Trump Renews ‘Pocahontas’ Attack While Drawing Fire Over Saudis

(Bloomberg) -- As Donald Trump came under increasing fire over his acceptance of the Saudi King’s denial of knowledge about a missing journalist, the president doubled down on a different controversy Tuesday tweeting three times about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test.

Trump once again resorted to name calling against Warren, claiming that a DNA test she released Monday showing American Indian lineage was “bogus ”-- even though it was performed by a Stanford University professor recognized internationally for his work with data science and genomics.

"Pocahontas (the bad version), sometimes referred to as Elizabeth Warren, is getting slammed,” Trump said in a posting on Twitter. In a subsequent message, he referred to the Cherokee Nation’s criticism of Warren for claiming a link to Native Americans based on a DNA test, which they say do not even distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America.

It was his second day of sparring with Warren, a potential 2020 opponent.

Warren’s test showed her native ancestor appeared in her lineage six to 10 generations back, making her less than 2 percent Native American. She has been criticized by Republicans for claiming to be a minority while a legal scholar.

“While the vast majority of the individual’s ancestry is European, the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor in the individual’s pedigree, likely in the range of 6-10 generations ago,” concluded Carlos D. Bustamante, who has a Ph.D in biology and a Master’s in statistics from Harvard University and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010. His research has focused on population migration and mechanisms of evolution, according to the MacArthur Foundation website.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo was in Riyadh meeting with Saudi leaders regarding the disappearance journalist Jamal Khashoggi in a diplomatic consulate in Turkey Oct. 2 and is assumed to be dead. Media reports from CNN, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal say the Saudis are considering saying he died during a botched interrogation, but the issue has swelled into an international test for the Trump administration on human rights.

Trump yesterday said he won’t make good on a Jul 5 promise to give $1 million to the charity of the lawmaker’s choice if a DNA test proved her Native American heritage.

To contact the reporter on this story: Terrence Dopp in Washington at tdopp@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Derek Wallbank at dwallbank@bloomberg.net, Elizabeth Wasserman, Jon Morgan

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