A Cornell law professor said Wednesday that Sen. Elizabeth Warren tried to use a claim of Native American heritage to gain a professional edge in her career as a law professor.
Bill Jacobson, a professor at Cornell Law School and blogger at Legal Insurrection, said on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show that the Massachusetts Democrat did not claim Indian blood while she was in college or law school.
“She only claimed it when she was in her late 30s and beginning to climb the law professor ladder from the University of Texas to Harvard,” Jacobson said. By doing so, she was deemed a “minority law professor,” which helped her law professor career.
“Your viewers need to understand how deceptive Elizabeth Warren was. … This is a woman who built her political narrative claiming other people are rigging the system. She tried to rig her career by claiming a status to which she’s not entitled.”
Warren, who President Trump has nicknamed “Pocahontas” because of her claims to be part Indian, on Monday released results from a DNA test that showed she is anywhere from 1.5% to .09% Native American (and also showed she’s 98.5% to 99.1% white, with European ancestors).
Warren listed herself as Native in the Association of American Law School Directory, and according to The Boston Globe, she “had her ethnicity changed from white to Native American at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she taught from 1987 to 1995, and at Harvard University Law School, where she was a tenured faculty member starting in 1995.”
Some critics say she got the Harvard slot by claiming to be American Indian. “Harvard Law School in the 1990s touted Warren, then a professor in Cambridge, as being Native American,’” CNN reported last November. “They singled her out, Warren later acknowledged, because she had listed herself as a minority in an Association of American Law Schools directory.”
A 1997 Fordham Law Review article identified the Democrat as Harvard Law’s “first woman of color.” Warren even submitted recipes to an American Indian cookbook called “Pow Wow Chow,” which was released in 1984 by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma. She signed her entries “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee.”
Trump took to Twitter Tuesday to rip Warren’s renewed claims that she’s part Native American.
“Pocahontas (the bad version), sometimes referred to as Elizabeth Warren, is getting slammed. She took a bogus DNA test and it showed that she may be 1/1024, far less than the average American. Now Cherokee Nation denies her, ‘DNA test is useless.’ Even they don’t want her. Phony!” he wrote.
He also said this: