Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has failed to disclose a $1.3 million line of credit provided to her by Bank of America, the Washington Free Beacon reports:
Warren argued that financial disclosures are needed to ‘reveal potentially damaging information that may undermine fitness to serve’ and that nominees with ‘complex financial histories’ need to be ‘forthcoming and transparent.’ Warren, meanwhile, continues to skirt congressional ethics laws by failing to include a $1.3 million line of credit against her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home on financial disclosure forms.
“Another example of this shady lady in action — she claims to fight for the downtrodden, but checks the box to claim minority status, takes zero-interest loans from Harvard to buy her mansion, says in 2012 that she doesn’t own stocks, only mutual funds, claims to be the ‘intellectual mother’ of the Occupy movement until it turns into a PR disaster — is anyone suprised by this latest?” Boston talk radio king Howie Carr tells Breitbart News.
“Surely not Bernie Sanders, whom she refused to endorse!” Carr notes.
The revelation of the existence of this previously undisclosed line of credit leaves Warren, who presents herself as a champion of the common people, vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy.
Warren aggressively criticized Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on January 18 to become Secretary of Health and Human Services over the purchase of $2,700 in the stock of one company by the manager of his stock portfolio.
“I’m just asking: Did you buy the stock, and then did you introduce a bill that would be helpful to the companies you just bought stock in?” she asked Price at the hearing.
“The stock was bought by a direct… by a broker who was making those decisions. I wasn’t making those decisions,” he responded.
“Was the stock purchased through an index fund? . . .Through a blind trust?” Warren asked, a question that was followed by this exchange:
Warren: So, let’s just be clear. This is not just a stock broker — someone you pay to handle the paperwork. This is someone who buys stock at your direction. This is someone who buys and sells the stock you want them buy and sell.
Price: Not true.
Warren: So, when you found out that…
Price: It’s not true Senator.
Warren: What? Because you decide not to tell them? Wink, wink. Nod, nod. And we’re all just supposed to believe that?
Price: It’s what members of this committee. It’s the manner in which members of this committee . . .
Warren: I’m not one of them.
The left-wing senior senator from Massachusetts, who is up for re-election in 2018, now has a political perception problem of her own related to personal financial dealings — the undisclosed $1.3 million line of credit, which suggests that she is very much “one of them.”
This is not the first time Warren has been publicly labeled a hypocrite.
In April 2012, during her successful campaign to win her Senate seat, the Boston Herald reported that Warren had publicly claimed Native American status in reports given to two of her employers — first at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in the late 1980s, and then at Harvard Law School in the 1990s.
As Breitbart News documented extensively at the time, there is zero credible evidence to support Warren’s claim that she has Native American ancestry.
Warren has repeatedly asserted that “family lore” of Native American ancestry is the only evidence she needed to make that claim.
In 1993, Warren provided information to the Harvard Women’s Law Journal about her background that led that publication to include her as a “woman of color” teaching at Harvard in an article published that year.
As improbable as it may seem in a state where Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump by a margin of 60 percent to 33 percent, a recent poll conducted by WBUR indicates that Warren may have a tougher re-election battle ahead in 2018 then previously thought.
“According to a new WBUR poll, only 44 percent [of Massachusetts voters] think Warren ‘deserves reelection.’ Forty-six percent think voters ought to ‘give someone else a chance,’ ” WBUR reported on Monday.
“No one’s going to look at a 44 percent reelect number and think that that’s a good number,” said Steve Koczela, president of The MassINC Polling Group, which conducts surveys for WBUR. “No one’s going to look at it being close to even between ‘reelect’ and ‘give someone else a chance’ and think that that’s reassuring.”
Colin Reed, executive director of American Rising, a Republican Super PAC, highlighted Warren’s political vulnerabilities in an op-ed at the Boston Herald on Friday.
“It’s quickly becoming the winter of her discontent for U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren. No matter which direction she looks, she faces political headaches,” Reed wrote.
“From the right, a fresh barrage of stories broke this week about the mysterious $1.3 million line of credit on her Cambridge home, a development first reported by the Boston Herald in 2015. For two years in a row, Warren failed to list it on the financial disclosure form all senators complete each year,” he continued, adding:
The purpose of the line of credit remains murky, and Warren’s staff claims she is not required by law to report it. But that hasn’t stopped the Massachusetts Democrat from hypocritically demanding the highest levels of ethics from President Trump’s Cabinet appointees. Writing in The Washington Post last week, Warren declared, “It is critical that each nominee follows basic ethics rules to ensure that they will act for the benefit of all the American people.”
Transparency has never been a hallmark of the former Harvard Law School professor. Throughout her political career, she has been dogged by lingering questions about a number of controversies, including her employment status at Harvard, her work as a corporate lawyer and her real estate holdings in Oklahoma.
Her own vulnerabilities, however, have never stopped her from casting stones at others.
In 2012, Warren defeated incumbent Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) by a 53 percent to 46 percent margin.
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