Despite the assurances made last week by the Minister of Finance Scott Bensten that all the reserves of gold in the United States stored in the military installation of Fort Knox are “attending and reported”, President Trump continues to insist that he and Elon Musk will soon travel to Kentucky to make sure that the gold bars were not sure that
“We will open the doors. I’ll see we have gold there. We want to understand, did anyone stole the gold in Fort Knox? “Trump said in a speech last week before the Republican Governors Association.
During his remarks on the Committee on Conservative Political Actions on Saturday, Trump said he and his senior councilor Elon Musk would visit the highly guarded military installation about 40 miles south of Louisville and made it aware that they were speculating what could happen when the door was opened.
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“Wouldn’t it be terrible? We open [it] Above, this Fort Knox has nothing. It’s just a hard granite that is 5 feet thick. The front door, you need six muscles to open it. I don’t even think they have windows. Wouldn’t that be awful if we open it and there is no gold? So, we will open these doors, we will look. And if there are 27 tons of gold, we will be very happy, “Trump said.
Days before Trump’s remarks, Musk had already given the theorists of Fort Knox’s conspiracy more fodder.
“Who confirms that gold was not stolen by Fort Knox?” He wrote in a post on February 17th to X. “Maybe it may not be. This gold is the property of the American public! We want to know if it’s still there. “
The last charm with Fort Knox
Fort Knox and the safety of just over half of the nation’s gold reserves have long been a topic that has captured American imagination, inspiring novels and numerous conspiracy theories that claim that gold may have been moved or stolen. Through James Bond’s film in 1964. GoldfingerThe villain of the same name seeks to blow up a dirty atomic bomb in Fort Knox so as to pollute gold and destroy the US economy.
The current dust over the United States Bit Depository, also known as Fort Knox, seems to have started with a tweet from the far -right Libertarian financial website Zero Hedge.
“It would be great if @elonmusk can look at Fort Knox just to make sure that 4.580 tons of us gold is there. The last time someone looked 50 years ago in 1974, writes the Zero Hedge X account on February 15th.
Musk replied, wrote, “Certainly reviewed at least every year?”
Chiming in the exchange, Senator Rand Paul wrote, “No, let’s do it.” In 2010, Paul, a frequent critic of the federal exchange, asked if there was still gold in Fort Knox.
I’m just checking against a formal audit
Part of the confusion of about 147.4 million ounces of gold stored in Fort Knox involves a distinction between visual inspection of reserves against actual weighing it. The Trenski, who hold the gold in Fort Knox, do not often open for non -authentic staff. In fact, the last time it happened was in 2017, during Trump’s first term, when the then secretary of continuous sting Steve Mnuchin and a delegation of the congress, which included the leader of the majority of Senator McConnell, toured the facility.
“Gold was there when I visited him,” Mnuchin told CNBC last week. “I hope no one has moved it. I’m sure they didn’t. I was the first secretary of the Ministry of Finance to go there for more than 50 years. Obviously, there are many serious security protocols to protect the gold I can’t talk about. “
In 1975, Senator Iowa Charles Grasli, a Republican, visited his own visit to look at the gold at Fort Knox.
“When I entered Fort Knox, you can see the piles of gold,” Grassli told Radio Iowa. “There were separate sections of the vault, and each section had a door that was locked, but there was a pieful, maybe a six -inch square, maybe a square on my feet, I no longer remember and there you saw a pile of gold brick.”
Mnuchin also added that if Trump wants Fort Knox to be audited, “it’s something that can easily be done.” Last week, Paul wrote to the Secretary of the Trump Department of Finance and asked for just that, asking for a “Audit of Coin Audit, including Gold Testing”.
In 1974, the latest official gold audit was conducted by the US General Accounting Service and the Ministry of Finance. But because of the security measures that do not allow the public to receive too much information about the storage of gold, the audits do a little to satisfy the theorists of the conspiracy.
The 1974 audit, for example, “was intended to cancel the rumors, but only provided temporary relief from public skepticism,” CMI Gold & Silver, one of the largest gold and silver dealers in the United States, says on its website. “Conspiracy theorists have two basic principles: one, the gold in Fort Knox is extremely exhausted or completely disappeared; Two, some of the gold bars are fake – made of tungsten with gold coverage. “
If, and when Trump and Musk travel to Fort Knox, it seems unlikely that the finance minister will not join them.
“I don’t have any plans to go to Kentucky,” Bechent told Bloomberg TV last week. “At the moment I can tell the American people on a camera, there was a report, September 30, 2024, all the gold is there. Every Senator in the United States who wants to come and visit it can organize a visit through our office.”