WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has some slings and arrows for “Pocahontas.”
Bessent on Saturday sent a handwritten note to lefty Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wishing her a “Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day” — a cheeky jab at her past claims at being of Native American descent.
“Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day in advance to you and your family,” he said, according to Fox Business Network.
His note also was a dig at Warren’s prolific letter-writing, which has included 100 letters sent to Bessent alone since the start of the second Trump administration, according to his team.
Warren fired off her latest missive to him Oct. 10 demanding answers on what the Treasury Department has been doing to slash borrowing costs for the public.
“Senator Warren loves to write letters,” Bessent told “Fox and Friends” on Sunday. “More than writing the letters, she loves to leak them to the press. That 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 said. “I can’t remember whether it was one, two, three, four letters ago she confused a currency swap with a currency intervention. Then she accused us of doing a bond market intervention. We’ve been doing it since 2024.
“The shocking thing here is that she is the ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee, and she is on Senate Finance.”
Warren, an arch-progressive, has faced criticisms over her past claims of being of Native American heritage when genetic testing showed she has a barely a fraction of a link.
In 1984, she authored a Native American cookbook and identified as Cherokee. She also identified herself as “Native American” in a State Bar of Texas survey two years later.
Harvard Law School, her employer at the time, described her as Native American on federal paperwork between 1995 and 2004, too.
Stanford University professor Carlos Bustamante found that she possessed a Native American ancestor “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.”
Specifically, her Native American heritage was estimated to be between 1/64th and 1/1,024th. It also found that she was likely around 95% European in her genome.
But some geneticists argue that such analysis is flawed because of the lack of data on Native Americans in genetic databases.
She faced condemnation from the Cherokee Nation and later issued an apology in early 2019.
President Trump later seized on this by dubbing her “Pocahontas” and offering to donate $1 million to a charity of her choice if she took a test to prove her claims that she should be considered Native American.
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, which is the rate of return investors can expect for holding federal government debt, jumped 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.
