Elizabeth Warren sure is secretive about her fancy Cambridge house

Elizabeth Warren sure is secretive about her fancy Cambridge house

It’s certainly understandable that so much attention has focused on Elizabeth Warren’s claim to be Native American for employment purposes as she was climbing the law professor ladder.

It’s a story which exposes her weak spot — she has perfected the politics of victimhood, yet she victimized one of the most historically victimized groups, the Cherokee, by using their identity to aid her career.

Her inability to acknowledge what she did and apologize reveals a character trait that is not very becoming.

Yet there are many other scandals and peculiarities in her past, as we have documented at ElizabethWarrenWiki.org, from inaccurate descriptions of her corporate legal work, to nickel-and-diming the federal electronic court docket system despite an almost million-dollar-a-year family income, to the flat out bizarre claim that she was the first nursing mother to take the New Jersey Bar Exam.

There was one other peculiarity from the 2012 Senate campaign that I also remembered when I saw a Free Beacon article about Warren’s non-disclosure of a home equity line of credit.

First, the Free Beacon article, The Time Elizabeth Warren Used Loophole to Avoid Disclosing $1.3M Line of Credit:

A U.S. senator who took advantage of a loophole in ethics laws to avoid disclosing a $1.3 million credit line against her home is now warning that incomplete financial disclosures from cabinet nominees put the country at risk.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D., Mass.) warning came in the Washington Post, where she wrote that “it is critical that each nominee follows basic ethics rules to ensure that they will act for the benefit of all the American people.”

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.

The line of credit was extended to Warren and her husband Bruce Mann in 2007 through financial giant Bank of America. It was first noted by the Boston Herald after Warren failed to included the line of credit as a liability on her 2014 financial disclosure filing. It was also absent from her 2015 filing.

An aide for Warren, who is worth millions, defended the omission, stating at the time that a home equity line of credit like the one that Warren received from Bank of America doesn’t have the same reporting requirements as a typical home mortgage, which would have to be reported.

The STOCK Act, which was signed into law in 2012, mandated that all members of Congress disclose details of any mortgages on their personal residences in their annual filings.

The legislation, however, does not mention home equity lines of credit, which banks offer as alternatives to a mortgage.

The Warren aide said that the senator had yet to borrow on the line of credit, which allowed her to leave it off disclosure forms.

I don’t know if Warren’s non-disclosure of the home equity line of credit violated any laws or Senate rules. But the story jogged my memory about how secretive she was during the 2012 Senate campaign about her apparently-luxurious multi-million dollar home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I recalled that Warren had a ground rule for reporters allowed into her home; the inside of the house was deemed “off the record” and could not be reported on. It must be quite impressive for her not to want people to know about it given her political persona demonizing people who got rich:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” she said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

An otherwise glowing 2011 article in NY Magazine described the procedure, A Saint With Sharp Elbows (emphasis added):

The contrast between the Massachusetts Everyman and the Harvard Professor is one that Republicans are eager to make—and one that Warren’s campaign has spent much of its time trying to rebut. Indeed, Warren’s advisers can be almost paranoid about how she is portrayed. When another reporter recently went to interview Warren at the house she shares with her second husband, a fellow law professor, Warren’s campaign allowed it only on the condition that the house itself—a restored Victorian a few blocks from Harvard Square that, according to financial-disclosure forms, is valued between $1 million and $5 million­—was off the record.

Strange, huh?

A recent poll in Massachusetts indicated that support for Warren may be slipping, and she would be vulnerable to a challenge from Republican Governor Charlie Baker in 2018. Warren also is considered a likely candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

I don’t know why she’s so secretive about her home. But whatever it is that she wants to hide, I doubt it will stay hidden in 2018 0r 2020.

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