was a continuity of government operation. How does Uncle
Sam continue to function after a nuclear war or a
bioterrorism attack? This might surprise some of us in the audience,
but it's really clever to make it a COG, special
access program, because those are super common for all governments.
(37:47):
It's like how if you want to steal a car,
for decades you would steal a Honda Civic.
Speaker 4 (37:54):
Because they're everywhere.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
Oh, yeah. And if you're going to, oh, gosh, what
was the movie I just watched?
Speaker 4 (37:59):
Drive.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
That older movie, Drive. One of my favorites of all time.
I forget what the vehicle is. Oh, it's like a
Malibu maybe or something like that. But it's like the
most common vehicle in the city at the time.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
Just how they did it. The more I'm hearing, Ben,
the more I'm just picturing Jimmy McGill. just like kind
of stumbling through his way towards being an attorney, but
in this case, a guy that runs a continuity of
government program for the CIA.
Speaker 4 (38:32):
Oh, I mean, it's a pretty high level grift. I
can't think of a much higher level one.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Right.
Speaker 4 (38:39):
And certainly there is some of that bobbing and weaving
I was talking about that is, again, like sort of
inherent in these kind of roles. But like this dude,
the cojones on this guy. I mean, just to be
able to continue forward and kind of figure out what
the next step is. Like, I mean, this is bold stuff.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
Like, doesn't it make you wonder if, if, if there's
not something more going on here?
Speaker 4 (39:01):
Yes. That's what I'm saying from the start. It just feels, yeah.
Like how, how is this possible to get this far?
I mean, Ben, you're always pointing out how we can't
get away with a late library book. You know, it
just doesn't seem like this could be possible if there
weren't somebody who In his pocket or that was looking
out for him, some guardian angel, or again, if some
(39:22):
of this was a feature and not a bug. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
All things, including grifts and bluffs, can end at any point.
So it's best to plan ahead. And speaking of planning ahead,
we're going to take a break for a word from
our sponsors, and we're going to enter the land of
conspiracy and speculation. Okay, we're back. So Rush did indeed
(39:49):
have very powerful connections in the upper echelons of government
as well as private industry. One of the most interesting,
there are a lot, one of the most interesting is
that prior to the CIA firing David Rush and then
him getting immediately arrested, he was close to with a
(40:11):
guy named Steven A. Feinberg, who is the current deputy
secretary of defense. So, you know, in law enforcement, they
sometimes use the phrase a rabbi, meaning like a higher
up person in the organization who can give you some juice,
who can help grease the wheels for your promotions and
so on. Feinberg was working very closely with Rush on
(40:37):
another case classified supes dupes program this one was allegedly
focused on china and feinberg knew this guy for a
while they had been working together since at least the
first uh presidential term of donald trump and if we're
being optimistic it is completely possible that feinberg saw russia's
(41:01):
as a vetted experienced asset you know you want a
right-hand man you can trust uh he may have used
his leverage to get... Well, actually, according to the New
York Times, we know that Feinberg used his leverage to
get Rush bigger roles and more involvement in certain programs.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
Ben, when did he join the CIA? Officially, do we
have that? Is it 2018?
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Actually, I believe it would have been 2009. That was
the third time he applied, like Noel was saying.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
Whoa, it's... It says he worked there for 17 years,
according to The Guardian?
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
That would put it... Oh, my God.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
It was a rotten apple in the orchard.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
Wait a second. Wait a second. Okay, I'm trying to
get my timeline straight here. We're talking about 2008, 2009?
17 years ago?
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Is my math right?
Speaker 3 (41:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
So....
Speaker 3 (42:05):
That means when he was at that Virginia volunteer firefighters group,
when he was working there, he was CIA. If that's true,
that means he's spinning tales to them about the Navy stuff.
That means he's actually working for the CIA at that time.
(42:25):
What the hell is he doing as a volunteer firefighter?
Speaker 2 (42:28):
What? It's a great way to stay in shape.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
I guess, but no, but legitimately, that's mind-blowing to me
that maybe I'm mentally flummoxed right now and I will
find my way back, but I don't understand how that
could be.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Yeah, the question of time commitment. If you're a full-time
CIA employee, maybe it's something where it just looks good
on your jacket to have public service like that. And
volunteer firefighters are awesome. So if you are one, thank
you for tuning in. But it is anomalous, right? And
we can allow us to do a few more red
(43:08):
strings here, folks, because in addition to being the Deputy
Secretary of Defense, our guy Feinberg is also a co-founder
of something called Cerebus Capital. It is a private equity
firm that you'll probably hear more about in a future
episode because it is super sketchy.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Somebody wrote to us about Cerebus Capital. And I think
that's how we learned about it a little while back.
Did we talk about it previously?
Speaker 2 (43:39):
We've been planning on making an episode on it for
a while.
Speaker 4 (43:42):
Okay. Okay.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
I think we saw something, and it was related to
Feinberg back in the day.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Oh, gosh.
Speaker 3 (43:49):
I hope it wasn't Epstein related. I don't think it was. Oof.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
But now we always have to check. That's something we
always have to do off air now. There's another red string,
which is the Intelligence Advisory Board. This is what Feinberg
was heading up under the first presidential term of Donald Trump.
And the IAB or the Intelligence Advisory Board is pretty
(44:13):
interesting because they have the ear of the White House
on all tradecraft activity related to collecting intel and cough cough.
other matters. It must have been so frustrating to be
the journalist writing about this. You know what I mean?
Because what, because you know so much that you cannot
say in public. But if there was, the reason we're
(44:36):
talking about Feinberg this way is because folks, if there
was one guy in all of the government who could,
who should have been able to divine the of David
Rush's web, it logically would be somebody like Steve Feinberg.
So how did he never catch any of this?
Speaker 3 (44:56):
Man, maybe he was just using Rush.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Right.
Speaker 3 (44:59):
Maybe he was using Rush's skills. What is that phrase?
He's got a special set of skills?
Speaker 2 (45:07):
A certain set of skills.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
Those are the ones. Man. Ben, I found where servers
came up for us earlier, and it was in a
thing called the Tier 1 group. And I believe this
is one of these like defense companies that trains soldiers
and like private military folks. Aggressive Training Solutions was their
(45:33):
name prior to becoming tier one group. And it goes
back to, wow, there's a deep rabbit hole right here, Cerberus.
Oh my God, I can't wait to jump into that
whole thing, man.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Yeah, I hope we make it to that one.
Speaker 4 (45:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
Because this is deep, deep water. It's also weird. It
was important for us to say this at the top
of this episode, folks. There's a lot we don't know
as the public. We don't have any inside access to
this one. We are not read on to the special
access programs involved here. We do know that, look, the
(46:10):
stuff we do know is dwarfed by what we don't know.
So we can say, We do know that David Rush
appears to have embellished or completely fabricated a lot of
his credentials. We also know that despite the fact that
these credentials would not bear up to even like a
single phone call to Clemson, somehow the guy made it
through all these investigation barriers in a way that reminds
(46:33):
me of Atreyu in The NeverEnding Story. Remember that? When
the guy had to walk through those three different gates?
Speaker 4 (46:39):
The Sphinx? Yeah, yeah. Dude, that freaked me out when
I was a kid, man.
Speaker 3 (46:44):
It is a whole movie.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Sadness. Yeah. Sad.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
The nothing. Right.
Speaker 3 (46:52):
Oh, gosh.
Speaker 4 (46:53):
He was a puppet, though. He wasn't that scary. Actually,
if you if you watch it again, the nothing is
a little bit underwhelming. But now, man, what a what
a film.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
And we do know that Rush was functioning in the
CIA for the better part of two decades. We do
know he got arrested. Do you know his home was raided?
We do know that the CIA is. in the wake
of this, they pulled several other senior officials and they
put them on administrative leave. Don't let that euphemism fool
(47:22):
you guys. Administrative leave comes with an investigation all its own.
And if you are found complicit or negligent in your duties,
this can be a death sentence for your career, right?
You don't have to be guilty of polluting with Rush.
You could just be found incompetence. Right. And they say, well, you're,
(47:45):
you may not be a criminal, but you're bad at
your job.
Speaker 4 (47:48):
For sure. I mean, and this would certainly extend to
anyone that he was able to kind of coerce or
trick or, you know, implicate.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Right.
Speaker 3 (47:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:59):
Even if they weren't necessarily doing so with malice.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
A hundred percent, you know, and we, we do know
that David Rush, as we're recording on August 21st, is
in the custody of the U.S. government. He has been charged.
He has not been tried. He has not been convicted.
