Vermont Senator and former 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and his wife Jane Sanders have hired defense attorneys for an FBI investigation into possible bank fraud.
According to CBS News, the couple lawyered up for an investigation stemming from a January 2016 complaint regarding Jane Sanders’s time as Burlington College president. According to the complaint, she is accused of distorting donor levels in a 2010 loan application for $10 million from People’s United Bank as part of a 33-acre land acquisition. She told CBS News that the loan was approved by the college’s financial board.
According to Politico Magazine, which originally reported on the Sanders’s hired defense, prosecutors may also be investigating allegations that Sen. Sanders’s office inappropriately lobbied and urged the bank to approve the loan.
Brady Toensing of Burlington is responsible for launching the complaint to the U.S. attorney for Vermont. Toensing was also a Vermont chairman for the Trump campaign.
“I filed a request for an investigation in January 2016 and an investigation appears to have been started right away. It was started under President Obama, his Attorney General, and his U.S. Attorney, all of whom are Democrats,” Toensing wrote in an email to CBS News. “My only hope is for a fair, impartial, and thorough investigation.”
However, Sanders’s top adviser Jeff Weaver alleges the claims against the senator are politically-motivated, baseless, and false. Sanders also called the claims a “political game” put forth after his presidential run.
H/T CBS News