I Am Also a Top Gun Trophy Winner
By 
“He told me he was a former fighter pilot, and I had no reason to doubt him,” Harting said. “He was completely believable. He looked the part. He talked the part.”
But now Bellmer and Harting don’t know what to believe after prosecutors accused Rush, 49, of being a serial fabulist who spun an elaborate fiction for years. He was arrested late last month in a federal case that has rocked the CIA and generated a series of sensational headlines.
Inside his modest home in Ashburn, about 40 miles west of downtown Washington, federal agents discovered 303 gold bars worth more than $40 million, according to federal prosecutors. They also seized $2 million in cash and 35 luxury watches, most of them Rolexes.
Why he had all that gold and cash is now the subject of a federal investigation. Rush, a CIA officer for about 17 years, is accused of creating a fake top secret intelligence program to receive government funds for his personal enrichment, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation.
Rush is also accused of fabricating his academic and military record when he applied to the spy agency in the early 2000s.
Among the fabrications, federal prosecutors say, was that he was a Navy pilot. Rush did serve in the Navy — from 1997 to 2015 — but he was an information systems technician. And according to federal prosecutors, he didn’t even have a pilot’s license.
Rush’s lawyer declined to comment.
So far he has been charged only with stealing public money by filling out fraudulent time sheets. Prosecutors say he pocketed $77,000 in military leave pay after he falsely claimed he was a member of the Navy Reserve beyond 2015.
“He looked the part” always seems to play an outsized role in these kinds of incidents. While it’s worth acknowledging that Rush isn’t a product of Trump (he entered the CIA and committed to his personal narrative before Trump appeared on the political stage) there’s certainly a correlation between their stories; a capacity to tell lies so large that it’s not in anyone’s interest to try to debunk them. It’s not as if the stuff about the F-14s is hard to debunk; it would take a serious evaluator with access to tools commonly available in the Intelligence Community to debunk core parts of the story.
Anyway, if you haven’t read the big new Epstein story here it is. Seems to be making both Bluesky and X very angry, albeit in different directions.