But we don't know the motivation for the crime. We
don't know if he actually did the heist or if
he got scapegoated. Let's just put the quiet part out
(48:27):
there and name the elephant in the room. We don't
know how long the CIA, we don't know when they
clocked the grift, excuse me. We don't know how long
they sat on it before they contacted the FBI, we also, guys,
we don't know where a bunch of the stuff he stole, allegedly, went.
(48:47):
When they raided that storage place, they only found a
portion of the money. So we don't know where it is.
Speaker 4 (48:54):
At a certain point, I mean, this is just an
absolutely horrible look for the agency. So, I mean, I
can imagine them scrambling to figure out how to handle
it internally before, you know, making it public.
Speaker 3 (49:05):
And.
Speaker 4 (49:06):
trying to push that down the road as much as possible.
I mean, you know, whether it's, I mean, it makes
the whole agency look incompetent.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
Yeah. It's a bag of badgers for sure.
Speaker 4 (49:18):
Or in some way, I don't know, in cahoots. It's
a weird one, man. It's a weird one.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
Yeah, negligence or complicity.
Speaker 4 (49:27):
Complicity is the word I was looking for. Thank you, Ben.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
Neither are particularly appealing, though. And also, we want to
shout out. some other journalists who have taken this in
interesting directions and saying, well, you know, this is a
lot of gold. These are a lot of gold bars.
So where did those even come from, right? That's another
twist to the tale.
Speaker 3 (49:50):
There's a further thing that Los Angeles Magazine has brought
to at least our attention, and it is a former
FBI agent named Babak Bromond. B-A-B-A-K-B-R-O-U-M-A-N-D. This guy had alleged
ties to the CIA, and this person allegedly found one
(50:15):
of Gaddafi's gold stashes. So the story that the Los
Angeles Magazine weaves here is that Muammar Gaddafi, when he
kind of saw some stuff was going down back in 2011... uh,
and during a civil uprising, got a bunch of gold
from Tripoli, a bunch of gold from other places in
(50:37):
the form of bars, in the form of, you know, diamonds, jewels,
these kinds of things, uh, a lot of money and
stashed that stuff, like put it on planes, spread it
out and stashed it in a whole bunch of places.
And this, this person, Babak Bramand worked with this other
person who was, I guess, kind of a storyteller, phony person, um,
(51:00):
to put together this whole scheme to get one of
Gaddafi's stashes somewhere in Africa. And they're not making any
direct connections to David Rush here. But at the very
end of this article, they do state that it is, quote,
unclear if Bremond has any ties to David Rush. Maybe
(51:21):
like an FBI person doing kind of the same thing
that Rush is doing as a CIA agent. top executive
official kind of guy. But this Bremond case is one
that we should at least look into. Towards the end
of the article, this is a statement that's written. Bremond,
for his part, tried to convince a jury that he
was playing this other person as a source. He testified
(51:44):
that he had been, quote, trained in the art of
deception and that he had been, quote, taught how to
spin a story when attempting to recruit sources. Which sounds
pretty dang similar to the things that Rush is doing.
It's just what sources are he, you know, who is
he flipping as a source throughout his whole scenario?
Speaker 2 (52:07):
Right.
Speaker 3 (52:07):
I don't, I don't see the end game there.
Speaker 4 (52:09):
Well, I also find it hard to believe that like
the CIA would see this grifter dude. and be like, well,
this guy does it better than anyone else we've ever seen. Like,
this guy, the quality of grift this dude is capable
of exceeds anyone within our storied organization that we would
have access to, like, legitimately, you know, that actually does
(52:29):
have the chops. What do you guys think about that? Like,
doesn't that kind of seem real unlikely?
Speaker 2 (52:35):
Yeah, it beggars imagination because the easier option would be
to just have that person.
Speaker 4 (52:41):
As an asset.
Speaker 3 (52:43):
Right.
Speaker 4 (52:44):
Not as a like an informant.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (52:46):
Put them out in the world like a snitch.
Speaker 3 (52:48):
Right.
Speaker 1 (52:49):
Exactly.
Speaker 4 (52:49):
Right.
Speaker 2 (52:50):
Like what if that if there is a phenomenal talent
for deception, then does that automatically make you executive material?
Maybe not. Right.
Speaker 4 (53:03):
You don't want people flexing that kind of deception on you.
Speaker 2 (53:07):
You know what I mean?
Speaker 4 (53:08):
Like, it just seems like that would be a real
red flag. And it's like, sure, we could maybe make
use of this guy, offer him some sort of per
diem or salary. I don't know how the hell that works, but, like,
not put him as an important key figure within an organization.
That just doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2 (53:25):
Right, because he's already proven that he's good at deception.
I mean, it is possible that certain powers not only, like,
it is possible that certain people may have aided and
abetted Rush is, pardon us, Rush to power. But that's conjecture.
It's not supported by evidence right now. It is implied
(53:46):
between the confirmed connections with Cerebus, Feinberg, and others. And again,
this gives us a lot to think about. This is
a black box of American endeavor. How does David J. Rush,
a guy with no normal public information, how does he
genuinely present a case of one grifter, outsmarting an entire
(54:08):
system that even now monitors every single significant action in
the Western world. There's smart, and then there's comic book
level super villain smart. So is the guy genuinely that
intelligent and genuinely that lucky?
Speaker 4 (54:24):
Well, smart and connected, like in the most meaningful ways imaginable.
I just have a hard time believing this guy could
have put one over on But again, you know, these
kind of organizations, they are quite large. There is a
lot of examples of one hand not knowing what the
other one is doing. Like, I mean, look at Burn
After Reading. If you want an example of how these
(54:47):
kinds of things can get out of control because various
entities within the organization, by design, don't know what the
other are doing exactly.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
Yeah, the SAP compartmentalization.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (55:00):
He seems to me like a puppet that was being
used by somebody. He had the right credentials. So unless
you looked really hard at him, you would just think
he is what he is. And he could function in
those upper echelons of the CIA to do things if
you needed someone who could do those things. It doesn't
feel like he's a lone actor just out there being
(55:23):
a con man. It feels like he was a con
man that somebody found useful.
Speaker 2 (55:29):
Somebody wants Rifted. Yeah, I agree with you guys.
Speaker 4 (55:34):
Hey now.
Speaker 3 (55:35):
Hey now, Ben.
Speaker 2 (55:38):
Hey now.
Speaker 3 (55:38):
Hey, Ben.
Speaker 2 (55:42):
We know that. That's what I'm skeptical about, you guys,
that one person could do this this long and this successfully.
It is also a point in the favor of conspiracy here. Again,
all conjecture. is that if you really want control of
somebody like that, then you can kind of blackmail them
(56:06):
by saying, hey, I know you don't actually have that
degree from Clemson. I know you weren't actually a captain. Oh,
here's a watch.
Speaker 4 (56:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
Just do what I say and get me that Rolex, okay? Yeah.
Speaker 3 (56:20):
Okay, no problem.
Speaker 2 (56:21):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (56:22):
You want another one?
Speaker 4 (56:23):
So maybe... There's someone deeper within the organization that's using
this guy as a proxy or like a patsy, patsy proxy,
where it's like they are the ones running the con,
running the scam and benefiting from it. But this guy,
they have so much on him that maybe they're keeping
him safe and forcing him to do this stuff to
benefit them so that they can become enriched or whatever
(56:45):
benefit in the shadows and never actually be exposed. I mean,
this guy's expendable. Real specific.
Speaker 3 (56:52):
Other ways.
Speaker 2 (56:53):
There's no.
Speaker 3 (56:53):
Yeah. Can you imagine that potentially that was the entirety
of the gold and cash and the watches?
Speaker 4 (57:01):
No, of course not.
Speaker 3 (57:02):
That was being used for whatever operations you think? I mean,
I mean, maybe it's his personal gain. It's a little vague.
Speaker 4 (57:08):
No, it was spread around. This is my point. Like
there are others that, you know, have pocketed way more
than him. I mean, he was maybe allowed to keep
a little bit for being a good boy. We just
have to figure out where this is. Correct.
Speaker 3 (57:21):
That's, that's making me think about the, The John Wick
situation of the concrete breaking open the case. Remember John
Wick 1? He breaks open the concrete in his basement.
He pulls out that little case. It has a bunch
of gold bars in it.
Speaker 4 (57:35):
Yeah, the go bag. Loose diamonds. Fraudulent passports. We know
the drill.
Speaker 2 (57:41):
Loose diamonds or passports that are so top level that
they can't even be considered fraudulent. Right.
Speaker 4 (57:48):
Like the word. Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (57:51):
The North Korean super notes. It reminds me of that
because we had that huge problem when North Korea was
making a hundred dollar bills that were actually better quality
than us under dollar bills.
