Fact Check: Were accusations of Dems from Haley, Laxalt at campaign event accurate?

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Jose Luis Magana / AP

Former Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley speaks at the 2019 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference, at Washington Convention Center, in Washington, Monday, March 25, 2019.

Sat, Oct 1, 2022 (2 a.m.)

As the Nov. 8 general election draws nearer, candidates vying for some of Nevada’s top elected offices are bringing high-profile political allies on the campaign trail to galvanize voters.  

Such was the case this week when former South Carolina governor and former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley spoke in support of Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Adam Laxalt at the DragonRidge Country Club on Wednesday. Haley, a high-profile Republican rumored to be exploring a potential run for president in 2024, also appeared at an event Thursday for gubernatorial candidate Joe Lombardo.  

Haley and Laxalt, Nevada’s former attorney general, touched on many topics, slamming Democrats, President Joe Biden and incumbent Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto on matters ranging from inflation to the war in Ukraine. Many of those statements, however, were riddled with half-truths and falsehood. 

The Sun fact-checked several claims made by Haley and Laxalt. Here’s what they had to say:  

Haley: “Your senior senator (Cortez Masto) has spent on things you would never forgive her for. I mean, think about the fact that she spent $10 million on a baseball stadium in New York, $12 million on New Jersey getting the World Cup, $6.5 million on golf courses in Colorado. Your senior senator spent and approved your tax dollars, $463,000, for pigeons to learn how to play slot machines.”

While technically true, this statement is misleading. The spending Haley is alluding to was part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which passed in Congress among party lines and was signed by Biden in March 2021. The law gave $350 billion to state and local projects and was not earmarked for anything in particular, according to the fact-check site Politifact.  

It was up to each state and municipality to determine how those federal dollars would be spent, and much of it went to projects aimed at reviving tourism. As of July 12, $25 billion of the $350 million had been budgeted by governments with populations of at least 250,000, with more than 42% of that going toward government operations, 13.7% toward public health and 11.7% toward infrastructure, according to the Brookings Institute.  

As for the claims about pigeons playing slot machines, The National Institute of Health granted $465,339 Reed College in Portland, Ore., to study “an innovative animal model of slot machine gambling with pigeons using a token economy,” according to the study’s abstract. The goal of the study was to examine behavior from an economic perspective, and the study notes that similar experiments have been conducted to examine elements of substance abuse, gambling and other “risky” behaviors. The study was featured as one of the top projects in Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) 2021 report highlighting “wasteful” government spending.  

Haley: “Gas prices went up — you felt it, right? And so Biden says we’re going to lower gas prices, so he takes more from our oil reserves. … When you deplete our (oil) reserves, when a hurricane hits, you need that. What are we going to do? Our reserves are at the lowest point they’ve been since 1984. 

This statement is only slightly inaccurate, but mostly true. As of June 2022, the U.S. held 493.3 million barrels in its strategic petroleum reserve, which is the lowest level since 1985, when roughly the same amount was being stockpiled, according to the Energy Information Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Energy. The recent release from the strategic reserve is a move the Biden administration made in a bid to cut skyrocketing gas prices.  

The U.S. held as much as 588.3 million barrels in its strategic reserve as of January, after hovering between 726 million barrels in 2009 and 638 million barrels as recent as 2020, according to the EIA.  

Haley: “So your senior senator, again, had no problem with defunding the police. No problem. She never spoke up against it. She never had the backs of law enforcement. She never tried to say anything that said ‘wait, this is wrong.’ ”

False. Not only did Cortez Masto co-sponsor a bill signed by Biden last November encouraging law enforcement peer counseling programs, she sent a letter last June along with other bipartisan lawmakers urging for increased funding for the Byrne Justice Assistance Program, part of the U.S. Justice Department, which aims to provide grants for local law enforcement training programs.  

