Warren Busts Buttigieg over Transparency but Dismisses Call to Release Additional Tax Returns

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) continued her growing beef with South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) during a campaign stop over the weekend, accusing him of creating “conflicts” by failing to open access to his closed-door fundraisers but dismissing the call to release more of her tax returns as an effort to better abide by her own calls for transparency.

Warren took aim at Buttigieg, who has been trailing her in the polls in recent weeks, blasting him for holding closed-door fundraisers with wealthy bundlers. However, she failed to agree to release additional tax returns in order to increase her own transparency.

“This is about what’s going on right now. He should open up his fundraisers,” she told a reporter who asked if Warren would release her tax returns from the early 2000s:

“This is about conflicts that he is creating every single day right now,” she said, dismissing the reporter’s question. “This is not about what happened 15 years ago or 20 years ago. It’s about the conflicts he’s creating right now.”

“The mayor is going to be in New York City, in Manhattan, starting next week doing at least three big fundraisers that we know about,” she continued. “Those should be open to the press and whoever is bundling for him at these fundraisers should be exposed.”

Warren argued that she already put out 11 years of tax returns — “11 years more than Donald Trump” and “years more than Barack Obama did at the same point.”

“And I have already put out a list of all of the legal work I did in all the years that I was in teaching — at least everything that I could find. So anyone can see about conflicts that date back from 15, 20 years ago,” she argued, pivoting back to Buttigieg.

She said she is worried about conflicts being created “every single day when candidates for president sell access to the highest bidder.”

“We shouldn’t be doing that in a Democratic Primary,” she added.

Over the weekend, a student asked the South Bend mayor if “taking big money out of politics includes not taking money off of billionaires and closed-door fundraisers,” to which Buttigieg replied, “No”:

Warren’s campaign recently touted a star-studded Hollywood fundraiser that took place over the weekend, which drew celebrities such as Elizabeth Banks, Busy Philipps, and Ben Feldman, as Breitbart News reported. However, Warren did not attend the fundraiser, stumping in New Hampshire instead, likely as an effort to leave her “plausible deniability for any pay-for-play face time with donors,” as ABC News reported.