On Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) responded to reports that the FBI is investigating his wife Jane by blustering that the investigation was “pathetic” and his wife was “the most honest person I know.”
Speaking on CNN’s OutFront, Sanders preened:
My wife is about the most honest person I know. All that I will tell you now is it’s a sad state of affairs in America when not only we have politicians being destroyed … but when you go after people’s wives. That’s pretty pathetic … That’s all I’m going to say. I think it’s fairly pathetic that when people are involved in public life not only do they get attacked, but their wives and their families get attacked.
The alleged FBI investigation is examining Jane Sanders’ actions when she served as the president of Burlington College; there have been reports she falsified loan documents.
As The Daily Wire has reported:
On January 10, 2016, the U.S. attorney for Vermont received a “Request for an Investigation into Apparent Federal Bank Fraud.” The four-page letter said that when she was president of Burlington College, Jane Sanders had “orchestrated” the purchase of 33 acres along Lake Champlain in Burlington to expand the school, where her husband had served as mayor. The letter alleged that Jane Sanders had lied and inflated nearly $2 million she said donors had pledged to repay in order for her to secure a $10 million loan. The letter stated that she “successfully and intentionally engaged in a fraudulent scheme to actively conceal and misrepresent material facts from a federal financial institution,” asking for a federal investigation into potential bank fraud.
The Hill, referring to a report from VTdigger.org that detailed Jane Sanders’ activities, wrote back in May:
She claimed the college could count on $2.6 million in donations to pay for the purchased land, according to a 2010 loan application. But she ultimately raised only a fourth of that, making $676,000 in donations over the next four years, putting the college into bankruptcy in May 2016. The numbers that donors say they pledged compared to what Sanders documented differ, according the report.
The report cites an example where Corinne Bove Maietta pledged to give $1 million over half a decade, according to the 2010 loan application. Maietta, however, says she did not make that pledge, saying she offered a bequest of an unspecified amount to be paid to the college when she died, the report said.
On Tuesday, WCAX reported, “A spokesman for Jane Sanders says she has hired an attorney to look out for her interests amid a federal investigation into a real estate deal involving Burlington College.”