Late last month, news broke about former CIA agent David Rush, who held a top-secret security clearance and had amassed 303 gold bars worth more than $40 million along with $2 million in U.S. currency and 35 watches, many of them Rolexes. “The man with the golden con,” could be the best tagline on this story, but the real howler is the belief that Rush “slipped through the fastidious vetting process.”

Tracy Walder, a former CIA officer and FBI special agent, told the New York Post the case could point to a much more troubling issue within the agency. “This would have been a large-scale lying cover-up,” Walder explained. “There would have had to be a lot of other co-conspirators.” The CIA will have to go back “at least 10 years” to find them. Maybe so, but the real problem goes back much further.

In 1974, the CIA fired counterintelligence chief James Angleton, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). After that, according to Angelo Codevilla, author of Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century, “the primacy of social and bureaucratic considerations” took over, and “this hurt American CI [counterintelligence] badly.” From his post on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Codevilla was one of the few to see everything the CIA wanted to use its money for, and he authored a report to CIA director William Casey, classified “above top secret.” According to John Ranelagh’s The Agency: The Rise and Fall of the CIA, and Bob Woodward’s Veil, Codevilla’s report posed a real threat to CIA bureaucrats.

After the firing of Angleton, Codevilla explained, those who wanted to win the Cold War “lost out to those who wanted to manage a perpetual competitive-cooperative relationship with the USSR.” That explains why President Gerald Ford, who was briefed daily by the CIA, proclaimed in October 1976 “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” The captive peoples knew better, but as Codevilla showed, “the CIA did not see hundreds of millions of people ready to overthrow the communist world.” The CIA line on East Germany, Codevilla noted, “had not deviated far from East German propaganda.” The “bureaucratically unchallengeable” CIA “might not always be right. But it would never be wrong.”

In 1980, the CIA hired Fordham University alum John Brennan, who in 1976 voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall, presidential candidate of the Communist Party USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. That should have disqualified Brennan from any post in the CIA, but the agency hired him anyway. So even in 1980, there was no “fastidious vetting process.”

As Codevilla noted, the CIA failed to uncover traitors such as Aldrich Ames, the Walker family, and CIA officer William Kampiles, who sold to the USSR for $3000 the entire operating manual of the KH-11satellite. The mighty CIA failed to stop 9/11, the worst attack on the United States since 1941. In 2013, President Barack Obama tapped none other than John Brennan to head the CIA.

According to his autobiography, Brennan believed in “the Islamic teaching that jihad is a holy struggle in pursuit of a moral goal,” and that “violence and jihad are not necessarily synonymous.” So, it was no surprise that under his leadership the CIA failed to prevent Islamic terrorist attacks at Fort Hood, the Boston Marathon, San Bernardino, and the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, all of which had massive casualties. As the CIA failed at its appointed tasks, Brennan fundamentally transformed the agency into a partisan domestic force, confirmed by his book Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad, which amounts to a repetition of the Russia hoax.

In 2020, Brennan joined 50 other intel operatives, including former CIA directors, in advancing the claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation,” a claim they all either knew or should have known was false. Again, there was no fastidious vetting process to filter out the lies and partisan fakery.

In Neutering the CIA: Why U.S. Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences, former CIA analyst John Gentry shows how Brennan transformed the agency into a DEI hothouse. This shows up, especially, in CIA recruiting.

“I used to struggle with impostor syndrome, but at 36 I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be,” an unnamed CIA employee said in a 2021 CIA recruiting video. “I am a cisgender millennial who’s been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.” People might think that such a disorder would disqualify a person from working for any intelligence agency. DEI hiring does not betoken “fastidious vetting.”

Rush was hired on his third try in 2009, after falsely claiming to be a graduate of the United States Air Force Test Pilot School, a weapons tester for the Army and Navy, and a thesis/dissertation advisor at the Air Force Institute of Technology. Rush also claimed he held a bachelor’s degree from Clemson University and a master’s from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Neither school has any record of his attendance. As it turns out, in federal bureaucracies, hiring fakes is standard practice.

Similarly, when he applied at the Environmental Protection Agency in 1989, John Beale claimed he had worked for Sen. John Tunney of California, which was untrue. Beale claimed he served in Vietnam, where he contracted malaria, so he needed a handicapped parking spot. He didn’t serve in Vietnam and didn’t contract malaria. Nobody checked any of those claims, and Beale got his EPA job and his handicapped parking spot.

In 1994, Beale told his bosses he was a CIA secret agent, but nobody at the EPA called CIA boss James Woolsey to verify that whopper. That empowered Beale to take more than two years off with full pay while claiming to be in London, India, and Pakistan, when he was actually lounging at a vacation home. Beale pulled off his CIA ruse for more than a decade, and while performing no work, he became the EPA’s highest-paid employee. After retirement, Beale continued to draw a paycheck and retention bonuses.

Beale defrauded taxpayers of nearly $1 million and, in 2013, received a 32-month prison sentence. While Rush’s trial awaits, there are a few realities for the people to consider.

After the CIA’s failure to prevent 9/11, the government rewarded its failure with more money and added the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). As former CIA man Fred Fleitz wrote, the ODNI has expanded “into a bureaucratic behemoth of roughly 1800-2000 personnel and is widely derided for politicizing intelligence and meddling in domestic politics.” Outgoing DNI Director Tulsi Gabbard has made some cuts, but Fleitz wants the ODNI eliminated in a quest to “make American intelligence great again.” Whether it was ever great remains debatable.

“Intelligence officials abuse their positions to discredit opposition to the Democratic Party, of which they are part,” Angelo Codevilla wrote in 2020. “Complicit with the media, they leverage the public’s mistaken faith in their superior knowledge, competence, and patriotism to vilify their domestic enemies from behind secrecy’s shield.” So it’s long past time, Codevilla counseled, to “Abolish FISA, Reform FBI, and Break Up CIA.” John Brennan and (former DNI) James Clapper, should already be in jail. They aren’t, and the Rush case leaves us plenty to ponder.

As Shirley Bassey might say, Rush may love only gold, but that leaves out the “lying cover-up.” What CIA operation demanded 303 gold bars and $2 million in cash? How far back does this go? Who are the co-conspirators? Could this be part of the long-term consequences of U.S. intel against Trump?