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** Explaining the $6 Billion Iranian Fund
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After Hamas attacked Israel, some Republicans -- including several of the party's presidential candidates -- renewed their attacks on the Biden administration for unfreezing $6 billion in Iranian assets as part of a prisoner swap with Iran in August.

But some of them got the facts wrong.

As FactCheck.org Deputy Managing Editor Robert Farley and Managing Editor Lori Robertson explain, the $6 billion is Iranian money -- not U.S. taxpayer dollars, as former President Donald Trump and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy claimed.

The money has been sitting in South Korean banks in accounts that were set up for the deposit of Iranian oil sales proceeds. The Trump administration tried to facilitate the release of that money for humanitarian purposes in 2019, but the South Korean banks balked for fear of violating U.S. sanctions imposed by the Trump administration on Iran in 2018 and 2019, according to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

As part of the recent prisoner swap, the Biden administration agreed to release the funds to banks in Doha, Qatar, under the condition that the money can only be spent on humanitarian needs in Iran, such as food or medicine.

Rob and Lori also dispel the myth that some of the $6 billion was used by Hamas -- which historically has been supported by Iran -- to attack Israel. In fact, they write, none of that money has been withdrawn yet.

“All of the money held in restricted accounts in Doha as part of the arrangement to secure the release of 5 Americans in September remains in Doha," the U.S. Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, Brian Nelson, posted on social media. "Not a penny has been spent.”

But, as Rob and Lori write, some Republicans -- including former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley -- argue that money is fungible, so the release of the funds will free up Iran to fund terrorism, including the terrorist group Hamas. A day after we published our story, the New York Times reported ([link removed]) that a White House official told House Democrats that the U.S. and Qatar have agreed to halt Iran’s access to the $6 billion for the foreseeable future.

For more, read "Republican Claims on Hamas Attack and Iran Funds Distort the Facts ([link removed]) ."
HOW WE KNOW
For her story on a viral meme that purports to list "flu shot ingredients," Staff Writer Catalina Jaramillo checked for the ingredients in databases compiled by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Institute for Vaccine Safety. She found that only a fraction of the 27 listed in the meme are present, in very small quantities, in at least one influenza vaccine. Read more ([link removed]) .
FEATURED FACT
The United States has provided $124 billion in military aid to Israel since 1946, according to a Congressional Research Service report issued in March. “Almost all current U.S. aid to Israel is military assistance,” the report states. “U.S. military aid has helped transform Israel’s armed forces into one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world.” Read more ([link removed]) .

WORTHY OF NOTE
Our parent organization -- the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania -- published an eight-question quiz this week that tests your knowledge on the flu and COVID-19.

The APPC's nationally representative Annenberg Public Health and Knowledge Survey has been posing questions for several years to assess public health knowledge of the flu and COVID-19. It has found that public knowledge varies greatly on the flu and COVID-19, but some facts are more strongly associated with an individual’s vaccination behavior.

Dan Romer, APPC's research director, picked eight questions -- four for each virus -- for the quiz that he said "had the strongest ability to independently predict" vaccination acceptance.

Take the quiz here ([link removed]) and compare how you do with the national average. We predict that regular readers of FactCheck.org will score above average.
REPLY ALL

Reader: Subject: Rep. Scalise

Did he really attend a white supremacist convention? Did he really describe himself as "David Duke without the baggage?" Articles preface the above as "reportedly." Is there proof or strong evidence that the above is true?

FactCheck.org Director Eugene Kiely: I’ll take your questions about Rep. Steve Scalise one at a time:

Did he really attend a white supremacist convention?

Yes. The congressman's adviser confirmed to the Washington Post ([link removed]) in 2014 that Scalise spoke at a convention of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, or EURO, in 2002 when he was in the state legislature. Former Klan leader and politician David Duke founded EURO in 2000, according to ([link removed]) the Southern Poverty Law Center, which described the group’s ideology as “white nationalist.”

Scalise’s appearance at the convention surfaced in 2014 after he became the new House majority whip ([link removed]) . “But,” the Post wrote, “the adviser said the congressman didn’t know at the time about the group’s affiliation with racists and neo-Nazi activists.”

In an interview with the Times-Picayune, Scalise also denied knowing the group was a hate group. The Post wrote:

When Scalise was asked by the Times-Picayune how he came to appear at the conference, he cited his staff, saying he had only one person working for him at the time. "When someone called and asked me to speak, I would go," he said. "If I knew today what they were about, I wouldn’t go."

(The interview is available ([link removed]) on GulfLive.com, which is a news site created by the former publisher ([link removed]) of the Times-Picayune.)

Did he really describe himself as "David Duke without the baggage?"