Speaker 4 (58:03):
Ben speak, speaking of that, and I'm sorry that this
just occurred to me, this would be a fun episode. Um,
you mentioned, we were talking about Rolexes and stores of
wealth and things like that. Um, recently canal street in
New York was massively rated. by local law enforcement. This
is where like they sell all these counterfeit, you know,
luxury goods, including like watches and Prada bags and things
(58:25):
like that. There are, however, these companies in Asia that
make what's referred to as super clones, which are so good,
such top level, you know, counterfeit counterfeits that they can
barely be told apart even by the people that like
work for Rolex making them. I think it'd be interesting
(58:46):
to talk a little bit about, I always wonder like,
how do they get away with flipping all these illegal
goods on canal street? And the answer is maybe they
don't always, but then they just set back up shop again,
the moment they get knocked down. And what about the
really high level? Where do these, these forgeries come from?
And what about the really, really high echelons of forgeries
when it comes to selling these counterfeit goods? I think
(59:10):
it'd be a fun episode to do.
Speaker 2 (59:12):
Yeah, agreed. Let's write it down. We also know that
the CIA is really good at forging stuff. That's something
I keep going back to, you guys. I think we
all do now after exploring this together. the CIA is
one of the world's greatest intelligence agencies, right? And despite
their many historical missteps, they are legitimately good at covering
(59:33):
things up and controlling narratives across generations. So that's one
of the things that keeps stopping me as a final
note from just saying, this was a lone actor who
somehow got super lucky for 17 years. I, this is,
That doesn't.
Speaker 3 (59:53):
Happen, man.
Speaker 4 (59:54):
You might get lucky for a couple of years, five years. 17,
that's a pattern.
Speaker 2 (59:59):
It's rough. To be fair, we have to be fair
and objective. Yes, David J. Rush is in U.S. custody,
but he has yet to be convicted of a crime.
So he is still an innocent man at the time
of recording. And for the record, David J. Rush himself
(01:00:20):
has so far denied any wrongdoing whatsoever, categorically saying he's
not guilty. But however you look at it, we'd love
to hear your thoughts. This case is chock full of
the stuff they don't want you to know. So get
in touch with us. Please do, by all means, get
in touch with us. You can do that in several ways,
(01:00:42):
two of which include the Handel's Conspiracy Stuff and Conspiracy
Stuff show on the various social media platforms of note.
Speaker 4 (01:00:49):
And there are other ways as well.
Speaker 3 (01:00:50):
Yes, as good as we know the CIA is at
doing the spoopy dupes, we also know they're accused of
and sometimes absolutely proven to have done some of the
most heinous things we can imagine. So it is weird
to have those two things come together, right? A group
that's going to protect democracy and the world and capitalism
(01:01:13):
and mostly capitalism. Just getting up to the crazy things
we've talked about in the past. Why don't you give
us a call? Our number is 1-833-STD-WYTK. When you call in,
give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if
we can use your name and message on one of
our listener mail episodes that show up in the audio
only feeds. You can find them anywhere you find your
favorite podcasts. Wait, you can also send us an email.
Speaker 2 (01:01:37):
That is correct. We are the entities that read each
piece of correspondence we receive. Be well aware, yet unafraid.
Sometimes the void writes back. We'd like to give, as well,
a special shout-out to Mark Mazzetti and Julian E.
Speaker 1 (01:01:52):
Barnes.
Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
They did some excellent reporting for the New York Times
on this case, and the Washington Post originally wrote the story.
So tell us your thoughts. Give us a random fact.
We'll give you one in return. Keep the pet pictures
and the rutabagas coming. Conspiracy at iHeartRadio.com.
Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the
iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
A production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hello and welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 4 (00:29):
My name is Noel.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
They call me Ben. We're joined, as always, with our
super producer, Dylan, the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
they don't want you to know. Thank you so much
for tuning in, fellow conspiracy realists. As we say, one
thing we love about our weekly strange news program is
(00:51):
that it can inspire people an episode in the future.
And guys, this is one of those cases. Remember when
we first ran into the story of David Rush?
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Yeah. Gosh. Why does it feel like it was this year?
Was it this year back in June? When did we
talk about it for the first time?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
I think we talked about it earlier this year. But
we'd have to look back into it. It may be
a name that Kind of tickles your memory as you
hear it. David J. Rush. Kind of like when you
hear a name and you think vaguely of an actor
you had seen before or something.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
Well, you probably remember David Grush, who was one of
the major whistleblowers during the whole UAP thing and congressional
hearings and looking into that. So, I mean, that's when
I hear his name, that's what I think of.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
I'll tell you what my mind goes to is David Koresh.
That guy.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Oh.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
Remember him?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Unrelated.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
Both of these are unrelated. It's just about the way
things ring bells in our brains. But, Ben, I know
precious little prior to digging into your research about David J. Rush,
the former CIA officer, who had some very interesting shenanigans
going on around the middle of this year.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Yes. Yeah. And I think of, you know, I think
of the band Rush.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
Also true.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
I've been auditioning to be an old person apparently, but
also it is.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
Our boy Trevor loves rush.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
The young kids love rush.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
Rush is hot.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
I got tickets, baby.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah, you do.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Just really quickly.
Speaker 4 (02:35):
I can't, I'm so charmed by this pavement line. I
can't remember. I think it's in stereo or he's talking
about the voice of Geddy Lee. Does he really sing?
How does he sing that high? Does he talk like
that in person? Then the other guy chimes in. Oh yeah,
he does. I've talked to him. It's like a little,
And you're my fact-checking cuz. Now you're my fact-checking cuz!
That's the one.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Hey, Dylan, when are you going to see Rush?
Speaker 3 (02:55):
November, around Thanksgiving.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Phenomenal. But I was going to say that in addition
to reminding me of Rush, I think it is fair
to note that David J. Rush, indeed, in his own way,
is one heck of an actor. We just have to
figure out what kind of role he is playing. This
is a weird one for us, folks. It is an
(03:18):
ongoing story. So the full we're cooking live. The full
ending is not written yet. Welcome to the strange saga
of David Rush. You'll see that there's a lot of
stuff we simply do not know.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
One thing we do know, though, is that we are
heading back out with Virgin Voyages doing this thing called
Stuff at Sea this year. Tell about it, guys.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
Our home is the sea.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
That's right. October 2nd through the 7th, we will be
joining forces with our good friends, Stuff Mom Never Told
You and Stuff You Should Know for the Stuff at
Sea Cruise with Virgin Voyages.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
Guys, I just took a look at some of the...
This is not me shilling for Virgin. Genuinely, I think
we all had the most fantastic time when we went
on a similar cruise last year that was true crime related.
But some of the... the shore experiences they're offering this year. Dude,
like snorkeling with turtles. I saw one that was like,
there's all these like catamaran voyages and I'm going to do,
(04:16):
I'm going to do all of them guys. I'm going
to do all of them.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Their boats apparently have some glass bottoms and I cannot
wait to look down into the ocean.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
I love a glass bottom. We'll be right back. Here
are the facts. First things first folks, You probably have
heard of this news story, but you will be surprised
by the directions the rabbit hole will go in when
you start digging into this. We don't know a ton
(04:48):
about David J. Rush's early life, other than his name,
and we only know the middle initial based on the
public records, and the fact that he was born in
the United States. It's tough to find too much more
verified info, almost as if Somebody was purposely scrubbing it
(05:09):
at some point.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
Scrub-a-dub-dub.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
For example, we also don't know the guy's exact birth date,
which is pretty strange here in 2026.
Speaker 4 (05:16):
Yeah, his day and age, right?
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
We do know he was around 49 years old in
the middle of 2026 when the story started to reach
the public.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
Well, and I mentioned mid-2026 as being the source of
his shenanigans. This is when the public became aware of
these shenanigans, not when they were actually taking place. We
also know that depending on whom you ask, who you ask,
it doesn't matter either or. He has a long and
a very storied career in public service. So we're going
to give you kind of the longstanding official version of
(05:50):
who this guy was, what he got up to, and then.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
The real version, I guess. Maybe I should.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
official and no quotes around real.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Yeah. Because we've been able to confirm that he did
genuinely enlist in the United States Navy in 1997. And
records show he was an information systems technician. There's no
record of a dishonorable discharge. There's no record of a
(06:21):
notable scandal. So He was, we can assume.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
He was honorably discharged in 2015.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Right, yeah. And he got an officer commission in 2004.
And so he served like a decade or so as
an officer before being honorably discharged. Again, no scandal, no
dishonorable stuff. He also claimed to have a background in academia,
qualifications from Clemson. And help me pronounce this, guys. RPI, Renneslaire.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
Rensselaer? Oh, what a weird one. Yeah, I don't know.
