Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren struggled to understand Sunday how the American people could ever support a presidential candidate with a checkered history of telling the truth.
“How could the American people want someone who lies to them?” Warren passionately asked in response to a question on whether dishonesty was a disqualifying trait in a presidential candidate.
“How could the American people want someone who lies to them?” @ewarren says after I asked if it’s disqualifying for a presidential candidate to lie to the American people about anything pic.twitter.com/b4AxH5Bq1m
— Zak Hudak (@cbszak) January 19, 2020
The question came during a gaggle with reporters during a campaign stop in Iowa.
Warren herself has a far from perfect history with honesty.
For decades, Warren lied about her ancestry and claimed to be Native American to gain professional and political leverage. Warren went as far as contributing recipes to an Indian cook book titled “Pow Wow Chow” and identified herself a Cherokee Indian under each. During her 2012 Senate campaign, she justified her claim to Native American heritage because her aunt often remarked that Warren had “high cheek bones like all of the Indians do.”
In the fall of 2018, Warren released the results of a DNA test to prove her Native American ancestry after years of mocking by her political opponents including President Donald Trump. The release of the test results however, backfired on the Massachusetts senator when they failed to offer any proof that Warren is of any Native American heritage at all, let alone Cherokee.
Warren’s DNA test only showed there was “strong evidence” to suggest she may have one Native American relative 6 to 10 generations in her past. The test revealed that even if Warren were to have a Native American relative, she would be anywhere from 1/65th to 1/1024th Native American. This is less Native American ancestry than the average American.
The test was roundly criticized by tribal leaders of the Cherokee nation, who condemned Warren’s claim to Cherokee heritage as “inappropriate and wrong.” Warren has since apologized for lying about her race and now identifies as a white woman.
More recently, Warren has been caught lying about the reasons she left her first teaching job. On the campaign trial, Warren still complains that she was fired for being “visibly pregnant.” It’s a sympathetic story, to be sure, but a fake one at that. In October, the Washington Free Beacon uncovered documents from the local school district that Warren worked under showing that the school board unanimously offered a renewal on her teaching contract for a second year.
Yet Warren has continued to share her made-up story on the campaign trail despite the revelations from the Free Beacon.
“I probably would be doing that work today but… by the end of the 1st year, I was visibly pregnant, & the principal did what principals did in those days — wished me luck & hired someone else,” Warren told voters in Dover, New Hampshire ten days ago.
"I probably would be doing that work today but… by the end of the 1st year, I was visibly pregnant, & the principal did what principals did in those days — wished me luck & hired someone else."
Speaking in Dover, NH Elizabeth Warren recalled being a special education teacher. pic.twitter.com/4OktBRXbXV
— The Hill (@thehill) January 10, 2020
Warren’s new call for honesty comes as the senator is under fire for allegedly making up a story that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders told her in December 2018 that a woman could not capture the White House. The story, published by CNN on the eve of last week’s seventh Democratic debate, relied only on anonymous sources who claimed to have knowledge of the conversation. Warren followed the story by making the charges on national television herself. Sanders has categorically denied them as “ludicrous.”
On the debate stage, Sanders again denied Warren’s charges to the primetime audience, upsetting the Massachusetts senator who confronted Sanders while still at the podium immediately following the conclusion of the night’s main event.
"I THINK YOU CALLED ME A LIAR ON NATIONAL TV" pic.twitter.com/c7LWL5SLoh
— Ursula Perano (@UrsulaPerano) January 16, 2020
“I think you called me a liar on national TV,” Warren said as she approached Sanders after refusing to shake his hand.
“Let’s not do it right now,” Sanders responded. “You want to have that discussion, we’ll have that discussion. You called me a liar.”
In 1988, Sanders publicly made the case that a woman could indeed win a presidential election.
“In my view a woman could be elected president of the United States.” — Bernie Sanders, 1988 pic.twitter.com/WJd847DdmA
— Meagan Day (@meaganmday) January 13, 2020
