In an exclusive interview with Kitco News, Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) revealed that next year at the start of the newly inaugurated 112th United States Congress, he would introduce a new bill to audit the U.S. gold reserves, which are reportedly stored at the New York Federal Reserve and Fort Knox.

The reason behind this bill is that in the event “we ever get around to deciding we should use gold in relationship to our currency, we ought to know how much is there,” Paul told Kitco.

“Our Federal Reserve admits to nothing, and they should prove all the gold is there. There is a reason to be suspicious, and even if you are not suspicious, why wouldn’t you have an audit?” said Paul.

This is not the first time Rep. Ron Paul has suggested that there be a full audit of the county’s gold reserves. Paul recalled that “In the early 1980s when I was on the gold commission, I asked to recommend to Congress that they audit the gold reserves — we had 17 members of the commission and 15 voted not to [recommend] the audit.”

The two votes in favor of an audit came from the two gold advocates who pushed for the creation of the commission in the first place — Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Rep. Ron Paul.

At the time, Sen. Helms and Rep. Paul were the leaders of Congress’s gold coalition, which included Republicans Sen. James McClure of Idaho, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Rep. Philip Crane of Illinois, Rep. James Collins of Texas, Rep. Steven Symms of Idaho, and Democratic Rep. Larry McDonald of Georgia, the latter of whom was at the time also a National Council member of the John Birch Society.

In fact, Rep. McDonald introduced a similar bill to that of Ron Paul’s newly proposed 2011 gold reserve audit bill. In 1979, Rep. McDonald sponsored H.R. 555, entitled: “A bill to require the Comptroller General of the United States to audit annually the gold held by the United States on the first day of each fiscal year and to report his findings to Congress.” McDonald presented the same bill again the next year, this time as H.R.555, and was unable to garner any cosponsors.

A few years earlier, on August 8, 1974, Rep. Phillip Crane introduced H.R. 16345, entitled, “A bill to provide for an audit by the General Accounting Office of all gold owned by the United States.” He too was unable to gain support for his gold reserve audit bill.

Although McDonald and Crane’s respected gold reserve audit bills received no cosponsors at the time, Ron Paul hopes to ride the wave of his recent landmark Federal Reserve Audit bill that passed the House this past year, but was eventually gutted in the Senate by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

If Paul’s Federal Reserve audit were able to pass the House and make strong headway in the Senate, despite Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, then come January, with a potential newly-elected “Tea Party” Congress, Paul’s bill to audit U.S. gold reserves might make headway. It would be fundamentally important to any future plans to return to a pure gold standard.

The last and only time that an audit was performed on the gold held in Fort Knox was issued within hours of President Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration on January 20, 1953. After 20 years of Democratic rule in the White House and President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6102 of April 3, 1933, in which private ownership of gold was outlawed, the American people had become worried whether all of the gold that FDR and the federal government confiscated was still in storage.

Ron Paul cited this audit of over 50 years ago as the “only one decent audit done”; however, Chris Weber from LewRockwell.com summarized the various problems with that audit as follows:

1.��� Representatives of the audited group were allowed to make the rules governing the audit. No outside private experts were allowed.
2.��� Those government bureaucrats involved were inexperienced in their tasks, by their own admission.
3.��� The entire audit of the largest gold hoard ever concentrated in history lasted only seven days.
4.��� Only a fraction of the gold was actually tested for purity. Later, the officials put this fraction at just 5 percent.
5.��� Based on that fraction, the official committee reported that, in their opinion, all the holdings would have matched their records if they'd all been tested.
6.��� If the audit was accurate, the fact remains that almost 80 percent of the gold went overseas in the coming years. If the audit was not accurate, the amount of gold lost could have been even more.

Although that audit may have satisfied the American public of 1953, which “was still used to accepting official government statements at face value,” Weber writes, in the decade since then Americans "have lost much of their respect and belief in the words of their government,” as a result of scandals and lies ranging from President Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin incident, the sinking of the USS Liberty, Richard Nixon’s Watergate fiasco, Bill Clinton’s lying under oath about his sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky to President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell's false “irrefutable” evidence that Saddam Hussein was building “weapons of mass destruction” and possessed direct links to the September 11 attacks.

With a great many Americans having lost faith in their government, any audit of U.S. gold reserves will not come without scrutiny, but 50 years since there was an actual full audit, one wonders if the gold is still there. After all, as Alex Newman pointed out in The New American, the United States government has been using the gold to keep the price of gold low against the dollar so that Americans don't become aware of the amount of inflation that has been occurring owing to the government's and Federal Reserve's money policies.

When asked if he thought “there is any truth to claims that there is no gold in Fort Knox or the New York Federal Reserve,” Paul replied, “I think it is a possibility.”

That possibility alone is one reason why Paul says there should be an audit, and as he said before, “even if you are not suspicious, why wouldn’t you have an audit?”