Your guess is as good as mine. Quick question. If
you're honorably discharged, that means you didn't necessarily finish your
term for what you signed up for. It could be
for a number of reasons, like being injured or what
have you, right?
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Yeah, it means that the individual has completed their commitment
to whatever their bid was in the armed forces.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Got it.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
I think I'd always had in my head that it
meant you ended your service prematurely, but for like, you know,
honorable reasons so that's thanks for the clarification.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
For sure yeah we we know that um this uh
background that he claimed this undergrad from clemson and this
other degree a master's from rpi was something that he
was very proud of he definitely talked about it a
lot and we know that while many people end up
going into private industry after serving their time in the
(07:47):
armed forces Rush continued government service. He eventually became an
employee for the CIA. And over the course of 17 years,
he rose to a senior level executive position in an
outfit called the Directorate of Science and Technology. And for
everybody playing at home, this is one of the more
(08:08):
interesting arms of the CIA. They're the ones who create
technical tools of espionage.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Sort of like Q from James Bond, right?
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Yeah, very similar. It's where technology and the spoopy dupes meet.
And it's been around for quite a long time. If
you go to the Central Intelligence Agency, you can find
a little thing they wrote about two years ago, August 12, 24.
Where anything is possible. Origins of the Directorate of Science
and Technology. And in that article, you will see this sentence.
(08:39):
The lithium iodine battery, advanced medical image processing techniques, and
Google Earth can all be traced back to CIA Technical Research,
which would all fall under this little outfit, the DS & T,
or Directorate of Science and Technology. And this thing, I mean,
we would highly recommend you look at the history of it.
(09:00):
We can get into it a little bit further in
this episode, but it is definitely a program built within
the CIA as a response to Russia or the Soviet
Union launching or testing nuclear weapons and um upping their
arsenal in a way that was dangerous and this thing
(09:22):
is supposed to figure out all the advanced technology to
be able to stop them from doing that and also
to be able to continue the government of the united
states in case nuclear weapons get you know thrown our
way yeah they do a.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Lot of cog stuff continuance of government uh and If
you're looking at David at this point on paper, it
appears like he has a typical standard of trajectory for
a career member of the CIA. Yeah, your military service,
you have a background in higher education. And keep in mind, folks,
that at this level, by the time you get to
(09:58):
where Rush was, you have had... background investigations up the wazoo.
The security clearance is no joke. If you are tuning
in and you have undergone some version of this process,
you know that it's safe to say that if you
did something, the investigators are going to find out. At
(10:18):
least that's how it happens. But in this case, it
appears that someone, possibly multiple people, somehow dropped the ball.
So that's like Noel was saying, that's our official story
of his career. That's what he said. But it's not
quite the same as the real story, because the real
story reveals this official narrative has more holes than Swiss cheese.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Oh, yeah. This guy was a storyteller as much as
he was an actor.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah, that's a good way to think of it, Matt.
We're leaning heavily on an affidavit that was filed by
an FBI special agent named Matthew T. Johnson. This is
freely available online. Please do check it out if you're interested. Johnson,
who is a crackerjack investigator, gives lie to a lot
(11:10):
of Rush's claims. This dude was spinning tall tales. He
was able to verify that Rush did enlist in the
Navy back in 97, but he saw something curious. David J.
Rush's apparent academic credentials kept changing over time.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
Right.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
Rush applied for the U.S. government service on three separate
verified occasions. In March of 2006, his purported background included
that Clemson undergrad degree you were talking about earlier, Ben,
a Bachelor of Science in Math and Information Systems. from 2000,
as well as a Master of Science in Computing Technology
(11:51):
from RPI in 2004. That difficult-to-pronounce Polytechnic Institute you mentioned
as well, Ben. In addition, he also had a Master's
of Science in Computing Technology from the Naval Postgraduate School.
Upon his second application in November of the same year,
he omitted that supposed Master's from the Naval Postgrad School.
(12:15):
Third time, was the winner. He applied again in 2009.
This time, his undergrad was a Bachelor of Science in
Mathematics from Clemson, Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering from RPI,
and an, quote, undated aircraft test and evaluation certification from
the United States Naval Test Pilot School. This one, like
(12:38):
I was saying, was successful, but it really shouldn't have been.
It does feel like we're having some shifting truths. as
he's putting in these applications, right?
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, first off, usually when people
go to the trouble of getting a master's degree, they
bring it up when they apply for jobs, right? They're
not going to try to obscure that kind of thing.
And if you are a pilot, you would probably mention
it in your first two applications, right? To this level
(13:10):
of government service. Agent Johnson says, Rush told investigators or
employers that he was a Air Force test pilot. He
had graduated test pilot school, that he was the director
of testing for a 145-person testing organization that was run
(13:32):
by both the Army and the Navy in conjunction. And
he said that he was doing this currently as he
was talking to these employers about despite the fact that
we know he left the Navy in 2015. Oh, and
then also he said he was a thesis and dissertation
advisor at the Air Force Institute of Technology. None of
(13:55):
this was true.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
We also know from stories out of NBC News that
from 2011 on to about the time that he got
hired in a new position that we'll talk about, he
joined the Ashburn Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department in Northern Virginia.
And to all of those firefighters, he would spin yarns
(14:19):
about the things that he ended up writing in these applications,
that he was a naval pilot, that he flew Tomcats, F-14s,
in a bunch of different places, that he was forced
to jump out of two of those Tomcats. And in
a third one, which the cockpit caught on fire, he
had to land an emergency aircraft He told all these
(14:39):
tales about being basically from the movie Top Gun. But,
you know, in even more dire circumstances than those fictitional
pilots faced. And you can just, it really makes you wonder, like,
where does the imagination begin for this stuff and to
what end? Is it so that when, Ben, I'm imagining
(15:03):
that if he's applying for these things, right? He's applying
for government, I'm assuming a CIA job most of the
time here. It just says government service, so I guess
it's multiple different things that he applied for. But at
least one of those was for the CIA. Yeah. And
if you're applying for that, what happens? What do they do?
(15:23):
Who do they call? Everyone.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Everybody, you know what I mean? What's your second grade
teacher doing, right? What about that first girl you kissed?
You said you kissed her, but did you?
Speaker 3 (15:34):
So the real people in David's life that they would
have been able to get in touch with would say,
oh man, he never stops talking about flying those tomcats, right?
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Old, old tomcat rush. That's what we call them. Yeah,
so that can help. It's like that unethical thing people
sometimes do when they have a rental application where they're
trying to get a job, they make up a reference
and the phone number is their buddy's phone number. And
so you call them and like the employer calls our
(16:07):
former boss and it's Dylan doing a cool Dylan voice.
And he's like, oh yeah, these guys are great.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
You mean Dylan's voice?
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Exactly.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
I've had follow-up calls from folks who have listed me
as a reference on apartment rentals. I mean- what did
he think was going to happen here in terms of
like the vetting process? He was like, nah, it's cool.
Surely they'll just believe my, my tales.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
Well, one of the members of that fire department guys
was an, an army veteran. So like an actual facts
army veteran who heard these stories and said, spoke to
NBC news and others that they fully checked out. The
guy knew jets. He knew, he knew the planes. He
knew the operations. He knew the stuff going on. inside
(16:51):
the planes and about the planes, the jets rather. And
he fooled an army veteran, like on the ground in
front of him face to face. So you just imagine like,
that's some pretty high level ability to lie, stick with it,
and then just continue that narrative throughout years of service.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, the consistency is key there, right? Like making a
good souffle of deception. The problem is that when you
say you have attended a university, they're usually going to
be records of that. In fact, there are entire departments.
There are people whose whole job is to get calls
(17:34):
and emails that say, did this person go to Georgia
State or what have you? So in this investigation that
our FBI agent is doing, he finds that there's no
proof Rush even attended Clemson at all, much less got
a degree. The same with RPI. The same with being
(17:54):
a pilot, because he asked the Navy about that. Oh,
and he claimed that he attained the rank of captain.
This was also untrue, and these were things that were
very easy to verify. Oh, and then he falsified a
ton of time cards.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Oh, yeah. The university stuff, the education stuff, reminds me
a lot of Bob Lazar. And the stories that he
would tell about the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a
master's from Caltech, I think it was California Institute of Technology. And,
you know, that never could be verified by anybody. But,
(18:31):
you know, there are then claims from the people originating
these stories that, oh, well, the records have been scrubbed
purposefully for nefarious means, you know, by a government agent
of some sort. I don't think you can apply that
same kind of even skepticism of that to David's thing.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
Or maybe we should.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
And we're, am I discounting that?
