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A radio interview with Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren turned awkward Friday after the host pressed the candidate over her past claims of Native American ancestry and told her, “You're kind of like the original Rachel Dolezal.”
During an interview with “Charlamagne tha God” on the syndicated radio show “The Breakfast Club,” Warren acknowledged regret over her past claims of Native American heritage – an issue that has dogged her throughout her political career.
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“I'm not a person of color, I'm not a citizen of a tribe,” Warren said. “And I shouldn’t have done it.”
Warren said the reason she claimed ancestry in the past was because she was told stories about her heritage from her family. But last year, she released the results of a DNA test showing she is only between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American -- and apologized for identifying as Native American on past forms.
Asked if she had a chance to do it over, would she still have claimed Native American heritage, Warren said, “I can’t go back. But I shouldn’t have done it.”
Still, Warren denied benefiting from her ancestry claims, including when she was applying for jobs, saying it never “affected any job I ever got.”
But "Charlamagne tha God," in the interview, compared her to Dolezal, the former NAACP chapter leader who famously resigned after her parents revealed she was not African-American.
“You're kind of like the original Rachel Dolezal a little bit -- Rachel Dolezal is the white woman pretending to be black,” the interviewer said.
Warren replied that she didn't intentionally mislead. “No, this is what I learned from my family,” she said.
Fox News' Patrick Ward contributed to this report.
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