A Tale of Two Davids
Rush, Grusch, and Two Levers on Special Access
Since late May, I’ve been following the totally insane story of David Rush, a now former Senior Executive Service-level CIA official in the Directorate of Science and Technology. Rush is facing federal charges after an FBI raid on his Virginia home uncovered 303 gold bars valued at over $40 million, $2 million in cash, and 35 luxury watches. In a sense, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Prosecutors characterize him as a “master manipulator” who, since 2009, climbed the intelligence ranks using a fabricated educational and military-service history that went completely undetected. He then allegedly created a fraudulent Special Access Program supposedly related to continuity-of-government operations, through which he not only repeatedly requested gold and foreign currency, but received them.
If you’re following this story from a certain perspective and are already interested in SAPs and USAPs, compartmentalization, black budgets, and beyond, some of the roles he’s alleged to have not actually held in the May 20 affidavit are intriguing to say the least:
Current Director of Test for a “145-person, 18-aircraft joint Army/Navy weapons test organization”
Graduate of the United States Air Force Test Pilot School
An eleven-year Thesis/Dissertation advisor at the Air Force Institute of Technology
For now, the case sits in a wait-and-see phase; more charges may come, the full alleged scheme is still taking shape publicly, and any trial could get very complicated very quickly because the story runs straight through classified programs, vetting failures, and whatever the government decides it can safely expose in court. At present, Rush is being held without bail as a flight risk while attention widens to include the CIA’s vetting failures. Several agency officials have already been placed on leave.
Given what we know so far, this is drifting toward “crime of the century” territory: the scale of the deceit, the amount of money, the classified setting, and the possibility that others were involved, knowingly or not.
Another David has been in the news recently as well, prying at the world of special access from a very different direction.
On June 9, 2026, former Air Force intelligence officer and whistleblower David Grusch and others spoke from Capitol Hill at a high-profile, bipartisan press conference. Standing alongside members of the congressional “UAP Caucus,” Grusch and lawmakers again called for the declassification of government secrets and files regarding UAPs. In a follow-up appearance on Fox News on June 13, 2026, he spoke directly to how these programs are funded:
“Earlier in my career, I was a counter-threat finance analyst and actually worked in a special cell looking at arms trafficking and terrorist funding. So, I have a background. And what I found was haircuts taken to classified black programs to fund this. There were also self-funding cut-out companies. If you’re familiar—you mentioned Iran-Contra—they had cut-out companies funding arms purchases.”
We have long heard of budget skimming, cut-outs, and other funding vehicles, but then he went further:
“But also, criminal enterprises were the third way I saw laundering money. And I bumped into a serious criminal enterprise. All that information was actually reported to the Department of Justice. It led to some federal investigations and things I can’t mention now, but the DOJ is handling that. Because I bumped into a government-run criminal enterprise that was siphoning money for this topic as well, to kind of pay for the crash-retrieval operations off-books.”
How about that?
Next up: Skinwalkers at the Supermarket