Speaker 4 (18:54):
I don't know, man. But I mean, I get the
ability to, you know, absorb information, recall it on command
when you're talking to somebody, being good enough at that
to fool an Army veteran. But how did he, how
in the heck did the CIA not clock all this
stuff that was so easily verifiable? Because he did make it.
past all of these clearances.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
He did? Yeah. I think Matt and I are having
the same instinct. Like, maybe the CIA already had an
interest that would compromise your typical background check.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
We don't have any proof of that. They saw a
purpose for this man and his certain set of skills, perhaps.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
I thought it was maybe they saw somebody who was
really good at fooling the people around him.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
And they went, Oh, this guy is a freaking liar.
Oh my God. This all looks legit.
Speaker 4 (19:44):
He's our people.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
And so it's like, Hey, should we, should we call Clemson?
And they're like, Oh, come on. Don't be a. stick
in the mud. Let's roll the dice. Let's see how
far he gets. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
Yeah. Of course he didn't go, but man, this is
exactly the kind of we need here at the CIA.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
He passed the polygraph test and someone's like, yeah, those
are also like, yeah, I know, but he's got, I
like his vibe.
Speaker 4 (20:08):
He's got the cut of his jib.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
And he did have a physical good cut, according to
the fellow fireman. And you can read all about it
in some of these NBC articles. It's just about how
chiseled this gentleman was.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
He looked the part. He looked believable. So we have
to ask, you know, Johnson in the affidavit, which we
can't recommend enough. Johnson says, OK, having higher education credentials
in government service will typically equate to higher pay. from
the jump. So maybe this guy is mythologizing himself just
(20:42):
to get that pay bump. But if we want, even
if we try to exercise the most open-minded perspective possible,
it beggars imagination to think that this was a series
of mistakes on this guy's part. He was bluffing, he's
doing it on purpose. He did get top secret compartmented
information clearance, a TSSCI. So the bluff worked. Until it didn't.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
Well, the other thing that kind of begs credulity, I
suppose you could say, is like, was this a series
of mistakes and oversights on the part of the folks
vetting him? You know, I really like you guys' perspective
on that, that maybe this was like considered a feature,
not a bug. And they decided to push forward, you know,
looking at these things as almost like their own kind
(21:30):
of weird, twisted credentials. But I do think it's important
to mention, too, that these agencies aren't infallible. We know
that mistakes are made. So it's, yeah, the truth is
maybe somewhere in the middle.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
We also know that con men like this guy are
very good, adept at meeting someone, maybe having some one-on-one
conversations and building that person up, making that person believe
in the con man and making them feel good about
themselves as they're hearing these things and, you know, getting
in with somebody. And so somebody else wants this person.
(22:07):
via their little magic that they pull, the smoke and
mirrors that they just, you know, poof in your face,
getting you to want good things for them. I like
this person, this guy, I like the cut of this
guy's jib. We need to get him in a high
level position.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
There's also, you know, the human element can always be
compromised because imagine you have that in-person interview as a
background investigator and And you say, well, this guy knows
his stuff. He knows his Tomcats. The timeline that he's
giving me makes sense. We have a good rapport. This
is the easiest background investigation I've done this whole summer. So,
(22:50):
you know, he's making my job easier. I met Dave.
I don't need to follow up with all this paperwork.
That's possible that it could happen.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Well, if you have pressure from above, Ben, so I'm
imagining if there's somebody high level that he met with.
that really likes him. You might be able to pull
some strings and get past some of that bureaucratic junk.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Yeah, it happens with presidential administrations all the time. It's
happened with this current administration. People who would normally have
to go through some pretty serious checks to attain their
position have been, like the wheels have been kind of greased.
That's a great point. But what I was getting to is,
(23:30):
even after you pass that first threshold, that first investigative Rubicon,
you are going to have routine evaluations. They're still part
of the system, right? And it's going to be a
different person conducting that background check the next time. So
it's not always the same person you have rapport with. Now,
of course, if you have someone higher up who is
(23:54):
looking favorably upon you, that can definitely influence things to
a degree. But why are we talking about this now?
Why did the FBI dedicate resources to re-examining everything Rush
said in the past? We'll tell you after a word
from our sponsors.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
And we've returned. Just to stand this for one second,
I'm thinking more about the background checks and polygraphing and
all the fun things that the CIA and FBI and
various government intelligence departments do to their folks, like force
their folks to go through just to verify that everybody
is on the up and up. I didn't know that
a background check would be replicated once you've been hired on.
(24:43):
I always thought it was more of a one-on-one polygraph
kind of thing you had to do on a regular
basis just to confirm for everybody's satisfaction that you're not,
you know, a double agent and or you're not meeting
with specific people. and you have to report that somebody
has spoken with you about specific things. I just didn't
(25:07):
know they would do a full background check again. That's
new to me.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
It'd be more like a routine evaluation. What are your
finances like? Serious travel? Have you met people, as you're mentioning?
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Got you.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
We'd have to learn more. We'd love to hear from
any professional experts investigators who do those background checks. We'd
love to hear the nuts and bolts of how those
evaluations work. But here's where it gets crazy. In this
affidavit from Johnson, we see that he writes, on or
around November 2025 through on or around March 2026, Rush
(25:50):
made several requests to the United States government to obtain
a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions
of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses. What a
cool thing to do at your job. Imagine having a
(26:13):
job where you can go to someone and say, hey guys,
stuff's coming up. I can't tell you because there's a
secret program, but I'm going to need millions of dollars
in hard gold Also, how many watches do we have
in the Petty Watch Fund?
Speaker 3 (26:30):
Wasn't it like 30-something?
Speaker 2 (26:32):
32. Wasn't it a crazy number? 32, 35. Lots of Rolexes. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Noel, how much does a Rolex cost?
Speaker 4 (26:40):
I'm the guy that knows this.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Well, no, you told us once about a watch show
or watch channel.
Speaker 4 (26:48):
Uh, yes, correct. And I'm just, I've become a bit
of a watch nerd. Uh, I think the cheapest Rolex
you can get is in the $ 10, 000 range if it's new,
but you can get like vintage older ones for a
little less depending, but yeah, about, about 10 grand.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Do they go up like way, way up?
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Oh, gosh, yes. Oh, heck yeah. And they're, they're also,
some of them have like diamonds and all kinds, there's
all kinds of options and they can go up to
the hundreds of thousands of dollars range.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Yeah. And they're also very useful as an alternative currency.
Depending on the situation.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
They hold their value more than just about any other
watch brands, Rolex in particular.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
Can you imagine guys having any kind of transaction where
a part of it is a $ 200, 000 watch that you
just slide across the table or you just put it
on somebody's wrist?
Speaker 4 (27:32):
I also picture like throwing it in the chip pile
on the blackjack tables. You know, that's like the ultimate
baller move when you're tapped out and you just throw
the watch on there.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Well, think about Putin's watch collection. We're going to be
doing an episode on Putin very soon, and he's got
an enormous watch collection.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Ben, speaking of Russia, I have been unable to verify which, quote,
foreign currency was in David Rush's possession. Do we know
which country that currency was from?
Speaker 2 (28:00):
We do not know. We know that it was the
equivalent of two million US dollars, but we don't know
if it was a single foreign currency or foreign currency, geez,
I'm getting all America here, or if it was a
mix of differing foreign currencies. It also doesn't stop there
because they said, oh, because they raided his home in Fairfax, Virginia,
(28:25):
and they also raided a storage unit of his on
May 18th, 2026. And shortly after that raid, they also
alleged he stole millions of dollars through a scheme, to
make a special access program up out of whole cloth.
And to understand why that's a big deal, guys, I
(28:48):
think we have to talk about what a special access
program or SAP actually is.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
Dude, we're talking about dark money here. Talking about a
black hole where funds go in and nobody gets to
know about it.
Speaker 4 (29:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
This is the need to know stuff you hear about
in fiction and film. It's, super restricted, think of it
kind of like the above top secret stuff, having your
regular old clearance, even if it's a fancy one, is
not enough to get you through the door for a SAP,
a special access program. Like you and your coworker might
(29:24):
both have top secret clearance, right? You might even share
the same office, but if your coworker is read on
to one of these programs and you are read on
to another one, You will coexist in the same space
without anything. breathing a word about these SAPs. You have
(29:46):
to get read on in a specialized way one at
a time to these programs. So they can't just give
you a blanket access to SAP. You have to get
read on to one, And then maybe later you go
to a different one and you can be on multiple ones,
but it's the, it's still a process that has to
(30:08):
be repeated because like you were saying, Matt, it's high
level stuff.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Yeah. It's really high level stuff. And it is, it's
so secret. It's so, I was going to say it's anti-American.
