Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) lawyer has sent a “formal disavowal” to the Federal Elections Commission on Ready for Warren —the group that aims to nudge Warren to run for president in 2016.
“This letter serves as a formal disavowal of the organization and its activity,” Mark Elias, Warren’s attorney wrote in the letter. “The senator has not, and does not, explicitly or implicitly, authorize, endorse, or otherwise approve of the organization’s activities.”
Later in the letter Elias stresses that “Senator Warren has publicly announced that she is not running for president in 2016.”
Ready for Warren is supposed to be an analogous group to Ready for Hillary, which as its name suggests, aims to lay the groundwork for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to run for president in 2016.
“We’ve all been clear since we launched our campaign that Senator Warren isn’t associated with our group, and we aren’t associated with the Senator — I don’t think there’s anything new in this letter,” Erica Sagrans, the campaign manager for Ready for Warren, said in a statement to TPM. Sagrans continued:
We completely agree with Senator Warren that maintaining Democratic control of the Senate in 2014 is what we need to focus on this fall. That’s why next week we’re holding a nationwide day of Ready for Warren house parties, where volunteers will get together in living rooms and coffee shops to talk about how they can support Democratic candidates in 2014 and elevate Senator Warren’s agenda.
The group gained attention at the Netroots Nation conference in Detroit in July, but Warren has repeatedly said she is not running for president.
Read the full letter below:
Letter to FEC Disavowing the Ready for Warren PAC August 22, 2014
This post was updated.
I was at Netroots. Those ready for Warren people were total assholes. All they did was piss everybody off.
Clearly she’s not running.
Which will only make the acolytes more fervent. Because once you embrace a dream, that dream CANNOT die!
Why do Democrats always insist on playing the circular firing squad game? If Hillary is the candidate, I hope every Democrat will work like hell to elect her, even if their delicate sensibilities are somehow offended by her. Because even the least nutty GOP candidate would still be a disaster. He will also have every Republican, from the Fox News/Evangelical/teabagger asshat crowd to the country club, pinky in the air Republicans in Greenwich voting for him.
Ready for Hillary will gladly allow them to work independently under their existing structure as a subsidiary of Ready for Hillary.
Providing one condition, the group pledges not to splinter into the camps of Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders or Brian Schweitzer.