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WaPo punctures Elizabeth Warren narrative: She represented large company “trying to avoid having to clean up a toxic waste site”

WaPo punctures Elizabeth Warren narrative: She represented large company “trying to avoid having to clean up a toxic waste site”

Much like her Native American scandal, Warren’s lucrative legal practice when she was at Harvard Law feeds a narrative that Warren has not been honest and transparent about her personal history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVUCDtGMFoQ

Elizabeth Warren political and personal narrative is that she has always been a selfless fighter against big corporations.

But as we first exposed in 2012, Warren maintained a vibrant legal practice when she was a professor at Harvard Law School that paints a different picture. Warren recently admitted that she made, at minimum, close to $2 million with her legal practice, most of it after she joined HLS as a tenured professor.

Aside from the the money, Warren has a bigger problem: Much of her representation was in favor of big corporations against employees, consumers and others she now claims to champion.

We paved the way in exposing how Warren issued misleading and incomplete lists of her cases in 2012:

Our reporting played an important role in leading Annie Linsky of The Washington Post (formerly at the Boston Globe) to issue a devastating take down of Warren’s role in fighting against women with breast implant claims, WaPo confirms: As lawyer, Elizabeth Warren worked to limit Dow Chemical’s liability to breast implant victims (2019)

That WaPo report on Warren’s representation of Dow Chemical, first exposed by us in 2012, should have created a media firestorm, but as I noted at the time, it got lost in the  noise created by a Trump tweet:

Timing is everything in politics, and Elizabeth Warren received a huge break when a devastating Washington Post investigation of Warren’s legal practice when she was a law professor was published on Monday, July 15, 2019. That was the day after Trump’s tweets telling four congresswomen “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how….”

The investigation confirmed and expanded on Legal Insurrection’s reporting from 2012 that in her private legal practice Warren worked against breast implant victims, not for them as she claimed. It was part of a pattern of Warren representing major corporations against the people Warren claims to care about, before she launched her political career.

Those Trump tweets sparked a week-long (and still ongoing) media feeding frenzy in which the WaPo report about Warren received little attention. The WaPo report should have been massive news, particularly with the second Democrat debate coming up this week. It should have been the subject of other news coverage about Warren’s private legal practice, and other Democrat presidential candidates should have been talking about how it works against Warren much as Joe Biden’s past is used against him.

But it passed with barely a mention in other news outlets and competing campaigns, as the prolonged news cycle was consumed by focus on Trump’s fight with “The Squad.”

Now Linsky, together with Matt Viser, has done it again, digging up a Warren representation almost as devastating to Warren’s political narrative as the Dow Chemical represenation. But you probably didn’t hear about that WaPo story, published December 9, because it was lost in the impeachment noise.

Here’s an excerpt from, Memo from 1990s pollution case shows Elizabeth Warren in action as corporate consultant:

The memo from then-Professor Elizabeth Warren was written on Harvard Law School letterhead, a symbol of gravitas for a scholar renowned as a champion for consumers victimized by predatory banks and other big businesses.

But on this occasion, Warren was not arguing on behalf of vulnerable families, nor was she offering the sort of stinging rebuke of corporate greed that would later define her political career. Rather, Warren was representing a large development company that was trying to avoid having to clean up a toxic waste site.

The memo, which Warren wrote in 1996, used legalistic and often dense language to argue that businesses faced the “risk of the unknown” from a growing threat of lawsuits, and that defended the company’s right to “maximize its returns to its unpaid creditors and to survive as an employer.”

“Environmental claims, product liability claims, and mass tort claims, for which we have currently only seen the tip of the iceberg, are multiplying against American businesses,” wrote Warren, who, according to her campaign, was arguing that a different company should bear the cleanup costs.

The eight-page memo, which has not previously been reported, offers a rare glimpse of Warren in action during her past work as a corporate consultant — one whose arguments were at times out of step with the liberal presidential campaign she is running today.

While Warren has attempted to claim here advocacy was purely a legal and philosophical argument over who should pay, WaPo casts doubt on that defense:

CMC Heartland Partners was trying to avoid a newly enacted Washington state law that could put it on the hook for about $4 million of the cleanup costs, according to local news reports. The company, which had acquired the land through a bankruptcy proceeding, argued that the legal maneuver should have shielded it from responsibility.

Warren’s memo was sent to the Justice Department in an effort to elevate the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court — a move seen by activists at the time as a delay tactic that would only jeopardize public health.

Environmentalists who fought to clean up toxic waste sites said they are familiar with that tactic and the frustrations it causes….

Warren’s argument put her in line with other major corporations that were also seeking a Supreme Court review of the Washington state law.

The problem is not that Elizabeth Warren represented big corporations and made millions. Lawyers gonna lawyer, and sometimes lawyers represent clients with whom they disagree economically or politically.

The problem is that Warren carefully has portrayed her personal narrative as something quite different. Much like her Native American scandal, it feeds a different narrative about Warren — that she’s not honest about her personal history.

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Comments

legacyrepublican | December 11, 2019 at 9:48 pm

Well, well, well. Pocahantis really is lying with all the colors of the toxic waste dump after all.

Guess a protester should wear a hazmat suit to one of her stump speeches with an Indian feather in their helmet.

Just a thought.

Was the toxic waste site the vast swaths of hate polluting the progressive left?

Cuz if she was trying to help someone avoid cleaning that up, well, I could at least relate. That’s a cesspool. There’s no cleaning that up. I could give her a partial pass on that.