It's anti-government to have these things, guys. I feel like
some of these SAPs and the folks who work on them,
They might be anti-American.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
I could see it being anti-American, but it feels very
in line with how governments work because it's– Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
But not the people's government because the people don't get
to know about it.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
You're being a little cheeky, buddy. You're being a little cheeky.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
I'm trying to make a parallel.
Speaker 4 (30:47):
I think it's intensely American. I think it's what they're
getting at as well. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
It's American as SAP.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yeah. SAPs for the SAPs. That's what David does. There
are three broad categories, acquisition, SAPs, intelligent SAPs, and operations
and support SAPs. They're pretty much self-explanatory. The acquisition is
R & D and building new toys. Intelligence is the
(31:15):
high-risk espionage, right? The human, the SIGINT collection operations. And
then operations and support, obviously, logistics and planning.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
Can we just say, Ben, these are the contracts that
Rage Against the Machine is talking about. Absolutely. These are
the government contracts, the secret money. It's literally secret money
because you cannot know what it is being used for.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Yes. And in general, this is a very smart system,
but it has a deep flaw. It has an Achilles heel, right,
on a massive level because... the framework that makes this
secrecy possible is simultaneously its greatest weakness. And this is
(31:57):
what Rush exploits because he's high level enough where he
will handle sensitive assets, including foreign currency, including valuable materials.
And his level was so high that it didn't just
allow him to participate in specific SAPs, It allowed him
(32:18):
to make them, to create them on their own. That's
exactly what he did.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
He was given that go-ahead, or he just kind of
took it upon himself?
Speaker 1 (32:30):
I just, wow.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
Ben, can we verify what that senior level CIA position was?
I can't find it anywhere. There's no CIA website that says, hey,
here's all of our top guys. Because they're CIA officers.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Even the affidavit just says government service a lot of times.
Kind of like, yeah, it's weird. It's your point, Noel.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
So in addition to not knowing what his exact title was,
they just call him a high level executive position. Uh,
we also, we're kind of assuming that he, he made
the pitch. Like he was proactive about this program. And
then somebody said, okay, yeah, you're a good guy. I
(33:18):
like you. You've got rapport. You've been working here for
17 years. Uh, you know how the, uh, butter gets spread.
Jam gets spread. Sausage gets made.
Speaker 4 (33:30):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
There we go.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
There's just no information in the reporting because every journalist
that I've seen writing on this doesn't have the ability
to get the information legally to even talk about specifics
on it.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
The New York Times article is a banger on this,
and they're a little bit cheeky. There's a little bit of,
I mean, they don't mean it as a teasing tone.
But there are a couple moments in that reporting from
the New York Times specifically where they're saying there are
things we can't print. Like we can verify this part
(34:06):
of the story, but due to national security concerns, we
can't say anything else other than our sources have verified
it's legit. And that's because the secrecy is so easy
to weaponize. And it helped him get away with it
for a while.
Speaker 4 (34:22):
It did.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
NBC News calls him, quote, a liaison to the Defense
Department for a sensitive nuclear submarine program.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Okay. And he did multiple things, too, because he was
working there for quite some time. He had a lot
of connections. And Here's the clever twist. Ethics aside, here's
the operationally brilliant part of his conspiracy. When some of
his colleagues started raising suspicions, why are you asking for
millions of dollars? What do you want all this gold for?
(34:56):
How many watches does a guy with two wrists actually need?
When they started asking him about this kind of stuff,
he would read them onto the program. And when he
read them onto the program, That meant they felt like
they were getting the information they needed. It was a
COG program. And they also, at the same time, would
(35:18):
now be legally prevented from talking to anyone about this,
including their suspicions.
Speaker 4 (35:27):
Can you imagine?
Speaker 3 (35:28):
Just that meeting. He goes through the whole thing. You
know the guy's got a giant notebook and a PowerPoint
presentation and brings you into the skiff. starts telling you
about all that stuff and at the very end is like, oh,
and by the way, none of this is real. Here's
a gold bar.
Speaker 4 (35:44):
Now go on your way. I mean, I just, I
can't help but like, you know, think about how this
siloed kind of Matryoshka doll level layers of insulation from
other branches and how, you know, so much of the
kind of ability to sort of bob and weave and
do what needs to be done for the situation is
(36:05):
kind of the very nature of some of these agencies.
It just kind of feels like this guy was able
to take that and weaponize it to his own ends
in a pretty remarkable fashion.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
Yeah. Again, weaponizing the secrecy. He used this SAP read-on
process as a way of his colleagues further and further as,
as we can tell from the scant sourcing we do have.
And at this point, guys, I think we can, I
think we can consider his colleagues victims. But originally when
(36:41):
all this broken, we'll get to how it all, how
it all shook out. Originally, those colleagues were getting looked
at as possible co-conspirators. It just, it would make sense
to think of them that way. But yeah, He made
a sap for the saps. The joke is right there.
And I hope he thought about it before he got arrested.
(37:04):
Because this is so surreal, you guys. This is a heist.
It is taking place in spoopy-dupe territory, which is already
so close to the land of make-believe. We don't know
his specific program. At least we don't know what he
told people the program was. But we know in general,
(37:26):
It was a continuity of government operation. How does Uncle
Sam continue to function after a nuclear war or a
bioterrorism attack? This might surprise some of us in the audience,
but it's really clever to make it a COG, special
access program, because those are super common for all governments.
(37:47):
It's like how if you want to steal a car,
for decades you would steal a Honda Civic.
Speaker 4 (37:54):
Because they're everywhere.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
Oh, yeah. And if you're going to, oh, gosh, what
was the movie I just watched?
Speaker 4 (37:59):
Drive.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
That older movie, Drive. One of my favorites of all time.
I forget what the vehicle is. Oh, it's like a
Malibu maybe or something like that. But it's like the
most common vehicle in the city at the time.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
Just how they did it. The more I'm hearing, Ben,
the more I'm just picturing Jimmy McGill. just like kind
of stumbling through his way towards being an attorney, but
in this case, a guy that runs a continuity of
government program for the CIA.
Speaker 4 (38:32):
Oh, I mean, it's a pretty high level grift. I
can't think of a much higher level one.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Right.
Speaker 4 (38:39):
And certainly there is some of that bobbing and weaving
I was talking about that is, again, like sort of
inherent in these kind of roles. But like this dude,
the cojones on this guy. I mean, just to be
able to continue forward and kind of figure out what
the next step is. Like, I mean, this is bold stuff.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
Like, doesn't it make you wonder if, if, if there's
not something more going on here?
Speaker 4 (39:01):
Yes. That's what I'm saying from the start. It just feels, yeah.
Like how, how is this possible to get this far?
I mean, Ben, you're always pointing out how we can't
get away with a late library book. You know, it
just doesn't seem like this could be possible if there
weren't somebody who In his pocket or that was looking
out for him, some guardian angel, or again, if some
(39:22):
of this was a feature and not a bug. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
All things, including grifts and bluffs, can end at any point.
So it's best to plan ahead. And speaking of planning ahead,
we're going to take a break for a word from
our sponsors, and we're going to enter the land of
conspiracy and speculation. Okay, we're back. So Rush did indeed
(39:49):
have very powerful connections in the upper echelons of government
as well as private industry. One of the most interesting,
there are a lot, one of the most interesting is
that prior to the CIA firing David Rush and then
him getting immediately arrested, he was close to with a
(40:11):
guy named Steven A. Feinberg, who is the current deputy
secretary of defense. So, you know, in law enforcement, they
sometimes use the phrase a rabbi, meaning like a higher
up person in the organization who can give you some juice,
who can help grease the wheels for your promotions and
so on. Feinberg was working very closely with Rush on
(40:37):
another case classified supes dupes program this one was allegedly
focused on china and feinberg knew this guy for a
while they had been working together since at least the
first uh presidential term of donald trump and if we're
being optimistic it is completely possible that feinberg saw russia's
(41:01):
as a vetted experienced asset you know you want a
right-hand man you can trust uh he may have used
his leverage to get... Well, actually, according to the New
York Times, we know that Feinberg used his leverage to
get Rush bigger roles and more involvement in certain programs.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
Ben, when did he join the CIA? Officially, do we
have that? Is it 2018?
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Actually, I believe it would have been 2009. That was
the third time he applied, like Noel was saying.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
Whoa, it's... It says he worked there for 17 years,
according to The Guardian?
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
That would put it... Oh, my God.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
It was a rotten apple in the orchard.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
Wait a second. Wait a second. Okay, I'm trying to
get my timeline straight here. We're talking about 2008, 2009?
17 years ago?
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Is my math right?
Speaker 3 (41:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
So....
