Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) made a name for herself taking on the predatory rich and championing the middle-class.
Who knew that, while she rallying against the so-called “1%” of richest Americans, she was out making a fortune by selling foreclosed homes.
In one instance, she even paid a sick old lady just $30,000 for a historic Oklahoma City home–which Warren turned around and sold for $145,000 just five months later.
Mary Frances Hickman, 70, had inherited her late mother’s lavish, historic Oklahoma City house when her mother. The house had been built in 1924, and came complete with a butler’s quarters and a fish pond.
Shortly after, in 1993, Hickman suffered a debilitating stroke–and Warren swooped in to buy the house.
“I don’t know why [Hickman sold her house],” said Hickman’s granddaughter, Andrea Martin. “Maybe she just wanted out from under it, but to sell it for such a low number–I don’t know. Maybe she got bad advice, maybe she was just tired.”
Regardless, Warren walked away from the sale of the house with $115,000 in pure profit–even though that money came at the expense of an old lady and her family.
Warren’s real estate wheeling and dealing in Oklahoma City wasn’t an isolated incident: Warren flipped at least five houses for a substantial profit, before she became a so-called “populist champion.”
After making a fortune as a foreclosed house dealer, Warren decided she’d try to slam the door behind her—by making it illegal for other Americans to, well, make money how she did.
She campaigned hard for the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (though Obama later snubbed her by handing the chairmanship to someone else.) The CFPB was designed to shield people from so-called predatory mortgage lenders—the kind of corporations that helped Elizabeth Warren become rich.
Warren even described, in her 2006 book “All Your Worth,” that the idea that “you can make big money buying houses and flipping them quickly” was an absolute myth. Except for people like Warren, of course.
There’s, of course, no problem with buying and selling houses. There’s no problem with taking a risk and making a profit.
But there is a problem when someone like Elizabeth Warren says one thing and then does another–like pretending to be a champion of the little guy, and then turning around and cheating an old lady out of her family home.