The solution there is to blast off and nuke the whole thing from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Trump should dig up that public service ad with the Native American crying while viewing litter (pollution).
“Keep America Beautiful”

    amatuerwrangler in reply to ghost dog. | December 11, 2019 at 10:33 pm

    The campaign probably already has it and is running an office contest for the best tag line to attach to it…. When the time is right, Boom!

    The Main Event is yet to come.

    Trapped in Davis in reply to ghost dog. | December 11, 2019 at 11:25 pm

    I thought of that. He was a fake Indian too, so I don’t know how the message would work.

    G. de La Hoya in reply to ghost dog. | December 12, 2019 at 9:39 am

    Second generation Italian/Sicilian-American actor, Espera Oscar de Corti a.k.a. Iron Eyes Cody was more Native American that Lizzy Warren. Cody at least wore the appropriate cultural clothing 😉

This is getting scary. Who is going to be left standing to run against Trump?

Why waste your time writing about … or even thinking about this dishonest harridan? She’s useless.

Heard the perfect nickname for Warren tonight on the Mark Levin Show.

“America’s Mother-in-Law”

Fits her to a T!

The investigation confirmed and expanded on Legal Insurrection’s reporting from 2012 that in her private legal practice Warren worked against breast implant victims, not for them as she claimed.

Correction: against purported breast implant victims. Since there was nothing wrong with the implants, there were no victims. There were only a gaggle of frauds pretending to be victims in order to get a payout.

    tphillip in reply to Milhouse. | December 12, 2019 at 7:33 am

    In your “expert” opinion. Gotta qualify your statements properly there Milhouse or you’ll give the fake impression that you’re a SME on the case.

    If you have facts that conclusively prove the plaintiffs were fraudsters (And losing a civil case does not make one a fraudster) we’re all ears.

    Or maybe stop lying to puff yourself up.

      Milhouse in reply to tphillip. | December 12, 2019 at 7:38 pm

      Sheesh. You clearly know absolutely nothing about this major case that was in the headlines for years. It is an established undisputed fact that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the implants. A $5 BILLION dollar company went bankrupt for absolutely no reason at all. And a useful product disappeared from the market. All because the head of the FDA decided to open his big yap and “suggest” that people should not buy these things.

The memo, which Warren wrote in 1996, used legalistic and often dense language to argue that businesses faced the “risk of the unknown” from a growing threat of lawsuits, and that defended the company’s right to “maximize its returns to its unpaid creditors and to survive as an employer.”

“Environmental claims, product liability claims, and mass tort claims, for which we have currently only seen the tip of the iceberg, are multiplying against American businesses,” wrote Warren

Sounds exactly right to me. And not legalistic or dense at all.

The company, which had acquired the land through a bankruptcy proceeding, argued that the legal maneuver should have shielded it from responsibility.

How is buying something a “legal maneuver”? It seems pretty straightforward to me. They bought a piece of land, free and clear, held it for a while and then sold it, and suddenly the state decided to seize $4M from them to clean up a problem they didn’t create and for which they had no responsibility. And which in all probability didn’t need to be cleaned up.

From the linked article:

“How many lives were changed while they had that fight? How many women weren’t able to carry their baby full term or had a birth defect or had a child that got cancer?”

I can answer that, with 99.9% confidence: zero. I don’t know anything about the case, but I don’t have to. None of these cases have ever resulted in such damage to anybody. Take the most famous case of all, Love Canal. Not one person was harmed, except GE’s shareholders, who were robbed blind so some environuts could feel good and Algore could have a political career.

So once again, once upon a time Warren did good but now she has to run away from it because she’s busy pandering to evil.

    RITaxpayer in reply to Milhouse. | December 12, 2019 at 4:36 am

    ” I don’t know anything about the case, but I don’t have to.”

    BINGO!! Milhouse. You just summed up most of your comments.

      Milhouse in reply to RITaxpayer. | December 12, 2019 at 10:32 pm

      Are you seriously claiming that one must know something about a specific obscure case in order to conclude that since it belongs to a class of cases essentially none of which have any merit, it is extremely unlikely to have any merit either? If someone is suing because the MMR jab made her child autistic, do you have to know any specific facts about the plaintiff or the kid to declare it bogus? No, you don’t; it’s enough to know that the claim is impossible, and therefore it doesn’t matter what the specific facts are. Ditto if someone is suing because the defendant is using mind control rays on him, or cast a spell on his cow so its milk turned sour. Or a “Palestinian” claiming the IDF tortured his child to death and stole his organs.

    tphillip in reply to Milhouse. | December 12, 2019 at 7:34 am

    Milhouse the know nothing and damn well proud of it.

    Who needs facts and supporting evidence when you have Milhouse around?

Shrieking Crow is more like squaw Schiff.

Bitterlyclinging | December 12, 2019 at 9:02 am

Like any good, loyal to the party Democrat, Fauxcahontas lies. Like a rug.

Lie-A-Watha has to be the biggest fraud in the Democratic Clown Car – fake claims of being a Native American, false accusations about being fired as a teacher because she was pregnant … the list goes on.

Lawyers are only supposed to represent only approved evildoers, not corporate ones.

Who remembers Hooker Chemical and Love Canal, “Feds Sue Hooker To Clean Love Canal” being the classic headline. Warren would have been the natural choice for a lawyer.