Speaker 3 (42:05):
That means when he was at that Virginia volunteer firefighters group,
when he was working there, he was CIA. If that's true,
that means he's spinning tales to them about the Navy stuff.
That means he's actually working for the CIA at that time.
(42:25):
What the hell is he doing as a volunteer firefighter?
Speaker 2 (42:28):
What? It's a great way to stay in shape.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
I guess, but no, but legitimately, that's mind-blowing to me
that maybe I'm mentally flummoxed right now and I will
find my way back, but I don't understand how that
could be.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Yeah, the question of time commitment. If you're a full-time
CIA employee, maybe it's something where it just looks good
on your jacket to have public service like that. And
volunteer firefighters are awesome. So if you are one, thank
you for tuning in. But it is anomalous, right? And
we can allow us to do a few more red
(43:08):
strings here, folks, because in addition to being the Deputy
Secretary of Defense, our guy Feinberg is also a co-founder
of something called Cerebus Capital. It is a private equity
firm that you'll probably hear more about in a future
episode because it is super sketchy.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Somebody wrote to us about Cerebus Capital. And I think
that's how we learned about it a little while back.
Did we talk about it previously?
Speaker 2 (43:39):
We've been planning on making an episode on it for
a while.
Speaker 4 (43:42):
Okay. Okay.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
I think we saw something, and it was related to
Feinberg back in the day.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Oh, gosh.
Speaker 3 (43:49):
I hope it wasn't Epstein related. I don't think it was. Oof.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
But now we always have to check. That's something we
always have to do off air now. There's another red string,
which is the Intelligence Advisory Board. This is what Feinberg
was heading up under the first presidential term of Donald Trump.
And the IAB or the Intelligence Advisory Board is pretty
(44:13):
interesting because they have the ear of the White House
on all tradecraft activity related to collecting intel and cough cough.
other matters. It must have been so frustrating to be
the journalist writing about this. You know what I mean?
Because what, because you know so much that you cannot
say in public. But if there was, the reason we're
(44:36):
talking about Feinberg this way is because folks, if there
was one guy in all of the government who could,
who should have been able to divine the of David
Rush's web, it logically would be somebody like Steve Feinberg.
So how did he never catch any of this?
Speaker 3 (44:56):
Man, maybe he was just using Rush.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Right.
Speaker 3 (44:59):
Maybe he was using Rush's skills. What is that phrase?
He's got a special set of skills?
Speaker 2 (45:07):
A certain set of skills.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
Those are the ones. Man. Ben, I found where servers
came up for us earlier, and it was in a
thing called the Tier 1 group. And I believe this
is one of these like defense companies that trains soldiers
and like private military folks. Aggressive Training Solutions was their
(45:33):
name prior to becoming tier one group. And it goes
back to, wow, there's a deep rabbit hole right here, Cerberus.
Oh my God, I can't wait to jump into that
whole thing, man.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Yeah, I hope we make it to that one.
Speaker 4 (45:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
Because this is deep, deep water. It's also weird. It
was important for us to say this at the top
of this episode, folks. There's a lot we don't know
as the public. We don't have any inside access to
this one. We are not read on to the special
access programs involved here. We do know that, look, the
(46:10):
stuff we do know is dwarfed by what we don't know.
So we can say, We do know that David Rush
appears to have embellished or completely fabricated a lot of
his credentials. We also know that despite the fact that
these credentials would not bear up to even like a
single phone call to Clemson, somehow the guy made it
through all these investigation barriers in a way that reminds
(46:33):
me of Atreyu in The NeverEnding Story. Remember that? When
the guy had to walk through those three different gates?
Speaker 4 (46:39):
The Sphinx? Yeah, yeah. Dude, that freaked me out when
I was a kid, man.
Speaker 3 (46:44):
It is a whole movie.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Sadness. Yeah. Sad.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
The nothing. Right.
Speaker 3 (46:52):
Oh, gosh.
Speaker 4 (46:53):
He was a puppet, though. He wasn't that scary. Actually,
if you if you watch it again, the nothing is
a little bit underwhelming. But now, man, what a what
a film.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
And we do know that Rush was functioning in the
CIA for the better part of two decades. We do
know he got arrested. Do you know his home was raided?
We do know that the CIA is. in the wake
of this, they pulled several other senior officials and they
put them on administrative leave. Don't let that euphemism fool
(47:22):
you guys. Administrative leave comes with an investigation all its own.
And if you are found complicit or negligent in your duties,
this can be a death sentence for your career, right?
You don't have to be guilty of polluting with Rush.
You could just be found incompetence. Right. And they say, well, you're,
(47:45):
you may not be a criminal, but you're bad at
your job.
Speaker 4 (47:48):
For sure. I mean, and this would certainly extend to
anyone that he was able to kind of coerce or
trick or, you know, implicate.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Right.
Speaker 3 (47:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:59):
Even if they weren't necessarily doing so with malice.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
A hundred percent, you know, and we, we do know
that David Rush, as we're recording on August 21st, is
in the custody of the U.S. government. He has been charged.
He has not been tried. He has not been convicted.
But we don't know the motivation for the crime. We
don't know if he actually did the heist or if
he got scapegoated. Let's just put the quiet part out
(48:27):
there and name the elephant in the room. We don't
know how long the CIA, we don't know when they
clocked the grift, excuse me. We don't know how long
they sat on it before they contacted the FBI, we also, guys,
we don't know where a bunch of the stuff he stole, allegedly, went.
(48:47):
When they raided that storage place, they only found a
portion of the money. So we don't know where it is.
Speaker 4 (48:54):
At a certain point, I mean, this is just an
absolutely horrible look for the agency. So, I mean, I
can imagine them scrambling to figure out how to handle
it internally before, you know, making it public.
Speaker 3 (49:05):
And.
Speaker 4 (49:06):
trying to push that down the road as much as possible.
I mean, you know, whether it's, I mean, it makes
the whole agency look incompetent.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
Yeah. It's a bag of badgers for sure.
Speaker 4 (49:18):
Or in some way, I don't know, in cahoots. It's
a weird one, man. It's a weird one.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
Yeah, negligence or complicity.
Speaker 4 (49:27):
Complicity is the word I was looking for. Thank you, Ben.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
Neither are particularly appealing, though. And also, we want to
shout out. some other journalists who have taken this in
interesting directions and saying, well, you know, this is a
lot of gold. These are a lot of gold bars.
So where did those even come from, right? That's another
twist to the tale.
Speaker 3 (49:50):
There's a further thing that Los Angeles Magazine has brought
to at least our attention, and it is a former
FBI agent named Babak Bromond. B-A-B-A-K-B-R-O-U-M-A-N-D. This guy had alleged
ties to the CIA, and this person allegedly found one
(50:15):
of Gaddafi's gold stashes. So the story that the Los
Angeles Magazine weaves here is that Muammar Gaddafi, when he
kind of saw some stuff was going down back in 2011... uh,
and during a civil uprising, got a bunch of gold
from Tripoli, a bunch of gold from other places in
(50:37):
the form of bars, in the form of, you know, diamonds, jewels,
these kinds of things, uh, a lot of money and
stashed that stuff, like put it on planes, spread it
out and stashed it in a whole bunch of places.
And this, this person, Babak Bramand worked with this other
person who was, I guess, kind of a storyteller, phony person, um,
(51:00):
to put together this whole scheme to get one of
Gaddafi's stashes somewhere in Africa. And they're not making any
direct connections to David Rush here. But at the very
end of this article, they do state that it is, quote,
unclear if Bremond has any ties to David Rush. Maybe
(51:21):
like an FBI person doing kind of the same thing
that Rush is doing as a CIA agent. top executive
official kind of guy. But this Bremond case is one
that we should at least look into. Towards the end
of the article, this is a statement that's written. Bremond,
for his part, tried to convince a jury that he
was playing this other person as a source. He testified
(51:44):
that he had been, quote, trained in the art of
deception and that he had been, quote, taught how to
spin a story when attempting to recruit sources. Which sounds
pretty dang similar to the things that Rush is doing.
It's just what sources are he, you know, who is
he flipping as a source throughout his whole scenario?
Speaker 2 (52:07):
Right.
Speaker 3 (52:07):
I don't, I don't see the end game there.
Speaker 4 (52:09):
Well, I also find it hard to believe that like
the CIA would see this grifter dude. and be like, well,
this guy does it better than anyone else we've ever seen. Like,
this guy, the quality of grift this dude is capable
of exceeds anyone within our storied organization that we would
have access to, like, legitimately, you know, that actually does
(52:29):
have the chops. What do you guys think about that? Like,
doesn't that kind of seem real unlikely?
Speaker 2 (52:35):
Yeah, it beggars imagination because the easier option would be
to just have that person.