In the interview Paul expressed discontent over the new tax burdens for selling gold in transactions of $600 or over that was passed in Section 9006 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as ObamaCare. In regard to this Paul said, “For every transaction of over $600, gold dealers have to fill out a form; it is a lot of paperwork.”

As for whether he would run for President in 2012, Ron Paul remained elusive, offering his usual response that it was still too early to tell. If Paul does run and win, he would be the first President since Ronald Reagan seriously to consider returning to a gold standard, and hopefully the first President since William McKinley actually to have such a proposal enacted, such as the Gold Standard Act of 1900.

In Ron Paul’s office is a portrait of President Grover Cleveland, who like Rep. Larry McDonald was a hard-money constitutionalist Democrat. Regardless of Paul's political willingness to run or not for the presidency, one thing is sure: come January 2011, he will push for an audit of the United States’ gold reserves in his effort to restore sound economic policies consistent with the U.S. Constitution.

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Angel Shaske said:

End the FED Take our government back. Get this country back under the peoples control so we can go forward. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5rr4MJK_iY

August 27, 2010 | url

C_T_CZ said:

As Usual Ron Paul Fighting For Americans It's like Ron Paul is the *only* person in Washington actually fighting for We, The People. Ron Paul deserves to be president!

August 27, 2010

JFK said:

Ron Paul is the only politician I trust Ron Paul seems to be the only one fighting in the interests of the people. We need more individuals like him to push for the end of the Federal Reserve and bring back the gold standard. Let those international bankers swallow their fiat currency and choke on it. Ron Paul, you have my vote for the 2012 presidency.

August 28, 2010

A. Daniels said:

Audit EVERYTHING! We need to audit EVERYTHING! And I mean EVERYTHING. The government has been selling us lies for so long I would have to look out the window to make sure if they told me it was day time. We should start with the Fed, the gold reserves, Geithner's tax returns, Obama's finances, congresscriminals' finances, etc.

August 28, 2010 | url

Free Arthur said:

Good idea! Great idea! I wonder if there is any gold in Fort Knox. Ron Paul has, during times past, proposed a bill concerning gold and silver moneys with the three following features. * No more taxes on the sale of gold and silver bullion. * Repeal all legal tender laws. * Remove all laws that prohibit people or entities from minting gold and silver coins. Please correct me if I am wrong. After all, gold and silver are money. Ron Paul will be at a rally at the San Francisco civic center @ Polk and McAllister Streets on this coming Saturday, Sept. 4, from 1:00 to 4:00.

August 29, 2010

Jerry McGuire said:

... SHOW ME THE MONEY !!!!!!

August 29, 2010

David said:

Mr. Fighting Windmills again? None of this has prayer of passing. The big wigs in Congress will not allow it. So who really gains? Well it is good grandstanding, but no political value because it has no chance of passing. I think a nice roll call of who voted for what about 2 days before they are due for re-election might be more effective. Heads you lose, tails I win. I think we need to seriously look at the election process and why when push comes to shove no matter who is in there things go a certain way.

August 30, 2010

Jason said:

Panic The problem is that people don't really want to know the truth. If Fort Knox ever were audited (and let's face it, it's probably close to empty), world-wide panic would follow.

August 30, 2010

Pathenry said:

SilverAndGoldAreMoney.com Yes, audit it. Yes, have a commission to show how government is involved in manipulating stock prices and also metals prices. But most importantly, use the Solari model privately in your own business circle (you really only trade with a few), to make the Fed notes obsolete as far as you are concerned, avoiding their hyperinflation. The calculator at the website in title will help you in the current fluctuations of prices. See how it works in Indonesia: http://solari.com/blog/?p=8392 An important comment: "pure gold standard" is not the best. See the speech and history surrounding William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech; demonetizing silver hurt agrarians. Note the Constitutional dollar is defined in silver, and its equivalent in gold. There is a reason for bi- or tri- metalism.

August 30, 2010

Becky said:

... Ron Paul is one of the very few who have been consistent and honest all throughout his career. I trust him above all others. I believe we need him in the WH!

August 31, 2010

NadePaulKuciGravMcKi said:

Dr Ron knows the score Nader Gravel Kucinich McKinney props & respect

September 01, 2010

Bob Vondruska said:

Wake Up America! Thank you Ron Paul for being a voice of reason in a wilderness of half-baked, economically illiterate, emotionally undeveloped people. Why is it so hard for these people to see the simple logic behind what Dr. Paul has been saying for more than 30 years? You can't have a government backed by nothing, and you can't just keep printing money out of thin air. All that Ron Paul is trying to do is find out if our government has any gold left so we can hopefully return to the days when our money was actually backed by something of value. Right now, our money isn't worth the paper it's printed on. It's time to wake up and take back our government! Ron Paul in 2012!

September 02, 2010