WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took a pointed swipe at Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Saturday, invoking the nickname “Pocahontas” that President Trump has used to mock her claims of Native American ancestry.
Bessent sent the Massachusetts Democrat a handwritten note wishing her a “Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” a sarcastic reference to the long-running controversy over Warren’s past identification as Native American.
“Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day in advance to you and your family,” Bessent wrote, according to Fox Business Network.
The message also appeared to mock Warren’s frequent correspondence with the Treasury secretary. His team says she has sent Bessent 100 letters since the beginning of the second Trump administration.
Warren sent her latest letter on Oct. 10, pressing Bessent for answers about the Treasury Department’s efforts to reduce borrowing costs for Americans.
“Senator Warren loves to write letters,” Bessent said Sunday on “Fox and Friends.” “More than writing the letters, she loves to leak them to the press. I read about the letter on Bloomberg and Politico before we receive it, and a lot of these letters are embarrassing.
“[She’s] economically illiterate,” he added. Bessent said Warren had recently confused a currency swap with a currency intervention and had accused the Treasury Department of intervening in the bond market. “We’ve been doing it since 2024,” he said.
“The shocking thing here is that she is the ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee, and she is on Senate Finance,” Bessent said.
Warren, one of the Senate’s most prominent progressives, has faced years of criticism over her claims of Native American heritage. Genetic testing later found only a very distant connection.
In 1984, Warren wrote a Native American cookbook and identified herself as Cherokee. Two years later, she listed herself as “Native American” in a State Bar of Texas survey.
Harvard Law School, where Warren worked at the time, also identified her as Native American on federal paperwork from 1995 through 2004.
Stanford University professor Carlos Bustamante concluded that Warren had a Native American ancestor “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.”
His analysis estimated that her Native American ancestry fell somewhere between 1/64th and 1/1,024th. It also indicated that approximately 95% of her genome was likely European.
Some geneticists, however, have questioned the reliability of the analysis, citing the limited amount of Native American data available in genetic databases.
Warren was condemned by the Cherokee Nation and later apologized in early 2019.
Trump subsequently seized on the controversy, calling her “Pocahontas” and offering to donate $1 million to a charity of her choice if she took a test to substantiate her claim of Native American identity.
In her latest letter to Bessent, Warren wrote, “The surge in Treasury yields is self-inflicted and follows the Fed’s decision to raise the federal funds rate by a quarter of a percentage point, driven by concerns about inflation.”
Last month, the 30-year Treasury yield — the return investors can expect from holding federal government debt — climbed to its highest level since 2004.
Bessent fired back at Warren’s criticisms in his at times sassy response.
“It is difficult to treat your concern as sincere,” he said. “As the federal funds rate climbed from near zero to its highest level in 22 years, with inflation hitting a 40-year high, you were a cheerleader for the Biden Administration’s reckless spending.”
Later, he offered Warren “a Foreign Exchange for Dummies tutorial still.
“[I]f you receive a passing grade to the Yale metric, not the Harvard curve, I would be happy to also include a Fixed Income for Dummies,” he said.
Warren’s office did not respond to a Post request for comment.
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