Elizabeth Warren and the Truth Don’t Have the Best Relationship
By Tom Joyce | January 22, 2020, 22:05 EST
Following a Democratic presidential primary debate last week, Warren confronted Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders with a non-question followed by a question mark: “I think you called me a liar on national TV?”
During the debate Sanders had denied telling Warren during a private meeting that he told her a woman couldn’t win the presidency.
It’s unclear if Sanders ever actually said what Warren claims he said. But if he did call her a liar on national TV, he was correct. She has a history of lying for personal gain. Here is a look at four times Warren has been caught lying:
4. Lied About Full-Term Pledge During Massachusetts U.S. Senate Race
Odds are, Elizabeth Warren will end up serving her full term as a Massachusetts senator, since she is unlikely to win the Democratic nomination for president and even more unlikely to win the presidency. But finishing her current term doesn’t seem ever to have been her intent.
In 2018, Warren began making trips to key early primary voting states, including Iowa, fueling speculation that she would run for president. As she ran for re-election to the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, she denied that she planned to run for president, promising she would serve her full term in the Senate, if re-elected, as Politico reported.
Warren easily won re-election over then-Republican state Representative Geoff Diehl (R-Whitman). Fifty-four days later, she became the first major candidate to announce an exploratory committee to run for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. So, for Warren, being a Massachusetts Senator is a fallback plan at this point – and it was when she was running for re-election, contrary to what she said at the time.
3. Lied About Her Child’s Schooling
Elizabeth Warren is a major proponent of public schools and an adversary of the school choice movement. She strongly opposes school choice and voucher programs that would allow students who come from working class backgrounds to attend charter schools and private schools. Her policy platform calls for eliminating charter schools.
Yet Warren sent her own son, Alex, to Kirby Hall School, a private school right near the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a professor at the time.
And then she lied about it when confronted by Sarah Carpenter, an African-American great-grandmother. One of Carpenter’s granddaughters attended KIPP Academy in Memphis, Tennessee and became the first member of their family to graduate from college — hence Carpenter’s support for school choice, according to Education Next.
When Carpenter confronted Warren about charter schools at an event in November 2019, saying she had read that Warren’s children went to private school, Warren corrected her:
“No, my children went to public schools.”
2. Lied About Her Legal Career
Warren has not been honest about her legal career, either.
She touts herself as a champion of the oppressed working stiffs of America.
For three decades, she represented corporations as a lawyer and took home at least $1.9 million in the process. Lucrative portions of her legal practice came while she was teaching at Harvard Law School, and she operated out of her office at the school. One of these cases included her representing Travelers Insurance in an asbestos liability case which ended up going to the U.S. Supreme Court. She earned more than $200,000 for her work on the case, according to The Washington Examiner.
However, Warren was never licensed to practice law in Massachusetts, as The Washington Examiner reported.
As a result, in 2012 she claimed she did not operate as a full-scale lawyer and never practiced law in a Massachusetts courtroom. However, The Washington Times reports that court records prove both of these claims inaccurate.
And champion of the people? Her legal clients include Dow Corning in its bid to avoid paying damages to women who said they were injured by breast implants the company made.
What about her other cases?
Here’s how The New York Times described in November 2019 how the detail-oriented Warren handled requests for information about her past legal work:
“Other summaries released by the campaign omitted key details.”
1. Lied About Her Heritage
Elizabeth Warren’s most famous lie has to do with her heritage. For years, Warren claimed that she was part American Indian.
In 1986, she identified herself as American Indian on a Texas State Bar write-in form, as Snopes confirms. She continued using the designation during her tenure as a Harvard professor. As Politico confirmed in 2012, a 1996 Harvard Crimson story described her as Native American and a 1997 Fordham Law Review story called her Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color”. They obtained the info from a “telephone interview with Michael Chmura, News Director, Harvard Law.”
Warren claimed her mother’s family was part Native American and her father’s parents opposed their relationship for that reason. However, when Warren took a DNA test in October 2018 to try to prove she had American Indian ancestry, it turned out she was as little as 1/1024th American Indian, as National Review points out.
In February 2019, she apologized for her claims about her heritage, according to The Washington Post.