While President Trump says he personally plans to check on the nation’s massive gold stockpile at Fort Knox, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says other ranking government officials have verified the supply of precious metal is indeed there and safe.
Grassley sent a Tweet on Sunday to correct reports that indicated it’s been decades since outside sources confirmed the gold’s presence in the Kentucky stronghold.
“I read that a group had gone there in ’74,” Grassley says, “and then the president was going to go, and you got the assumption that nobody had been to Fort Knox since ’74 and I wanted them to know that I had visited there in ’76.”
Grassley says his visit to Fort Knox in the nation’s bicentennial year had nothing to do with conspiracy theories, rather, he was there as a student of history. He recalls seeing the vast hoard of gold with his own eyes.
“When I went into Fort Knox, you could view the piles of gold,” Grassley says. “There were separate sections of the vault, and each separate section had a door that was locked, but it had a peephole, maybe six inches square, maybe a foot square, I don’t remember anymore, and you saw the stacks of gold brick there.”
The military installation is legendary for its high level of security, though Trump’s post on X Monday said “…maybe somebody stole the gold. Tons of gold.” Grassley says he heard over the weekend how very recent tours of Fort Knox confirm the many thousands of gold bars housed there are safe and sound.
“The new Secretary of Treasury said something like on September 30th, there was an inventory taken at that particular time,” Grassley says. “I suppose that’s the end of the fiscal year, and maybe that’s something they do annually, I don’t know that, but he said, ‘I can assure you that the gold’s there.'”
During a conference call with Iowa reporters, Grassley was asked about the gold’s relevance, since President Nixon took the U-S off the so-called gold standard in 1971, which had linked the country’s currency directly to gold.
“I suppose it’d be one penny on the dollar, maybe not even that, that we have gold backing our business,” Grassley says. “It’s hard for me to say the role that gold pays, but if somebody was demanding payment in gold, we’d have to have a supply to pay them. Now that doesn’t happen very often, thank God.”
President Trump said Monday he intends to visit Fort Knox soon to make sure the gold is still there. He’d be the first president to do so since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943. Reports say the depository contains more than 147-million troy ounces of gold, which would peg its value around $436-billion.