In what may be the most audacious expense report ever filed in the history of American intelligence, a former CIA official identified as Rush received tens of millions of dollars in gold bars and foreign currency from the United States government between November 2025 and March 2026, ostensibly for work-related purposes. When the CIA later attempted to locate said gold bars, they found precisely none of them. The currency had similarly gone on an unscheduled and apparently permanent holiday.

Court documents reveal that Rush made multiple formal requests to the government for the precious metals, received them, and then failed to account for their whereabouts in any documentation whatsoever. The CIA, after conducting an internal investigation and establishing that forty million dollars in gold does not simply misplace itself, referred the matter to the FBI. Rush was subsequently arrested.

The case raises several questions that the intelligence community may prefer not to answer publicly, chief among them being what operational necessity requires tens of millions in physical gold, and what the approval process looks like for such requests. That the CIA apparently disbursed the funds before anyone thought to ask those questions suggests that the agency's internal controls may benefit from some review — ideally before the next large gold bar requisition comes through.