Jane Sanders off the FBI hook

Nearly two years after she first came under the eyes of an FBI fraud investigation based on some of the loans she got for the Burlington College she wound up running into defunctery (I'm an editor, I can invent words like that), Jane Sanders is now off the hook.

Two notes for the Berniecrats (I won't call you bros, but I will call you -crats): First, I know who filed the claim. And, I know who Brady Toensing is. Second, the Vermont U.S. District Attorney's office started looking into the allegations while Obama was still president. Thus, it's a bit stretched to think this whole thing was a GOP plot.

Several bits of background, from previous blogging I've done.

1. Reportedly, a grand jury was impaneled at one time, though that was disputed. Also reportedly, the FDIC as well as FBI were investigating.

1A. Per that same link, Bernie's unauthorized biographer, Harry Jaffe, noted that bank fraud is hard to prove.

2A. The Sanders family is a nepotistic money machine. Now, within the family, as Bernie showed with son Levi, that nepotism tilts more toward Jane's kids from her first marriage. And, Bernie put Jane on his campaign payroll before. That said, to pull Harry Jaffa's piece out of my first blogging link, Jane has long been a drive behind Bernie's drive.

3. Murray Bookchin took a critical look at Bernie's own land redevelopment ideas when he was mayor of Burlington.

4. Both The Sanders Institute and Our Revolution appear to have a bit of these same issues.

5. Per the links above, Toensing may have started the ball rolling, but Seven Days, and especially VT Digger, pushed it a lot further along of their own action.

6. Just because. For the #ActualFlatticus Deadheads, or dead-end kids, he was wrong about this being a nothingburger. That said, I agree with Jaffe that the "pressure" angle was a nothingburger. But, I think Jane made arguably false statements on contributions pledged to the college. Did the DA not look at them? Not consider them serious enough? As Jaffe noted, bank fraud is hard to prove.

It was enough of a somethingburger, per Seven Days' long piece about the investigation ending (VT Digger was no longer than The Hill, linked up top), that eight people were interviewed by either the FBI or FDIC. That includes former college prez Carol Moore. Moore told Vermont Public Radio in 2016 that the land deal was an albatross, while carefully neither supporting Sanders nor explicitly throwing her under the bus.

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For Bernie, of course, it removes a shadow from a possible 2020 run. "Interestingly," or more, Nov. 13, the AP ran a story about a growing field of possible Democratic presidential contenders, and never mentioned his name.