Investigation Into Land Deal by Bernie Sanders’ Wife Intensifies
FBI and federal prosecutors have questioned numerous people lately.
In May, Kemberlee blogged that the FBI reportedly started investigating failed presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders’ wife Jane over a land deal.
She allegedly falsified loan documents when she served as president of the now defunct Burlington College.
Federal prosecutors have now amped up the investigation after they hauled “off more than a dozen records” from the college and asked “a state official to provide evidence for a grand jury.”
The Investigation
Officials started the investigation back “in early 2016 after Brady Toensing, a lawyer who was the state chairman for Trump’s presidential campaign, wrote to the U.S. attorney and federal bank regulators, alleging potential bank fraud.”
Officials did not confirm the investigation until this past April “when the local news outlet VTDigger.org reported that a federal prosecutor had asked that records from the college be preserved.”
Last week, The Washington Post received a subpoena from “an attorney for the Vermont Educational and Health Buildings Financing Agency, which helped the college get financing.” The agency received the subpoena, which instructed asked for “records related to the land deal and all fundraising efforts, pledges and donations” for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Burlington. The subpoena is titled “grand jury investigation” and tells the agency “to contact a special agent with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., a banking regulator” if anyone has questions.
The Post claimed that this subpoena has become “the first confirmation that prosecutors have collected evidence to present to a grand jury.”
The Washington Post reported:
Half a dozen people said in interviews in recent days that they had been contacted by the FBI or federal prosecutors, and former college trustees told The Washington Post that attorneys for Jane Sanders had interviewed them to learn what potential witnesses might tell the government.
—
The questions from government investigators, as described by those who were interviewed or received subpoenas for documents, suggest that the inquiry is focused on Jane Sanders and alleged bank fraud, and not on her husband. But the inquiry could nonetheless create a political liability for the senator, who was a candidate for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination and is the progressive movement’s most popular leader.
Burlington College
Jane Sanders became president of the college in 2004. In 2010, she decided the school should move to a “waterfront property that belonged to the local Roman catholic diocese,” which would cost the school $10 million.
Sanders promised the college would receive the needed donations and enrollment would surge. She presented documents that showed $2.6 million in confirmed donations and “received a $6.7 million loan with the help of the Vermont Educational and Health Buildings Financing Agency.” The Post continued:
People’s United Bank bought the bond, meaning the bank became the lender. The college promised to pay the remaining $3.65 million to cover the entire $10 million purchase from the diocese over 10 years.
The donations were critical. An independent consultant warned in a report to the state bonding agency that the college’s ability to repay its loans from People’s United and the diocese “depends on its ability to raise sufficient capital through its capital campaign.” An undated report from the college touted a “firm commitment” of $1 million and a verbal commitment of $1 million more.
But only months after the college closed on the property purchase, trustees sensed problems.
“Things did not add up,” Dantzscher said. “The donations were not coming in.”
Trustee David V. Dunn said the college collected only about $125,000 through the summer of 2011. The trustees asked other college administrators to get in touch with donors, he said.
“What they were finding was different than what was represented,” he said. “Multiple donors were saying they had never committed to those amounts.”
Mike blogged in May that Sanders resigned in 2011 “and left the school with a golden parachute of $200,000.” He also noted that the Catholic Diocese of Burlington wanted “Sanders investigated for fraud.”
He also mentioned a report from the Washington Free Beacon that during Sanders’ time at the college, it “steered funds to her daughter and a family friend who had been an advisor to Bernie Sanders when he was mayor of Burlington.”
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Typical socialists, they live the rich lifestyle with their 4 homes and claim they are for the little people as they steal more every year from the system they preach against. Bernie never worked a job outside government inhis whole life and probably couldnot balance his checkbook. Angry and dumb.
Several things of importance (though there are several more if you read up on it.) Burlington College was a tiny school, with a top enrollment of ~100, an annual tuition cost of about $25K. One of their most important “degrees”? Woodworking – taught at a facility owned/operated by Sander’s daughter at huge expense.
Is this true? Can you point to someone or some site that may be compiling details about the way this college was run and how it met its demise.
Feels like a Wiki is needed much like the one the good professor started to keep track of my fraudulent senior senator… Chief Warren.
Start here – but there is MUCH more going back several years
http://digital.vpr.net/post/look-jane-sanders-role-closure-burlington-college#stream/0
Whether it’s a state, municipality, or private college, when other people’s money is involved, leftists will always find a way to piss it away, leaving all in ruin, but still manage to pay off cronies, family, or line their own pocket.
Parasites all.
To show any sort of fraud, actual documents making false claims about revenue would be nice. But
An undated report from the college touted a ‘firm commitment’ of $1 million and a verbal commitment of $1 million more
doesn’t sound like the sort of evidence on which convictions are made. Any real report is not going to be undated. Notes scrawled out on restaurant napkins are undated, but no bank is going to make financial decisions based on casual ephemera like that.
So unless somebody can do better than that, this looks like little more than harassment.
A failed college may be enough to smear Bernie as “anti-education” but that’s a campaign tactic, not a legal prosecution.
The minutes and information packets of any and all meetings of the Board of Trustees of Burlington College would be a great place to start.
Certainly the Board would have to approve the purchase and the loan so it should be well documented therein.
As you said, no bank will make a loan based on something as shaky as an undated report from the college. Yet the bank made the loan, and the state agency helped the college get the loan.