That statement attributed to Scalise about Duke first surfaced in a 2014 column ([link removed]) by Stephanie Grace, a journalist at The Advocate, a Louisiana newspaper. She said it occurred in a conversation with Scalise when he was a new member of the state legislature, so there is no record of it.

Grace wrote:

This is what I remember about the first time I met Steve Scalise nearly 20 years ago: He told me he was like David Duke without the baggage. ...

The “baggage,” of course, was Duke’s past, his racist and anti-Semitic views and his former role as a KKK grand wizard. Scalise disavowed Duke then, as he did once again this week, when blogger Lamar White Jr. revealed that Scalise had spoken in 2002 at a meeting hosted by a Duke-founded white nationalist group.

But the other part of the sentence, the part about their similarity, was the rub. Scalise may have been naïve about how to express himself to a newcomer, but he was already a savvy politician who knew that, even though Duke had lost the governor’s race a few years earlier, Duke voters were still around. And those Duke voters also were potential Scalise voters.

In her column, Grace also noted that Scalise made "similar" statements to Roll Call, which reported in 2014 that it had interviewed Scalise in 1999 when Duke was mulling a run for Congress.

Roll Call wrote ([link removed]) :

Another potential candidate, state Rep. Steve Scalise (R), said he embraces many of the same “conservative” views as Duke, but is far more viable.

“The novelty of David Duke has worn off,” said Scalise. “The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. Duke has proven that he can’t get elected, and that’s the first and most important thing.”

More recently, Grace talked about her column ([link removed]) after Scalise (briefly ([link removed]) ) emerged as a candidate for House speaker. This is from an NPR story that ran Oct. 12:

In an interview about her column, Grace pointed out that Duke is from the same area of Louisiana as Scalise. At the time Scalise made that comment in the '90s, Grace noted that Duke had recently lost in a runoff to be Louisiana's governor and said Scalise's comment was likely reflective of his effort to appeal to a conservative voter group that supported Duke.

"What he was saying was, 'I'm not a Klansman. I don't believe any of those things.' And in fact he really had disavowed David Duke," explained Grace.

She thinks Scalise meant to imply that while he shared Duke's disapproval of affirmative action and entitlements, he rejected racism and anti-Semitism.


** Wrapping Up
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Here's what else we've got for you this week:
* "Biden’s Border Wall, Explained ([link removed]) ": After the Department of Homeland Security announced it would waive laws to enable miles of border wall construction in Texas, President Joe Biden said he “can’t stop” the money being spent on border barriers because of the way it was appropriated by Congress. That’s correct, experts told us.
* "Flu Vaccine Ingredients Are Safe, Contrary to a Misleading Meme ([link removed]) ": Influenza vaccines contain small amounts of various ingredients that allow them to work and keep them safe and long-lasting. A misleading meme suggestively lists more than two dozen substances it claims are in flu vaccines. But most are not present — and the ones that are aren’t dangerous.
* "Trump Cherry-Picks Law Journal Commentary on his Civil Trial ([link removed]) ": Former President Donald Trump cited an article in the New York Law Journal as evidence that a civil business fraud case against him is a “hoax.” The author of the article argued that dissolution of Trump’s LLCs is not a remedy included in the law, but he also wrote that “the judge was 100% right in holding that the Trump actions were fraudulent” and that Trump ought to face penalties.
* "Viral Video Clip Misrepresents Trump Remarks on Israel ([link removed]) ": A video clip shared on Instagram on the day Hamas attacked Israel appears to show former President Donald Trump condemning Israel. But the clip is from a 2019 campaign rally and has been taken out of context. Trump was not expressing his opinion, but was quoting Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
* "Online Video Misrepresents Ukraine’s Conscription of Women in War with Russia ([link removed]) ": Ukraine began requiring women with medical and pharmaceutical backgrounds to register for the military on Oct. 1 and remain in the country in the event they are called into service. But a video, posted by a YouTube show that frequently spreads misinformation, misleadingly claims that Ukraine ordered all women ages 18 to 60 to “report for duty.”
* "Posts Share Bogus Memo to Falsely Claim U.S. Is Sending Additional $8 Billion to Israel ([link removed]) ": The U.S. provides Israel with $3.8 billion each year in military funding under an already established agreement. But social media posts are sharing a doctored “memorandum” that falsely purports to show an additional $8 billion was approved for Israel by President Joe Biden on Oct. 7, the day war began between Hamas and Israel.
* "Post Paints Misleading Picture of Biden’s Financial Support for Israel and Palestinians ([link removed]) :" An Instagram post misleadingly claims President Joe Biden is “funding every angle of this conflict” between Hamas and Israel. The U.S. does supply military aid to Israel, but it has supplied only humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people in Gaza, not military aid to Hamas.

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