Slumlord Bernie Sanders and his piggish wife Jane are under investigation, and it seems to be gathering steam.
| Feds stepping up pace of probe into slumloard Bernie Sanders and wife |
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Did Jane Sanders commit fraud in a land deal involving Burlington College in 2010? Questions about the role that Sen. Bernie Sanders’ wife played in the collapse of the school have percolated for over a year, and two months ago the website VTDigger and Washington Post reported that the FBI had opened an investigation into the failure. Today, the Post’s Shawn Boburg and Jack Gillum report that the investigation has “accelerated in recent months” — but what precisely does that portend?
Boburg and Gillum provide a lengthy and informative backgrounder to the scandal, assuming that it is a scandal. It didn’t do much to dent Bernie’s campaign momentum, which peaked at about the time it first emerged but didn’t get a lot of play in the media until afterward. In part that’s because the issue doesn’t involve Bernie, even indirectly. There has been no allegation that his senatorial connections were exploited to drive the loan or the decision by Burlington to sign onto the purchase of the land that led to its collapse.
It was clearly a bad business decision on Burlington’s part under Sanders’ leadership, but the question is whether it amounts to a crime. The complaint alleged that she deceptively claimed to have “confirmed” donations of over $2 million from contributors in order to (a) get the board to agree to the purchase, and (b) get a loan from the bank with help from a government agency. In the end, the school only got $125,000 from donors, and more than one informed the school that they had never committed to larger amounts.
Jane Sanders continues to deny any wrongdoing through her attorneys and spokespeople, but the circumstances of the collapse seem suspicious. But then so too did the way that the failure first came to the attention of investigators — through an official of the Donald Trump campaign, Brady Toensing. That allowed Sanders and her defenders to claim that the controversy was nothing more than a campaign attack on Bernie Sanders through his wife.