Elise Stefanik's brag about humble origins busted by new investigation

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) grew up quite a bit wealthier than she has let on since entering politics, according to a new investigative report.

The New York Republican contrasted herself against her Democratic rival in 2014 as a scrappy underdog running against a "multimillionaire," but The Daily Beast found that the Harvard graduate came from a much more comfortable background than she has let on.

"If Stefanik was supposed to remember where she came from, she seems to have forgotten — to the point of making blatantly misleading statements, beginning in her first congressional campaign — how her family’s wealth has given her a leg up, from providing her with an expensive private-school education to her parents buying her a $1.2 million D.C. townhouse when she was just 26," wrote William Bredderman and Jake Lahut for the website.

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She was actually asked about that townhouse, which is now valued at more than $1.85 million, according to assessor records, and while she has long described the three-bedroom residence as an “investment property,” the D.C. Recorder of Deeds office shows no other investors in house other than Stefanik’s parents and her younger brother.

Stefanik has repeatedly said her parents "risked everything" to start up the company Premium Plywood Products "from scratch," but The Daily Beast found that they secured a Small Business Administration-guaranteed loan worth $335,000 — around $755,000 in today’s money – shortly after incorporating the company in 1991, and her father was also able to resolve a federal tax lien lodged in 1997 for $21,621 in under a month.

The future lawmaker attended Albany Academy for Girls, where New York's political and business elites have long sent their daughters, and she graduated from Harvard in 2006 and went straight to work for then-president George W. Bush's administration with the help of an Ivy League mentor.

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The Daily Beast investigation also found evidence that Stefanik's own business ventures received substantial assistance from her parents' wealth, in contrast with her political biography's claims, and the lawmaker's team disputed the findings of what they inaccurately described as a "pitched story."

“Rep. Stefanik grew up in a hardworking small business family that her parents built from scratch, was the first in her family to have the opportunity to graduate from college, and is working hard everyday to serve her constituents to ensure they have economic opportunity that is currently being crushed under Joe Biden,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Many Members own property in Washington D.C., yet the mainstream media continues their deranged obsession with attacking Elise.”

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