‘I am sorry for furthering confusion on tribal sovereignty and tribal citizenship and harm that resulted….’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After long denying that she had benefited from false claims of minority status early in her professional career, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is doing damage control from revelations that she listed “American Indian” on her 1986 Texas State Bar card.
Using an open records request, The Washington Post obtained the previously undisclosed document and broke the story on Tuesday, hours before President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was guaranteed to dominate the next day’s news cycle.
“I can’t go back,” Warren said in an interview with The Post. “But I am sorry for furthering confusion on tribal sovereignty and tribal citizenship and harm that resulted.”
It was previously known, but sparsely reported, that Warren had identified as a minority in the 1986 Association of American Law Schools Faculty Directory, released a year before she accepted a prestigious position at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
As Mary Katharine Ham noted in The Federalist, “Both Harvard and Penn touted her minority status in literature about their law schools.”
After apologizing to the Cherokee Nation recently for having taken a widely-mocked DNA test that revealed only a trace of Indian DNA—less than the typical American Caucasian—Warren attempted to bury the lede by tacking on in her Post interview that it was also intended to cover her earlier exploitation of minority status while at the Ivy League law schools.
“I told him I was sorry for furthering confusion about tribal citizenship,” Warren told The Post, referencing a conversation between herself and Bill John Baker, principal chief of the Cherokee. “I am also sorry for not being more mindful about this decades ago. We had a good conversation.”
While it seems Warren, one of the first major Democratic candidates to formally announce her 2020 bid for the White House, hoped to get out in front of the controversy, or at least appear to be addressing it proactively, the Post revelation poses further challenges to her judgment, ethics and integrity.
Warren has attempted to play against type by casting herself as a champion of the common folk, chugging a beer on New Year’s Eve, and calling on her fellow Democrats to disavow dark money funding and rely only on grassroots donations.
But she has been unable to live down her own past history of benefiting from the same things she claims now to oppose, including having her early political career bolstered by billionaire George Soros.
Soros indicated that he planned on sitting out the crowded Democratic presidential primary instead of financially or otherwise backing a specific candidate.
Warren also seems to have lost the crucial support of her own home-base newspaper, The Boston Globe. While The Globe had long laid cover for her on the Cherokee-gate scandal—asserting without evidence that she never benefited from minority status and also that her DNA test supported her heritage claims—it discouraged her from running for the White House after her November re-election race showed declining support in the liberal stronghold of Massachusetts.
One of the most vocal supporters of Warren’s floundering campaign, however, has been President Donald Trump. Although Trump had yet to comment on the latest developments as of Wednesday morning, he has routinely mocked “Pocahontas” on Twitter over the false heritage claims and expressed hope that she will be selected to run against him.
Pocahontas is at it again! Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one of the least productive U.S. Senators, has a nasty mouth. Hope she is V.P. choice.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 10, 2016