evidence: McCarthy — the former House speaker, whose spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment — said that "Iran only had $4 billion in the foreign exchange when [Biden] took office. They now have $70 billion." We traced those numbers to a social media post by Robert Greenway, who had been a Trump White House official involved in Iran policy and is now at the Heritage Foundation. He pointed us to a 2021 International Monetary Fund report showing that Iran’s foreign reserves in 2020, during the covid pandemic, were $6 billion. (So McCarthy was in the ballpark with $4 billion.) But for 2023, the IMF estimates that Iran’s foreign currency reserves are $21.1 billion, not $70 billion. Greenway did not respond to a question about why he said it was $70 billion now. The IMF also has an updated estimate for Iran’s foreign currency reserves in 2020: $13.8 billion. So rather than an increase to $70 billion from $6 billion — more than 1,000 percent — the foreign currency reserves have grown about 50 percent, to $21.1 billion from $13.8 billion. The IMF estimates that the reserves will be $24.3 billion in 2024. An Iranian central bank official this month attributed the increase to the growth of oil and non-oil exports.