Speaker 4 (52:41):
As an asset.
Speaker 3 (52:43):
Right.
Speaker 4 (52:44):
Not as a like an informant.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (52:46):
Put them out in the world like a snitch.
Speaker 3 (52:48):
Right.
Speaker 1 (52:49):
Exactly.
Speaker 4 (52:49):
Right.
Speaker 2 (52:50):
Like what if that if there is a phenomenal talent
for deception, then does that automatically make you executive material?
Maybe not. Right.
Speaker 4 (53:03):
You don't want people flexing that kind of deception on you.
Speaker 2 (53:07):
You know what I mean?
Speaker 4 (53:08):
Like, it just seems like that would be a real
red flag. And it's like, sure, we could maybe make
use of this guy, offer him some sort of per
diem or salary. I don't know how the hell that works, but, like,
not put him as an important key figure within an organization.
That just doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2 (53:25):
Right, because he's already proven that he's good at deception.
I mean, it is possible that certain powers not only, like,
it is possible that certain people may have aided and
abetted Rush is, pardon us, Rush to power. But that's conjecture.
It's not supported by evidence right now. It is implied
(53:46):
between the confirmed connections with Cerebus, Feinberg, and others. And again,
this gives us a lot to think about. This is
a black box of American endeavor. How does David J. Rush,
a guy with no normal public information, how does he
genuinely present a case of one grifter, outsmarting an entire
(54:08):
system that even now monitors every single significant action in
the Western world. There's smart, and then there's comic book
level super villain smart. So is the guy genuinely that
intelligent and genuinely that lucky?
Speaker 4 (54:24):
Well, smart and connected, like in the most meaningful ways imaginable.
I just have a hard time believing this guy could
have put one over on But again, you know, these
kind of organizations, they are quite large. There is a
lot of examples of one hand not knowing what the
other one is doing. Like, I mean, look at Burn
After Reading. If you want an example of how these
(54:47):
kinds of things can get out of control because various
entities within the organization, by design, don't know what the
other are doing exactly.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
Yeah, the SAP compartmentalization.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (55:00):
He seems to me like a puppet that was being
used by somebody. He had the right credentials. So unless
you looked really hard at him, you would just think
he is what he is. And he could function in
those upper echelons of the CIA to do things if
you needed someone who could do those things. It doesn't
feel like he's a lone actor just out there being
(55:23):
a con man. It feels like he was a con
man that somebody found useful.
Speaker 2 (55:29):
Somebody wants Rifted. Yeah, I agree with you guys.
Speaker 4 (55:34):
Hey now.
Speaker 3 (55:35):
Hey now, Ben.
Speaker 2 (55:38):
Hey now.
Speaker 3 (55:38):
Hey, Ben.
Speaker 2 (55:42):
We know that. That's what I'm skeptical about, you guys,
that one person could do this this long and this successfully.
It is also a point in the favor of conspiracy here. Again,
all conjecture. is that if you really want control of
somebody like that, then you can kind of blackmail them
(56:06):
by saying, hey, I know you don't actually have that
degree from Clemson. I know you weren't actually a captain. Oh,
here's a watch.
Speaker 4 (56:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
Just do what I say and get me that Rolex, okay? Yeah.
Speaker 3 (56:20):
Okay, no problem.
Speaker 2 (56:21):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (56:22):
You want another one?
Speaker 4 (56:23):
So maybe... There's someone deeper within the organization that's using
this guy as a proxy or like a patsy, patsy proxy,
where it's like they are the ones running the con,
running the scam and benefiting from it. But this guy,
they have so much on him that maybe they're keeping
him safe and forcing him to do this stuff to
benefit them so that they can become enriched or whatever
(56:45):
benefit in the shadows and never actually be exposed. I mean,
this guy's expendable. Real specific.
Speaker 3 (56:52):
Other ways.
Speaker 2 (56:53):
There's no.
Speaker 3 (56:53):
Yeah. Can you imagine that potentially that was the entirety
of the gold and cash and the watches?
Speaker 4 (57:01):
No, of course not.
Speaker 3 (57:02):
That was being used for whatever operations you think? I mean,
I mean, maybe it's his personal gain. It's a little vague.
Speaker 4 (57:08):
No, it was spread around. This is my point. Like
there are others that, you know, have pocketed way more
than him. I mean, he was maybe allowed to keep
a little bit for being a good boy. We just
have to figure out where this is. Correct.
Speaker 3 (57:21):
That's, that's making me think about the, The John Wick
situation of the concrete breaking open the case. Remember John
Wick 1? He breaks open the concrete in his basement.
He pulls out that little case. It has a bunch
of gold bars in it.
Speaker 4 (57:35):
Yeah, the go bag. Loose diamonds. Fraudulent passports. We know
the drill.
Speaker 2 (57:41):
Loose diamonds or passports that are so top level that
they can't even be considered fraudulent. Right.
Speaker 4 (57:48):
Like the word. Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (57:51):
The North Korean super notes. It reminds me of that
because we had that huge problem when North Korea was
making a hundred dollar bills that were actually better quality
than us under dollar bills.
Speaker 4 (58:03):
Ben speak, speaking of that, and I'm sorry that this
just occurred to me, this would be a fun episode. Um,
you mentioned, we were talking about Rolexes and stores of
wealth and things like that. Um, recently canal street in
New York was massively rated. by local law enforcement. This
is where like they sell all these counterfeit, you know,
luxury goods, including like watches and Prada bags and things
(58:25):
like that. There are, however, these companies in Asia that
make what's referred to as super clones, which are so good,
such top level, you know, counterfeit counterfeits that they can
barely be told apart even by the people that like
work for Rolex making them. I think it'd be interesting
(58:46):
to talk a little bit about, I always wonder like,
how do they get away with flipping all these illegal
goods on canal street? And the answer is maybe they
don't always, but then they just set back up shop again,
the moment they get knocked down. And what about the
really high level? Where do these, these forgeries come from?
And what about the really, really high echelons of forgeries
when it comes to selling these counterfeit goods? I think
(59:10):
it'd be a fun episode to do.
Speaker 2 (59:12):
Yeah, agreed. Let's write it down. We also know that
the CIA is really good at forging stuff. That's something
I keep going back to, you guys. I think we
all do now after exploring this together. the CIA is
one of the world's greatest intelligence agencies, right? And despite
their many historical missteps, they are legitimately good at covering
(59:33):
things up and controlling narratives across generations. So that's one
of the things that keeps stopping me as a final
note from just saying, this was a lone actor who
somehow got super lucky for 17 years. I, this is,
That doesn't.
Speaker 3 (59:53):
Happen, man.
Speaker 4 (59:54):
You might get lucky for a couple of years, five years. 17,
that's a pattern.
Speaker 2 (59:59):
It's rough. To be fair, we have to be fair
and objective. Yes, David J. Rush is in U.S. custody,
but he has yet to be convicted of a crime.
So he is still an innocent man at the time
of recording. And for the record, David J. Rush himself
(01:00:20):
has so far denied any wrongdoing whatsoever, categorically saying he's
not guilty. But however you look at it, we'd love
to hear your thoughts. This case is chock full of
the stuff they don't want you to know. So get
in touch with us. Please do, by all means, get
in touch with us. You can do that in several ways,
(01:00:42):
two of which include the Handel's Conspiracy Stuff and Conspiracy
Stuff show on the various social media platforms of note.
Speaker 4 (01:00:49):
And there are other ways as well.
Speaker 3 (01:00:50):
Yes, as good as we know the CIA is at
doing the spoopy dupes, we also know they're accused of
and sometimes absolutely proven to have done some of the
most heinous things we can imagine. So it is weird
to have those two things come together, right? A group
that's going to protect democracy and the world and capitalism
(01:01:13):
and mostly capitalism. Just getting up to the crazy things
we've talked about in the past. Why don't you give
us a call? Our number is 1-833-STD-WYTK. When you call in,
give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if
we can use your name and message on one of
our listener mail episodes that show up in the audio
only feeds. You can find them anywhere you find your
favorite podcasts. Wait, you can also send us an email.
Speaker 2 (01:01:37):
That is correct. We are the entities that read each
piece of correspondence we receive. Be well aware, yet unafraid.
Sometimes the void writes back. We'd like to give, as well,
a special shout-out to Mark Mazzetti and Julian E.
Speaker 1 (01:01:52):
Barnes.
Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
They did some excellent reporting for the New York Times
on this case, and the Washington Post originally wrote the story.
So tell us your thoughts. Give us a random fact.
We'll give you one in return. Keep the pet pictures
and the rutabagas coming. Conspiracy at iHeartRadio.com.
Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the
iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com