$40m+ in an expense account based in gold bars is absolutely crazy. CIA agents must have access to untold resources if this is seen as a somewhat regular 4 month spend. Seems it is, given that they seemingly weren't concerned about the $40+ million being taken out, but where it was being held.

The "resources" are off the books, it must be just the tip of the iceberg.

I'm imagining its like the Continental Hotel in John Wick. Everything you need to fund and arm an insurgency, checking it out from facilities like I might with an AV adapter.

$40M is a trivial amount of money to everyone involved in this matter. It’s only a few hundred 1kg bars.

And the bars are the size of a cellphone.

Nobody’s talking about how much money it is to them,

to some degree, that’s our employees and often our money - it’s our concept of how much money is okay to fuck around with that matters.

I thought this was baseless speculation, but from TFA:

> [he] asked for, and received, “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.

Or, someone decided they wanted to redirect the flow of black money through someone else, but couldn't do it internally for some reason; so they called in their FBI friends to make a ruckus. While the guy is busy defending himself, they have an excuse to pick someone else to receive the new stream of gold.

Yeah, this reads like right out of "Burn notice".