According to the article investigators hauled off dozens of boxes of documents from the college, and the bank and state agency have also received subpoenas to turn over their records. The reason the WaPo could get their grubby mitts on that undated report is no doubt because the investigators had the same reaction you did. That report has no value as evidence. Consequently they didn’t seize it. So it would appear to me that the investigators can do better in terms of documentation on which Burlington College administrators made representations r.e. the college’s ability to repay the loan. And possibly misrepresentations. That will no doubt be found in the bank and state agency documents Sanders signed.
you are correct.
getting an unsecured loan for anyone beside the spouse of a sitting senator and potential POTUS will NOT happen.
and in this occasion, the bank and people of VT are on the hook and the Bern is in the catbird seat.
and besides, expecting SJW’s to be ethical ?????
The two most important words in the article: “grand jury.”
This isn’t some “Comey pretending to investigate Hillary” kind of investigation. This is more like the real thing. Mrs. Bernie could be in big trouble and there is some possibility that Senator Bernie is too.
one can only hope. 😉
The wife of a Democratic candidate for president is involved in a shady land deal. Seems like I’ve heard that story before.
I foresee a new Internet “soap opera” – “As the World Berns”…..
or a new hobby woodworking show – Ark & Saw – how to strip the DummyCraps of their Ethics (Ethics, we don’ need to stinkin Ethics).
Quick! Someone needs to warn Brad Toensing to stay out of Rock Creek Park!
… and Fort Darcy Park
Haven’t seen diddly about this investigation anywhere but here and Breitbart.com. Notice that, anyone? And this is an actual “criminal” investigation with a grand jury empaneled and everything.
that’s ok – we will see the perp walk, soon enuf
Dunn said that although Sanders’s fundraising figures were inaccurate, he thinks she had good intentions.
“For me, personally, I don’t believe she had malicious intent. I don’t think it rose to that level,” he said. “Jane had an agenda that she wanted what was best for the college, and she stretched it beyond its capabilities.”
_______________________
(From the WaPo article linked)
Sure she lied, deceived her board, and defrauded the bank.
But hey, she meant well, so let’s just move on!
did she return 200K ?
didn’t think so.
maybe we can foreclose on their 4 properties to repay the defraud….
Gotta love those pro-Communist millionaires…
google with your iPhone you got on Amazon.
Billionaires not Millionaires.
Bernie and Wife: “Let them eat cake!”
To the guillotine!
Lock her up,
What would be more ironic!
Sleazy talentless daughter, just like her sleazy talentless mother: mother:
Writer claims Chelsea Clinton stole book idea:
Chelsea Clinton ripped off an upstate author when she published her best-selling feminist kids book, “She Persisted,” a federal lawsuit claims.
“Christopher Janes Kimberley, 56, of Albany, is suing the former first daughter and Penguin Random House for copyright infringement, seeking up to $150,000, according to the lawsuit, filed Thursday in Southern District of New York court. “I did months of painstaking research on my book. Her version looks like a ninth-grade homework assignment,” he vented to The Post. “I am in disbelief.”
http://nypost.com/2017/07/11/writer-claims-chelsea-clinton-stole-his-book-idea/
Chris,
Look who you’re dealing with. What’s so hard to believe?
Be sure to look for Chelsea Clinton’s new follow up book:
“She Perspired” (subtitled “Profusely as She Was Perp Walked).
Corrupt…fake…
Speaking of Obama:
“A new memoir documents a Barack Obama White House in which a fratty speech writing team smoked, drank, told “dick jokes,” and used their jobs to sleep with women.
“David Litt, a former Obama speech writer, will release Thanks Obama: My Hopey Changey White House Years in September, the Daily Mail reports.
Litt, a Yale graduate, and, at just 24 years of age in 2011, one of the youngest White House speech writers, tells the story of applying for a White House position with a history of recreational drug use.
“After some back-of-the-envelope math, I listed thirty instances of undergraduate marijuana use, plus one experience with mushrooms I made clear I hadn’t enjoyed,” Litt recalls.
“He also discusses how romance was “almost painfully easy” for a White House staffer. At least one aide used his position to sleep with a “blonde D.C. newscaster,” although Litt does not specify who. The aide regularly boasted about his conquest to his coworkers.
“The White House that Litt describes might be characterized as “fratty.” He writes how the all-male, all-white, all-under-40 speech writing team drank, smoked, called each other “bro,” and followed along with college basketball mostly to please Obama.
“If chest bumping had been permitted in the Oval, we would have gone for it,” Litt writes.
“Serving regularly as Obama’s comedy writer, Litt helped draft Obama’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner routine, including at least one crack at the expense of 2012 Republican contender Tim Pawlenty.
http://freebeacon.com/culture/obama-memoir-drinking-womanizing/
“You may think Tim Pawlenty’s all-American, but have you heard his full name? That’s right: Tim ‘bin Laden’ Pawlenty,” Litt wrote in a line that Obama later removed.
“Off-color jokes were not limited to former governors either. In one particular lewd quip, a speechwriter suggested Obama say, “Let’s put it this way, dreams aren’t the only thing I got from my father.”
“Not all was fun and games in the White House, however. Litt discusses the president’s work to get under-35s to enroll with Obamacare through healthcare.gov.
“Litt himself, like many others, did not trust the health care website in the first days of its catastrophic roll-out.
http://freebeacon.com/culture/obama-memoir-drinking-womanizing/
Most telling:
-“Litt said Obama struggled with timing during speech rehearsals”
-Real Person: Noun. An American living outside Washington who is not famous and does not work in government.
Litt reveals how the West Wing had its own vernacular:
-Click: Noun. An American living outside Washington who is not famous and does not work in government.
-Real Person: Noun. An American living outside Washington who is not famous and does not work in government.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4675908/Obama-s-speechwriter-tells-new-memoir.html