At the end of May 2026, the FBI seized 303 gold bars worth about 40 million dollars at the home of David Rush, a former senior CIA official. Donald Trump took the opportunity to publicly rene
At the end of May 2026, the FBI seized 303 gold bars worth about 40 million dollars at the home of David Rush, a former senior CIA official. Donald Trump took the opportunity to publicly renew his call for a physical audit of the U.S. gold reserves. Is the world’s most famous vault really full?
Around May 27, federal agents raided David Rush’s home in Virginia and seized 303 gold bars, about 2 million dollars in foreign currency, and 35 luxury watches, including several Rolexes. The total value of gold alone is close to 40 million dollars.
€20 bonus for registering on BitvavoThis link uses an affiliate program.The prosecution accuses him of falsifying documents to inflate his salary and obtaining gold and currency through the agency without traceable justification. His detention hearing is scheduled for early June 2026.
Trump responded immediately on Truth Social, stating that “it is time to conduct a physical audit of Fort Knox”. In an interview on May 10 with Sharyl Attkisson on Full Measure, he had already indicated his desire to “knock on Fort Knox’s door” to verify the state of the reserves. Rush’s arrest gave him the political argument he had been seeking for several months.
According to U.S. Treasury data as of April 30, 2026, Fort Knox contains 147,341,858 fine troy ounces of gold, about 4,580 metric tons. At current market prices, near $4,500 per ounce, these reserves represent between 662 and 667 billion dollars.
However, at the legal book value of $42.22 per ounce, fixed since 1973, the assets officially value only $6.22 billion on the Treasury’s books.
The last independent and exhaustive physical audit of Fort Knox dates back to 1953, under President Eisenhower. A partial inspection conducted with Congress and journalists did take place in September 1974; however, it only covered about 21% of the bars. Since then, no complete count or independent weighing of the entire stock has been made public.
This is not Trump’s first attempt either. In February 2025, he and Elon Musk, then leading DOGE, announced an imminent inspection. It never happened, and Treasury officials at the time deemed that annual internal audits were sufficient.
For reference, it was also at that time that prediction markets like Polymarket went wild over the Fort Knox audit, with odds rising up to 64% for an audit before May 2025.
In 2025, Representative Thomas Massie introduced the Gold Reserve Transparency Act (HR 3795), mandating independent audits every five years. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent states that “all the gold is present and accounted for” through annual internal controls. Nevertheless, neither he nor Trump had set an official date for a public audit as of May 31, 2026.
Gold has been trading between $4,500 and $5,000 per ounce in recent months, further widening the gap each day between its half-century-old book value and its real market value.
For observers of gold and commodity markets, the announcement of an official audit would inevitably revive the debate over the gold standard, even though Trump has never proposed ending fiat currency.
Ultimately, the Rush case has put Fort Knox back in the center of the American political agenda as summer approaches. The arrest of a former CIA agent with $40 million in gold bars, growing Congressional pressure through HR 3795, and the gold price surge form a cocktail hard to ignore.
An audit might change nothing. Or maybe it will. A bit like in La Casa de Papel, where the Professor emptied the Bank of Spain’s vaults to fill them with rocks… and where the State chose silence to avoid panic. Except this time, it’s not a Spanish series. This is Washington. And the cameras don’t stop rolling at the end of the episode.
