Elizabeth Warren shuts door on Herald’s inquiry

Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren, in a sequel to an awkward on-camera encounter this week about her claim to Native American heritage, bolted from a campaign event yesterday, refusing to answer a Herald reporter’s questions about the controversy.

Moments after giving the keynote speech at the Young Democrats of Massachusetts convention, Warren and her handlers hustled out a rear exit of the SEIU 1199 offices in Dorchester. She climbed into the passenger side of an SUV and closed the door as a Herald reporter asked her a question and a photographer rolled video.

“Professor Warren, we’re with the Herald. Can you ... ” a Herald reporter said to Warren as she hopped into the car.

“She’s got to get going. I’m sorry,” a man who ushered Warren out of the building said. “Sorry, we’re running late.”

The man then apologized for earlier closing two stairwell doors on the Herald crew while it was hot on the heels of Warren and her entourage as they hustled out of the building.

“I didn’t know you were behind me,” he said.

Warren’s spokeswoman, Alethea Harney, declined to say where the candidate was headed after the Dorchester event.

Earlier this week, Warren repeatedly dodged on-camera questions about her ancestry from a Fox 25 reporter, responding instead with talking points about her campaign and its emphasis on middle-class families.

Yesterday’s SUV exit evoked memories of the great escape U.S. Sen. John Kerry pulled off in the summer of 2010, when he slammed a car door on a pack of newshounds eager to know how he would pony up the Massachusetts taxes on a $7 million yacht he’d docked in Rhode Island.

“Can I get out of here, please?” Kerry said to the media scrum that day, after an event at the former South Weymouth Naval Air Station.

Harney said Warren’s campaign was unaware that the Herald crew had attended yesterday’s event. A Herald reporter and photographer identified themselves by name and affiliation to event staff at the door and stated their intention to speak with Warren after her address.

The campaign declined to make Warren available by telephone later in the day, and instead released the same statement it put out Friday, when U.S. Sen. Scott Brown urged Harvard University to correct its records for the years it has reported having a Native American woman on its law school staff.

The Herald broke the story last month that Harvard Law counted Warren as a minority hire and touted her Native American roots. The New England Historic Genealogical Society has found nothing to prove her claim that she is 1⁄32 Cherokee — a claim she says is based on generations of family lore.

SOURCE: Boston Herald