The CIA Just Got ROBBED For $40 Million. The Trail Leads Straight To Trump's Pentagon.

The CIA Gold Bar Scandal Just Got a New Character — And Her Story Doesn't Add Up

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] There’s a simple tell when someone’s lying about why they quit a job. The reason keeps changing. Hold that thought, because I need to back up to the gold. A senior CIA officer named David Rush — seventeen years at the agency, served two administrations, one of each party — got arrested after the FBI found more than 300 gold bars sitting in his house in Virginia. Forty million dollars in bullion. The affidavit says he was holding it for “work-related expenses.” A retired officer who spent his whole career moving money for the agency told the Wall Street Journal he never once dealt in gold, and he’s right to point it out. Cash leaves a record. Wires leave a record. Gold is what you reach for when you need money no oversight committee will ever trace. That’s the scandal. Now meet the woman who’d like to be the hero of it. Amaryllis Fox Kennedy held three of the most sensitive jobs in government at the same time — deputy director of national intelligence, a seat on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, and a post at OMB watching how the CIA and the rest of the spy agencies spend their money. Nobody hands one person that much power by accident. In her case, the qualification that mattered was a last name. She’s married to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s son. That was the door. She’s not a fraud — she was a real officer, wrote a book about it. But an administration that campaigns against “the swamp” handed a relative the keys to the agency’s checkbook. That is the swamp. They just gave it a flag pin. *This is the kind of thing I dig into here. Subscribe — it’s free, and it keeps me on it.* Now back to the resignation. When she left, the story was family. A daughter heading to college, bills to manage, time to step back. Ordinary stuff. Nobody questions it. Then the gold broke into the headlines — and her reason grew a second act. In the Wall Street Journal she’s no longer leaving over tuition. Now she “couldn’t keep signing the checks.” Now she “would’ve become complicit.” Now she’s the one principled person who saw money and gold moving in the dark and walked away rather than be part of it. Pick one. Either you quit to pay for college, or you quit because you uncovered a corruption you couldn’t stomach. Those are not the same resignation. And here’s what sinks it for me. She had authority over CIA spending right up to her last day. If she was watching untraceable gold flow through the system, almost nobody on earth was better positioned to do something about it. Yet the public record shows she never raised the gold with senior agency staff — not once — and when reporters ask her to name specifics now, she retreats behind “national security.” Watch who she’s careful to protect. The Trump appointees running the place — Ratcliffe, Gabbard, Pulte — she calls heroes “doing the Lord’s work.” The villains are conveniently faceless: career people who were there before Trump arrived. She knifes a ghost and flatters every Trump official by name. That’s not a whistleblower. That’s an audition. A story built so she can kiss the ring on her way out the door — because whatever made a Kennedy walk away from three of the most powerful seats in Washington, it wasn’t the electric bill. The CIA says her claims are flat-out false. Believe that as much as you believe any spy agency talking about its own transparency. So where does that leave us. The arrest is real. The gold is real. And the bigger question — whether the CIA runs money out of sight of the people who are supposed to be watching it — is real, and old. People in both parties have been chasing it since before the Church Committee. It deserves a serious answer. What it doesn’t need is this particular person volunteering as the conscience of the story the moment it got famous, after telling us she left for completely different reasons. She even floated coming back — “first in line,” she said, if the conditions are right. That’s not someone who walked away on principle. That’s a nepo baby keeping a seat warm for the next administration. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

ICE Just CROSSED THE LINE at This Detention Center and Democrats Are FROZEN

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Outside Delaney Hall in Newark, you’re watching the federal government act like it owns the streets. Tear gas in a residential neighborhood. Flash bangs going off like it’s a war zone. People getting tackled, sprayed, and beaten on camera. Families inside the facility saying conditions are so bad their loved ones stopped eating, and DHS answering with the oldest lie in the book: nothing to see here. And the part that should make every Democrat in this country sick is the response from Democratic leadership in New Jersey: tone policing. “Lower the temperature.” “Don’t give ICE an excuse.” That’s not leadership. That’s a governor admitting—out loud—that she believes ICE will retaliate against her residents if they protest too hard. That’s what it sounds like when elected officials start treating their own federal government like a hostile occupying force they can’t control. Here’s the truth: pressure works. Visitation didn’t come back because somebody asked nicely. It moved because people showed up, stayed put, and forced the issue into daylight. And that’s exactly why the crackdown outside the gates is so aggressive—because the people on the ground are doing the job our institutions are refusing to do: making sure the country can’t pretend it didn’t know. If you want to help, don’t just doomscroll the footage. Call Sherrill. Call Kim. Call your House member. Tell them you expect subpoenas, hearings, and state-level action—not another press conference about “temperature.” Support the legal groups representing detainees and protesters. And keep sharing what’s coming out of Newark, because the only thing these agencies fear is sustained attention. Delaney Hall isn’t “one bad night.” It’s a preview of what unchecked federal power looks like—right here, at home—when the people who are supposed to fight back decide their safest move is to manage you instead. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

