Federal law requires the United States Mint to use only American-mined gold for its investor-grade coins. The Mint told reporters it buys only U.S. gold. Both of those statements are true in only the narrowest, most legalistic sense possible. In practice, the U.S. Mint has been buying foreign gold for decades, running it through a chain of middlemen, melting it together with some American gold, and calling the result American. A 2024 federal watchdog report found the Mint had stopped asking its suppliers about gold origins more than 20 years ago.

Reporters from The New York Times followed that supply chain to its source. They ended up in Caucasia, Colombia, a gold boomtown controlled by the Clan del Golfo. The Clan del Golfo is a U.S.-designated terrorist group. It sells drugs and gold and uses violence to hold its territory. At a place called La Mandinga, a government-owned cattle ranch, illegal miners tear up the earth under the Clan's supervision, paying the cartel a monthly fee to mine the land. The gold they extract travels from those miners to local traders, to a Colombian exporter, to a Texas middleman, to a U.S. Mint supplier, and ultimately into American investor coins bearing the seal of the United States government.

The U.S. Mint blamed its suppliers. The suppliers blamed the Texas middleman. The Texas middleman said he relied on someone in Mexico to ensure the gold was legal. After the Times presented its findings, everyone involved said they had stopped receiving the Colombian gold. The Treasury Department denied there was a systemic problem. Then it announced it was investigating and had tightened sourcing standards.

That sequence deserves to be read slowly. The government denied a problem. Then it announced an investigation into the problem it denied. Then it tightened standards that it had stopped enforcing 20 years ago. That is not accountability. That is damage control triggered by a newspaper investigation, applied to a system that has been operating this way for two decades while the U.S. government sold investor coins to Americans who believed they were buying American gold.

The Clan del Golfo is designated by the United States government as a terrorist organization. The United States government has also been a customer of its gold supply chain. That is not a technicality. It is a national security failure and a legal violation that has been ongoing for decades. The fact that the gold passed through several layers of intermediaries before reaching the Mint does not change the destination of the money. Every link in that chain that involves the Clan del Golfo generates revenue for a terrorist organization that uses violence to control Colombian communities and funds operations that threaten regional stability.

The tightening of sourcing standards announced after the Times investigation is a start. It is not sufficient. Full mandatory end-to-end supply chain verification must be required for every ounce of gold the U.S. government purchases. Congress must investigate how this was allowed to continue for more than 20 years after the Mint stopped enforcing its own sourcing requirements. And the Treasury must answer publicly for its initial denial that any systemic problem existed.

Sign this petition to demand Congress investigate the U.S. Mint's decades-long failure to enforce American gold sourcing requirements and its role in financing a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, require mandatory end-to-end supply chain verification for all government gold purchases with full public disclosure of every supplier in the chain, and call on Treasury to explain why it denied a systemic problem existed before announcing an investigation into the systemic problem it had just denied.