Ex-CIA official's plea filing lists $40 million in gold, no charge to plead to

…(cont) I'm sorry, I know I already did the date, but the number won't leave me alone either. Forty million dollars, in gold bars, kept for what the filing calls "work-related expenses." I don't have a job that pays in bars, and I don't know anybody who does. Somebody had to carry that out of wherever it was sitting — not by wire, not electronically, box by box, out a door, into a car, down a driveway. That's a physical fact before it's ever a legal one. Forty million dollars of gold doesn't file itself. It gets carried. And whoever carried it still doesn't know, on paper, what he's being charged with.

Which brings me to my glovebox, if you'll let me use it a second. Every registration I've ever been handed has two things on it: what you own, and what you're allowed to do with it. You can't have one without the other — try renewing plates on a car with no make or model listed, see how far you get at the counter. A charge is just the make and model of what happened. This filing has the make — forty million dollars, gold, a CIA official — and no model. Just the value, sitting on a line that hasn't been filled in.

I'm sorry — one more time, and then I'll drop it — the phrase itself. "A plea agreement in principle." I looked at that a long while, because it sounded careful, like somebody chose it on purpose. It is careful. It's a sentence built entirely out of the furniture of a deal that isn't the crime.

Excuse me, before you go — I found something else in the notebook I'd nearly forgotten. October of 2015: a Goldman Sachs banker named Rohit Bansal, accused of trading on information leaked out of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He agreed to plead guilty. Whatever else was wrong with that case, the paperwork at least had a crime typed into it. Goldman itself was facing fines from New York's financial regulator over the same leak — facing them, not yet paying them, which I suppose is its own kind of blank, but a smaller one than this.

So I've got two filings in front of me now, eleven years apart. One says what the crime was. The other says what the gold was for. I keep flipping between them, looking for the page where this one says what that one did. I haven't found it yet. Maybe you have better eyes than me. Somewhere between the gold and the blank line there's a word missing, and before anybody signs anything "in principle," I would very much like to know what it is: the charge.