In a new book released today, Massachusetts Democratic senator and potential presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren attempts to rewrite history regarding the controversy surrounding her “Native American” ancestry that emerged in the 2012 Senate campaign. What’s remarkable is that, at least in the initial book reviews, the press largely allows her to get away with it. In fact, it’s virtually ignored that to this day Warren still refuses to release any law school records that may shed light on this controversy.

To be fair, most reviews note that Warren has never substantiated her claims of Native American heritage, which is true. The larger and unaddressed issue, however, is whether or not Warren falsely claimed minority status in order to gain an unfair advantage in her academic career. This was a question that was unresolved at the end of the 2012 campaign and it remains unresolved with the publication of Warren’s book.

As the communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2012, I had a front row seat to Warren’s dubious claims. While she succeeded in stonewalling the press then, it’s an issue that will surely re-emerge if she one day runs for president. In that vein, and in the context of Warren’s claims that she was “hurt” and “angry” by the ostensibly dishonest Republican “attacks” on her ancestry, it’s worth re-examining the facts.

First, what’s perhaps most notable about Warren’s book is that she even includes a section called “Native American,” in which she reportedly writes, “Everyone on our mother’s side — aunts, uncles, and grandparents — talked openly about their Native American ancestry. My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents’ courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory.”

This is ironic because, until the Boston Herald first broke the news in April 2012 that Harvard Law School had repeatedly promoted Warren as a Native American faculty member, Warren never once mentioned these stories of her upbringing in a single press interview, speech, class lecture or testimony at any point, ever, in her decades-long career. What's more, Warren was not listed as a minority on her transcript from George Washington University where she began her undergraduate education, nor did she list herself as a minority when applying to Rutgers University Law School in 1973.

In fact, it was not until she was in her 30s and focused on climbing the highly competitive ladder of law school academia that Warren apparently rediscovered her Native American heritage. It’s important to note that entrance and advancement in the law school profession is governed by the Association of American Law Schools, which requires registrants interested in teaching at law schools to fill out a questionnaire detailing their education, experience, bar passage and, yes, ethnicity. This information is then disseminated to law schools around the country that, as Warren surely knew, are always on the lookout to add to the diversity of their faculty.

A copy of Warren's questionnaire currently resides in the Association of American Law Schools archives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. However, only Warren herself has the authority to release the complete copy of her questionnaire and to date, she has refused to do so.

Her opposition to such transparency can perhaps be understood in the documented fact that in the years thereafter, starting in 1986, Warren began self-reporting herself as a "minority professor" in the Association of American Law Schools staff directory that lists all law school professors around the country. As the former association chairman told the Boston Herald, the directory once served a tip sheet for law school administrators, in the pre-Internet days, who were looking to identify and recruit minority professors.

Remarkably, Warren's explanation to the Boston Herald was that she listed herself as a minority in the hopes that she would be invited to a luncheon so she could meet "people who are like I am" and she stopped checking the box when that didn't happen. Perhaps it "didn't happen" because at no point, at any of the schools she attended or worked at, is there any evidence that Warren ever joined any Native American organizations on campus or in any way interacted with anyone in the Native American community.

That did not however, stop Warren from continuing to self-report as a Native American minority. The New York Times reported in May 2012 that Warren was listed as a minority recipient of a teaching award years earlier at the University of Pennsylvania where she had advanced after teaching at several non-Ivy League law schools. Notably, Penn declined to explain to the Times why Warren was listed as a minority.

From Penn, Warren moved on to Harvard Law School, where her Native American heritage was touted in multiple articles, including a Fordham Law Review piece that lauded her as Harvard Law's " first woman of color." Even as recently as 2011, it appears Warren was listed as the lone Native American faculty member on the school's 2011 "diversity report," though like Penn, Harvard also refused to comment.

Yet, when the Herald first broke the story in April 2012, Warren claimed she "had no idea" that Harvard had touted her Native American status and claimed she did not "recall" ever citing her Native American heritage when applying for a job. In the months afterward, Warren ducked, dodged and stonewalled subsequent questions, eventually wearing-out the press, and succeeded in winning an election without ever releasing any records that might substantiate those claims.

So her decision to revisit this controversy in a new book re-opens the issue and reminds us that there is a very simple way for Warren to answer the many still outstanding questions, and it begins with finally releasing her records.

Whether Warren falsely claimed to be a minority in order to game the system and advance her career is a question that goes to the heart of her honesty and integrity. It's also a question that will confront her if she ever seeks higher office.

It’s worth recalling that this wasn't the first time an issue like this arose in Massachusetts. In 1988, two fair-haired, fair-complexioned 10-year veterans of the Boston Fire Department, Philip and Paul Malone, were fired when a re-examination of their job applications from years earlier found that they had self-reported themselves as black based on a photograph of their great-grandmother. A lawyer who represented black and Hispanic civil service applicants at the time said of the Malones: "They aren't innocent victims; they just got away with it, and the ones who chose to ignore them are equally culpable."