Cortez Masto’s office in October announced it had secured $1.3 million in grants from the same program for law enforcement agencies in Clark County, Reno, North Las Vegas, Henderson and Carson City. Even Tuesday — a day before Laxalt’s rally — Cortez Masto’s office announced $437,517 in funding from the DOJ for police departments across Nevada.  

Laxalt: “Anybody remember our FBI targeting parents that simply wanted to get kids back in school and get critical race theory out of the classrooms? By the way, Senator Masto [sic] could have voted to ban critical race theory. She voted with the Democrats. She could have voted to stop the FBI from persecuting parents.” 

Mostly false. This conservative talking point originated after a since-debunked Facebook post from Nov. 16, 2021, that went viral stating Republicans in the U.S. House “obtained whistleblower documents alleging the FBI was using its counterterrorism division to investigate and add ‘threat tags’ to parents protesting school boards.”  

The FBI did create tags to track threats of violence directed at school officials, but a FBI memo released by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) only showed the agency asking offices to apply the tag to investigations involving threats against school board members, educators and school employees, PolitiFact reported. There is no evidence to support the FBI used the tag on parents simply attending or protesting moves made by their local school board.  

Laxalt: “It’s terrible that governors like Steve Sisolak and many blue state governors kept our schools shut way longer than they needed to be shut. In fact, they didn’t need to be shut at all, as we knew from the beginning.”  

False. Most public health experts agree that COVID-related closures at least reduced the spread, especially early in the pandemic. But much of that depended on how long stay-in-place orders lasted and how willing the public was to adhere to them, which varied across regions seemingly everywhere.  

Specifically for schools, “closing both schools and universities was consistently highly effective at reducing transmission at the advent of the pandemic,” according to a study published in Science Magazine that analyzed 41 countries and the effectiveness of their shutdowns. The study found that the average number of people that had COVID-19 and could infect others was reduced by 38% by such closures.  

Laxalt: “(Haley) mentioned our conflicts in the Ukraine, and the one thing that’s not discussed very often is the fact that not only did he (Biden) kill the Keystone (XL) Pipeline, but they greenlit the Nord Stream Pipeline in Russia. They gave them the money to fuel this war.” 

False. Joe Biden did not give the Nord Stream 2 pipeline any kind of regulatory approval, and American presidents do not have the authority to approve energy projects in other countries. The Biden administration, however, did waive sanctions against the project and its CEO, who is an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in May 2021, when the project was already more than 90% complete, according to Reuters.  

The move came as the Biden administration sought to strengthen ties with Germany after relations had deteriorated under ex-President Donald Trump, Reuters reported. Construction for the $11 million Russia-to-Germany pipeline began in 2011, and the move last year by Secretary of State Antony Blinken was intended to give Germany more time to discuss possible negative effects of the project.  

Though the Biden administration lifted the sanctions, the president himself has stated opposition against it, fearing it could weaken nations in the European Union by increasing dependency on Russia. Biden even said Feb. 7 in a joint news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Schulz “If Russia invades — that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine again — then there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2.” 

“We will bring an end to it,” Biden said.  

Laxalt: “Joe Biden did it just a few weeks ago. He did, like, a White House address about defund the police — ‘who, us? We would never defend the police. We love our cops.’”

False. Biden has clearly stated on several occasions he is against defunding the police, according to at least six articles by PolitiFact. The president in June 2020 — during the height of protests across the U.S. denouncing police brutality amid the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer — told CBS “I don’t support defunding the police. I support conditioning federal aid to police, based whether or not they maintain certain basic standards of decency and honorableness.”  

Months later, Biden told KDKA-TV “I not only don’t want to defund the police, I want to add $300 (millon) to their budget.” Biden has voiced support for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which died in the Senate, but would require police agencies to divert funding to training on racial profiling and use of excessive force, as well as requiring them to maintain data on traffic stops and use of deadly force. 

Nowhere in the bill did it call to “defund” law enforcement. The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated it would cost agencies several hundred million dollars each year to implement such requirements, but the bill would have also offered grants to cover the financial burden.

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