Federal prosecutors have ended an investigation into a land deal overseen by Jane Sanders, wife of Sen. Bernie Sanders, without bringing any charges.
Investigators had been looking into a $10 million real estate deal that Jane Sanders led when she was president of the now-defunct Burlington College between 2004 and 2011.
“Jane Sanders has been informed that the U.S. Attorney in Vermont has closed its investigation of the Burlington College land deal and has decided not to bring charges of any kind,” Jeff Weaver, a Sanders adviser, said in a statement. “Jane is grateful that the investigation has come to an end,” Weaver said. “As she has said from the beginning she has done nothing wrong and Jane is pleased that the matter has now come to a conclusion.”
The allegations that Jane Sanders fraudulently helped secure a loan for the college were outlined in a letter to federal prosecutors by Brady Toensing, an attorney who was Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman in Vermont.
In 2010, she had worked out a $10 million deal for the college to buy 32 acres of waterfront land in Burlington on Lake Champlain and a 77,000-square-foot former orphanage and administrative offices of Vermont’s Roman Catholic Church, which needed the money to settle a series of priest sex abuse cases.
Jane Sanders, a longtime political adviser to her husband, promised at the time that the deal would be paid for with increases in enrollment and about $2.7 million in donations.
She left the school a year later.
The enrollment increase and the promised donations didn’t happen and by 2014, the college had about $11 million debt. It sold much of the waterfront land and closed in 2016.
The Vermont senator, an independent who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, has dismissed the federal investigation as “nonsense” and has suggested the allegations were politically motivated.