In presidential politics every scrap of biographical information a candidate puts out can and will be used against them.
That’s the upshot of Elizabeth Warren’s law school application, which the 2020 Democrat’s campaign put out last year to blunt criticisms over wrongly claiming Native American lineage to help with law school teaching applications years later.
But detractors can now seize on releases as further evidence of the Massachusetts senator and top-tier candidate mudding the personal narrative that Warren weaves on the trail. That includes why she left her “dream job” as a special needs public school teacher to study law. Warren eventually secured a teaching post at Rutgers University, her law school alma mater, the University of Houston, the University of Texas, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School, where she made enemies on Wall Street as a fierce consumer advocate.
Warren’s 1973 application to Rutgers School of Law in New Jersey was posted on her website in 2018 when she revealed a DNA test showing she had one Native American ancestor six to 10 generations ago. Her team annotated the document with red boxes to underscore how Warren, 70, identified as being white.
The application, however, also shows that a few months after Warren’s daughter — businesswoman Amelia Warren Tyagi, now 48 — was born in September 1971, she “became a nursery teacher for the Community School, Intervale, New Jersey” in February 1972. Warren omits the second teaching position from her stump speech and focuses instead on how a Riverdale Board of Education principal hired another speech therapist for children with disabilities in 1971 when Warren became “visibly pregnant.”
“I have carefully analyzed my career and personal aspirations and have concluded that the study of law and a law practice would be consistent with my goals while best satisfying my intellectual hunger,” Warren wrote in the law school application.
Warren’s timeline is further complicated by her University of Houston faculty candidate profile.
The senator joined the law school in 1978 as an assistant professor early on in her academic career, but the profile refers to a rarely mentioned administrator job she held in 1973 at IBM, where her then-husband, the late Jim Warren, worked. Her responsibilities included “library reorganization, typing, filing,” she wrote.
In her 2014 book, A Fighting Chance, Warren attributed the loss of her first teaching role with the Riverdale Board of Education as her impetus for applying to law school, skipping over her position in Intervale.
“My first choice was to go back to teaching, but I never even asked Jim. I knew he would saying that a demanding full-time job was out of the question. So somewhere between diapers and breast-feeding, I hatched the idea of going to school,” Warren wrote.
GOP strategist Ford O’Connell told the Washington Examiner Republicans could use Warren’s little-discussed background disclosed in the documents to portray Warren as dishonest.
“The Trump folks are going to have to tie this up into, you know, a little knot and present it, but they’re going to have to re-introduce Elizabeth Warren by saying, ‘Here’s what she says about herself, and here are the facts,’” O’Connell said.
There is a twist of irony in how opponents are leveraging information Warren’s own team made the public to undermine her.
“I don’t think that they thought about it at the time,” O’Connell said. “The Native American thing they thought about, and that kind of blew up in their face.”
In the meantime, amid scrutiny of her pregnancy discrimination story, Warren’s standing by her version of events.
“All I know is I was 22 years old, I was six months pregnant, and the job that I had been promised for the next year was going to someone else. The principal said they were going to hire someone else for my job,” Warren told CBS News this week.
Democratic consultant Mike Lux, who has known Warren “for maybe a dozen years,” said questions regarding the veracity of her pregnancy discrimination account were “bullshit.” But “there’s always a balance when you’re in a presidential campaign about what you say about your bio, your life history,” Lux told the Washington Examiner.
“You have to tell people who you are and what your story is, what your motivations are, what your experiences are,” he said. “You have to sort of make those decisions about what to tell, how much to tell.”
