Elizabeth Warren reveals she earned $2 million from 30 years of private legal work as she feuds with Pete Buttigieg over financial transparency
by Grace Panetta- Sen. Elizabeth Warren's campaign released new details about her private legal work on Sunday, revealing she earned approximately $2 million representing private clients over the course of 30 years.
- The new disclosures come amid a simmering feud between Warren and rival candidate former Mayor Pete Buttigieg over matters of financial transparency.
- Warren and other candidates have called for Buttigieg to release the full details of his work at the elite management consulting firm McKinsey and Co., where he worked as an associate approximately a decade ago and has signed a nondisclosure agreement pertaining to his work there.
- Buttigieg has also come under scrutiny in recent days for no longer releasing the names of his top-dollar fundraisers and bundlers, and declining to allow members of the press to cover his fundraising events.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren's campaign released new details about her private legal work on Sunday, revealing she earned approximately $2 million representing private clients over the course of 30 years.
The new disclosures come amid a simmering feud between Warren and rival candidate former Mayor Pete Buttigieg over matters of financial transparency.
In recent weeks, Buttigieg's campaign has honed in Warren's previous private legal work, seeking to cast her as a "corporate lawyer" at odds with her populist campaign message, and called for her to release her tax returns from all the years she performed such private work.
Before being elected to the US Senate in 2012, Warren worked as a law professor specializing in bankruptcy and consumer protection law at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law Schools. She also represented some private clients along with her academic work.
Previously, Warren's campaign had released eleven years of tax returns going back to 2008. Warren aides told CNN that she didn't release 30 years of tax returns partly because it would be a double standard between her and other candidates, and because tax returns wouldn't show an itemized list of all the private parties she represented and how much she earned from each case.
Meanwhile, Warren and other candidates have called for Buttigieg to release the full details of his work at the elite management consulting firm McKinsey and Co., where he worked as an associate approximately a decade ago.
The Buttigieg campaign has said they are in the process of trying to release Buttigieg from the non-disclosure agreement he signed pertaining his work at McKinsey, a notoriously secretive firm which makes nearly all current and former employees sign NDAs.
The South Bend mayor has released his tax returns from his time at McKinsey and says he is looking to make more information available about his time at the firm. In a recent statement, Buttigieg said McKinsey "had not agreed" to his requests to be released from the NDA.
Buttigieg has also come under scrutiny from his rivals and progressive groups in recent days for no longer releasing the names of his top-dollar fundraisers and bundlers, and declining to allow members of the press to cover his fundraising events.
Buttigieg's relative secrecy around his fundraising stands in stark contrast to his top rivals in the 2020 race. Former Vice President Joe Biden has let one or more reporters into nearly all his fundraising events, while Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders are completely relying on grassroots donations and aren't holding any private fundraisers at all.
While Buttigieg released the names of his high-dollar bundlers in April, his campaign has not updated the list since, according to the Huffington Post.
"Sen. Warren held closed door fundraisers for years, which allowed her to start this campaign with over $10 million raised by the same practices she now decries," a Buttigieg spokesman told HuffPost. "Our donors are available on fundraising reports for anyone to review, and the only promise anyone at a fundraiser will get from Pete Buttigieg for a donation is that he'll use that money to defeat Donald Trump."
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