Jane Sanders, former Burlington College president and wife of Senator Bernie Sanders, is suspected of arranging a questionable loan for the now defunct college, a loan in whose procurement Senator Bernie Sander’s office may have exercised an undue influence, according to allegations.
The couple has hired prominent lawyers to defend them against these and any other allegations, according to Mr. Sanders’ chief strategist and advisor, Jeff Weaver.
The FBI opened a bank fraud probe involving Senator Bernie Sanders and his wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, according to reports, an investigation that has been in process now for a year and a half. Mrs. Sanders procured a series of loans for the expansion of the college and its programs; but the loans themselves proved detrimental to the school, according to the report, and just one year ago, almost to the day, it was sadly forced to shut its doors for good.
The college struggled to service the overly ambitious financing that was said to have been brought about in part as a result of Senator Bernie Sander’s influence.
The central issue at hand, however, is whether or not the college and Mrs. Sanders falsified information about the extent of the school’s liquidity during the loan approval process. In other words, there is some question as to whether income from donors and other sources were overstated in an effort to qualify for the loan, according to the VT Digger, a watchdog news organization in Vermont. But if this is true, then that would certainly qualify as bank fraud, though a very big if.
In an effort to unveil the truth, FBI investigators have been conducting this inquiry over the last year and a half, and that has included the questioning of former donors about their financial participation. These questions have revealed potential inconsistencies in, for example, actual donor amounts as compared to the school’s official statements of those pledges.
No matter the outcome—whether or not a crime was committed—this could be disastrous for the Democratic Party as it struggles to stem Republican advancements in political races across the country. And this devastation starts with the real possibility that such an investigation could prove damaging to Senator Sanders’ brand and his ability to mobilize progressives at the grassroots level and elsewhere.
The obvious truth is Mr. Sanders’ credibility may be severely hampered as a result of his wife’s targeting in an FBI probe in which some would like to see Mrs. Sanders exposed as behaving much like one of the Wall Street one percenters the senator has spent much of his career criticizing.
So, as an example, when the Senator advocates for the very good idea that tax payers should subsidize tuition free education for in-state students attending community colleges and 4 year state schools, his wife’s overextending a college whose capital assets would not support such lavish expansions does not make for good optics. In other words, as one reporter noted of possible impressions: “Is this what we want colleges focusing their efforts on when tuition costs are so high?” a point Mr. Sanders raised many times during the 2016 campaign.
But there is something suspicious in terms of the motives behind this claim and the man who originally reported the potentially fraudulent case to the FBI. It was none other than Trump operative in Vermont and chair of the Trump campaign there, Brady Toensing.
The facts of the case are involved and convoluted to say the least. They consist of documents, pledges and guarantees, donations, bond underwriting by a state agency, and a mess of private money mortgages used to secure repayment of the loans. But that did not stop the Washington attorney and Republican strategist who would jump at any opportunity to sink a democratic campaign.
In essence, Toening distilled all of these disparate and complex details into a single story of tremendous fraud and ethics violations, details that may prove no wrong-doing on Mrs. Sanders’ part, and then laid them out in a letter that he sent to federal prosecutors as well as to the FDIC and requested they look into a case of “apparent federal bank fraud.”
As for Senator Sanders himself, he has said that these charges are motivated by his meteoric rise in the 2016 race that has made of Mr. Sanders a powerful voice in Democratic politics. Mr. Toening’s job, therefore, was similar to a Mafia hit man’s, the primary focus of which is to eliminate the problem.
Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders’ longtime advisor and head of the Sanders political organization, said of the allegation that Senator Sanders used the influence and power of his office to secure the loans is “baseless” and “false.”
In the end, while the facts of the case are many and involved, intricate even, unscrupulous individuals, such as Mr. Toening, with no real concern about fraud or the sad case of Burlington College, will muddy the waters and perhaps forever taint the reputation of one of our finest senators and his ability to get Democrats elected.