Trump flew Venezuela's gold to America and nobody will melt it. Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of bars sit untouched in warehouses, three people who know the shipments told The New York Times on Monday, because no refiner will certify where it came from.
The gold came out of the mines of southern Venezuela, where miners pay gangs for protection and the army sells access. Refiners work under international rules that demand a guarantee the metal never funded gangs, corruption or environmental destruction. Nobody can give that guarantee for this gold. Planes carried it out of the country before the buyers had visited a single mine.
Trump knew all of that in 2019. His own Treasury blacklisted Venezuela's state gold company that March, calling the trade a lifeline that let Maduro pay miners in worthless bolívars and convert the bars into hard currency for the regime and the generals guarding it. Treasury said the mines poisoned people with mercury and that malaria was rising in the mining states. That designation still stands today.
Then US forces captured Maduro on 3 January, and Trump's view of the gold changed. In early March, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum brought a businessman into the Roosevelt Room with ten Venezuelan gold bars, White House officials recalled. Trump admired them. Aides took photos and joked about keeping it. The same day, Treasury issued a licence letting American traders import Venezuelan gold, and the first shipments came from the very company Treasury had named a national-security threat.
"Usually, you have to be in the Olympics to bring back the gold," Burgum told an energy conference.
The man who may soon run the House Intelligence Committee has a different name for it.
