Ad Portrays Warren as Middle Class Champion Despite Her Career Helping Big Corporations

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has proposed criminal penalties for tho
AFP/File STEPHEN MATUREN

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), in a recent political ad, attempted to contrast herself with President Trump, presenting herself as a champion of working people despite largely building her multimillion-dollar fortune via her years in government service.

In the recent Iowa ad, titled “Why She Will Beat Him,” Warren attempts to contrast herself with Trump by detailing their upbringing.

“He grew up in a mansion in New York City. She grew up here in Oklahoma. He got millions from his dad’s real estate empire. Her dad ended up a janitor,” the narrator states.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” the narrator continues. “Trump’s life taught him how to get rich on the backs of others. Elizabeth Warren will be a president who works for you”:

However, the ad’s presentation of Warren’s roots and values is not entirely accurate, as detailed in Breitbart News senior contributor and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer’s latest blockbuster investigative work, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite.

As Schweizer acutely details, Warren scored millions off her work in government service, frequently working on behalf of the big corporations she routinely rails against on the campaign trail and building her fortune by assisting corporations in navigating the bankruptcy laws she helped write.

Schweizer writes:

But Warren’s image as an outsider and progressive reformer is not matched by the realities surrounding her actions, interests, and commercial ties that have enriched her family. Her family’s accumulation of wealth, even while she has risen to power championing attacks on corporate America, has been deeply dependent on those same corporations. Indeed, in the 1990s she effectively leveraged her position working as a government consultant on bankruptcy issues to reap a rich financial harvest as a legal consultant for the biggest corporations in America. And her family has benefited from other corporate ties. The fundamental contradictions between what she presents herself to be and what she has done provide for remarkable contrasts.

“A lot of people don’t realize that Elizabeth Warren in the mid-1990s was paid by us, by taxpayers, and hired by Congress to rewrite portions of bankruptcy law,” Schweizer explained on Breitbart News Daily on Wednesday.

“While she was doing that and after, she started going to large companies that would be affected by this law and said, ‘Hey, you know you can hire me, an expert. I will help you navigate around and through this law to your own benefit.’ And that’s what she did,” he explained.

“And so, she’s made millions of dollars doing that for corporations and she — by the way, in these cases or in these instances — represents the corporation,” he added. “She doesn’t represent the victims. You know with Dow Chemical it was women with breast implants and the problems being caused there.”

Warren frequently assisted corporations in evading their pension and healthcare obligations at the expense of the victims.

As Breitbart News detailed:

Warren leveraged her legal expertise in corporate bankruptcy law by advising companies like Dow Chemical, Travelers, and LTV Steel — all of which were seeking bankruptcies to avoid liabilities from pensions or lawsuits:

Indeed, of the known cases where she did legal consulting, her work on a number of those cases was on behalf of major corporations. Each of these companies was facing major liability involving pensions or class-action lawsuits, which she helped them avoid. She was extremely well compensated. In a legal brief, she described her “customary billing rate” as $700 per hour back in 2002. Today in 2019, that equates to about $996 per hour.

One of the cases demonstrating the stunning gap between Warren’s campaign trail rhetoric and reality involved her work with corporations that were “seeking release from a law that required them to pay health benefits to coal miners.” LTV Steel, one of her clients, was attempting to “overturn a court ruling that required the company to pay its former employees and dependents $140 million in retirement benefits”:

LTV was trying to avoid its responsibilities under the 1992 Coal Act, which established a fund to pay retired coal workers. The appellate court sided against Warren’s clients, and Warren filed a brief with the Supreme Court seeking to overturn the decision. The Supreme Court never took up the case.

Warren made $10,000 for her efforts, later contending that she was simply standing up for “bankruptcy principles.”

As Schweizer revealed and Breitbart News reported, Warren’s daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, also benefited from her mother’s power and influence and cashed in on corporate clients for her temp firm while her mother chaired the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP):

As Schweizer reported, Amelia was actively “in search of capital investors, board members, clients, and partners” at the time.

Schweizer documents how Warren’s work as chair of the TARP oversight committee coincided with her daughter’s efforts to raise money and sign up advisers from investment banks being bailed out by TARP.

“As we will see, they were doing business with some of the largest corporations in the country, as well as government agencies,” Schweizer revealed:

At the same time that Elizabeth Warren was meeting and talking with major Wall Street investment firms, her daughter’s firm BTG was adding high-profile advisors with connections to the same companies who would benefit and face possible scrutiny from TARP. According to BTG’s website in late 2008 these included:

  • Robert A. Kindler—Global head of Mergers and Acquisitions at Morgan Stanley, former global head of M&A at JPMorgan Chase. Ironically, Kindler boasted a vanity license plate for his Porsche that read “2BIG2FAIL.” Morgan Stanley would receive $10 billion from TARP.
  • Edward J. Mathias—Managing director at the Carlyle Group, former member of management committee and board of directors at T. Rowe Price. The Carlyle Group grabbed $154 million in TARP funds for an affiliate.
  • William I. Jacobs—Former senior executive vice president and chief operating officer at MasterCard International.

The trend continued, even as Warren oversaw the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

According to Profiles in Corruption:

Communication with the CEOs of major Wall Street firms was in “stark contrast to the battle that [was] waged in public.” Warren has met in private with Wall Street moguls that she publicly criticizes. This duality in her public utterances and private tone continued well into her tenure in the U.S. Senate. In July 2017, she joined a private donor retreat held at the Martha’s Vineyard home of Robert Wolf, the former UBS Investment Bank CEO. Wolf told the New York Times: “I think she is very different in a conversation than when she’s on the stump.” She also held private meetings with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. In public, she has excoriated Dimon and pointedly asked for his resignation from the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s board of directors.

That “occurred while her daughter Amelia was building BTG,” Schweizer notes.

Warren’s attempt to brand herself as a champion of the working class and enemy of the rich has fallen flat on some, given her legal consulting career, which largely contradicts her campaign trail rhetoric and her net worth, which was up to $14.5 million in 2012.

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