Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) pans fellow Democrat Bill Clinton in her new book, This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class, due out on Tuesday, criticizing the former president for his role in deregulating the financial sector years before the housing crisis in 2007.
"In the same way that some Republicans had signed on for greater regulations in earlier decades, some Democrats now got on the deregulation bandwagon big-time," Warren writes, recalling a time during Clinton's presidency when Congress repealed a financial regulation, which some argue was an important factor behind the housing crisis.
Glass-Steagall, signed during the Great Depression, separated commercial and investment banking.
Warren, who previously called for a new Glass-Steagall Act, criticized Clinton for "cracking a few jokes" at the time and predicting the repeal of Glass-Steagall would "expand the powers of banks," according to the Washington Examiner.
"As he signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, President Bill Clinton, cracked a few jokes, then praised the move for 'making a fundamental and historic change in the way we operate our financial institutions,'" Warren says in the book.
Billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg also drew the ire of Warren, who suggested he was out of touch for comparing illegal immigrants and Wall Street power brokers.
Bloomberg appeared to compare the two groups during a commencement address last year, saying they were "roughly equivalent," the Examiner noted.
"In the spring of 2016, billionaire Michael Bloomberg climbed up to the podium at the University of Michigan to deliver the commencement address to tens of thousands of cheering students and families ... Bloomberg took the opportunity to denounce those who 'fan the flames of partisanship,' and he accused both Republicans and Democrats of demagoguery," Warren writes. "He scolded Republicans for blaming our problems on 'Mexicans who are here illegally and Muslims' and Democrats for blaming our problems on 'the wealthy and Wall Street.'"
Warren took issue with Bloomberg's comments, arguing his views as a billionaire are out of touch with those of most people.
"That might all be true in Michael Bloomberg's Alternative Billionaire World–but not so much here on planet Earth," Warren said.
That episode scared Warren because it reminded her "of two fundamental truths: the playing field isn't level, and the people at the top often don't notice that."