A 14-Year-Old Got Shot In The Back. The Shooter Just Walked Free.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] A South Carolina jury watched the video: a 14-year-old kid running away, then getting shot in the back. And they cleared the shooter. The kid was Cyrus Carmack-Belton. The man who shot him was convenience store owner Rick Chow. Chow said he thought Cyrus had stolen water. But surveillance footage showed the water never left the store. Cyrus died anyway. Here’s the part I can’t get past, as someone who spent 20 years wearing a badge: Stand Your Ground is giving civilians more legal cover to kill than cops get. If I shoot a fleeing suspect in the back, I’m living inside Tennessee v. Garner—deadly force is supposed to be about an immediate threat, not a hunch, not anger, not “he might’ve done something.” South Carolina’s law (the “Protection of Persons and Property Act”) takes that old duty-to-retreat principle and guts it. It says there’s no duty to retreat in a place you have a right to be, including your business, and it builds in immunity if the shooter claims the right kind of fear. And once the person who got shot is dead—once the only living narrator is the guy holding the gun—“I believed I was in danger” becomes a magic sentence a jury can hide behind. If you’re thinking “that’s not self-defense,” you’re not crazy. Real self-defense is stopping an imminent threat. What we’ve created with these laws is something else: a system where chasing someone down and killing them can get laundered into “reasonable fear,” even when the video looks like a kid trying to get away. And if we don’t face what these laws actually do—case by case, body by body—more families are going to bury kids and watch the shooter walk. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

Six Hours. That’s How Long Their Surrender Lasted.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] DOJ leadership tried to slam the door on the January 6 payout scheme with one of those courtroom words that’s supposed to end the conversation: “Period.” Acting AG Todd Blanche told Rep. Grace Meng the so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” wasn’t moving forward — and that it was never going to happen. That lasted about six hours. Because once the cameras were off, you could watch the replacement being built in real time. Lindsey Graham immediately started floating a new workaround — paying “weaponization” claims through the Federal Tort Claims Act, which is basically the quietest way possible to move taxpayer money: not one big fund everyone can see, but a bunch of smaller settlements that don’t look like a headline until you add them up later. Then came the tell. Stanley Woodward — the Associate Attorney General, the number three person at DOJ — replied publicly to Graham with “We’re on it.” Present tense. Not “we’ll look at it,” not “interesting idea,” but we’re already moving. And then he deleted it — after journalists screenshotted it, because of course they did. And Trump didn’t help their “it’s dead” story either. In a podcast taping this week, when asked about dropping the fund, he didn’t say I ended it. He said a court stopped it, and that the people it was meant to pay “should be reimbursed.” Translation: the plan didn’t die. It got blocked. So they’re shopping for a new vehicle. That’s the point here: they’re not abandoning the payoff — they’re abandoning the version that was too obvious to survive. Big, loud, easy to freeze in court. The next version will be quieter, messier, and harder to track unless Congress forces disclosure. If you don’t want “period” to become the new magic word for “we’ll do it anyway, just off-camera,” this is the moment to pressure lawmakers to lock down the loopholes — because they just told you, accidentally, that they’re still building it. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

They Look Like Patriots. A Leak Just Exposed What They Really Are.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] A roster tied to Patriot Front leaked out, and it paints a picture that should make everybody stop pretending this is some fringe problem. Hundreds of members. Spread across basically the entire country. And the part that matters most isn’t the number on the page — it’s the pipeline behind it: how a movement like this keeps finding new recruits in ordinary towns, over and over again. Here’s how they do it. They don’t lead with swastikas and “blood and soil.” They lead with belonging. They wrap the hate in fitness, “brotherhood,” discipline, matching outfits, flags, clean visuals — a whole cosplay of purpose and masculinity. Researchers and reporting have been saying this for a while: Patriot Front operates less like the stereotypical backwoods militia and more like a media-and-recruitment machine built to pull in young men who feel isolated, angry, and invisible. If you’ve ever worked cases that involve recruitment—gangs, crews, trafficking networks—you recognize the pattern immediately. The front door is always something that feels like community. The ideology comes later, once leaving would mean losing the only “team” that finally noticed you. That’s why these leaks matter. They don’t just expose “monsters.” They expose how regular people get turned into threats. So no, the answer isn’t just “arrest them all” and move on. We need pressure on elected officials and law enforcement leadership to treat domestic extremism like the sustained threat it is, not a headline they can ignore until something explodes. And we need communities paying attention to the recruitment tactics — the flyers, the “training clubs,” the sanitized branding — because that’s where this starts, long before it ends up in the streets. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!