Appearing on Tuesday’s Megyn Kelly Today, NBC News reporter Morgan Radford attempted to defend Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren’s dubious claim of Native American heritage by arguing that the liberal lawmaker “understood” it to be true. Meanwhile, anchor Megyn Kelly blasted Warren for using the claims of minority status to advance her academic career.

While all three broadcast networks noted the “controversy” and “backlash” sparked by Warren commissioning a DNA test to try to prove Native American ancestry, some in the liberal media still looked for ways to excuse the potential 2020 Democratic candidate’s major gaffe. Radford was one of those apologists, seeming to use her own African American heritage as a way to explain away Warren’s racial misrepresentation:

I’m of a different mind. And partly because a lot of black and brown people in this country do not have the data to prove where they come from. Partly, that’s because of slave records that weren’t dated. But secondly, because of miscegenation law. So the concept of quantifying culture, that is a white and majority concept. A lot of us had to rely, as a black person of mixed race, on oral tradition to know where we were from. So she’s not saying, “I used this.”

Kelly countered: “She’s not saying she used it, but she did.” Radford argued: “But acknowledging who you are isn’t using who you are.” Kelly pushed back: “It is when you are touted as the first Native American professor at Harvard Law School and you’re not Native American.” Radford proclaimed: “She understood she was Native American.”

Kelly wasn’t buying it:

That’s not good enough. It’s like, we ripped on a woman not long ago, a young high school girl, for wearing a prom dress that was kimono style, saying she was guilty of culture appropriation. That is what people on the left told us, “You’re not allowed to appropriate anybody’s dress or cultures”....Elizabeth Warren is out there representing that she’s got a heritage that, at best, is probably similar to most Americans in this country, none of whom checked the box.

Minutes later, Radford again tried to suggest that any criticism of Warren was somehow racist: “I’m fundamentally uncomfortable. And why do you get to dictate who or what I am? I don’t want someone putting a pencil in my hair to see if it stays to find out if I’m really black.”

Turning the subject back to Warren being dishonest about her heritage, Kelly declared: “No one would be making an issue out of this if she hadn’t claimed it, as an academic, to advance her own career. And allowed Harvard Law School to tout her as the first Native American professor when she was not. As a person of color, when she was not.”

Wrapping up the panel discussion, Kelly described Warren’s credibility problem: “...if she is not a truthful person, it matters. I mean, we rip on Trump a lot for the spin he offers....It’s fair game for her, too.”

Here are excerpts of the October 16 discussion: