June
24, 2017
Bernie and Jane Sanders lawyering up for FBI fraud investigation
Just
when Bernie and Jane Sanders thought they had it made as the icons of the
American left, along comes a mean old Republican to spoil it with accusations
so serious that the FBI is investigating. In a long and sympathetic
article, Politico Magazine explains:
Jeff Weaver, Sanders' longtime top political adviser who
heads Sanders' political organization, Our Revolution, confirms
to Politico Magazine that Bernie and Jane Sanders have lawyered
up. The couple has retained Rich Cassidy, a well-connected Burlington attorney
and Sanders devotee, and Larry Robbins, the renowned Washington-based defense
attorney who has represented I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and disgraced
former Rep. Bill Jefferson, to represent Jane Sanders in the matter.
Now, President Donald Trump's Justice Department is
handling an investigation that will proceed at the discretion of a U.S.
attorney of Vermont that Trump has yet to appoint.
Jane
is portrayed as a victim. The story is going to be that enemies of Bernie
are hounding poor Jane:
"I made it clear I didn't want him to run," she
told me at their campaign headquarters at the time, "but if he decided to,
I would be behind him 100 percent."
The
Snidely Whiplash villain in this piece comes from conservative aristocracy. LawNewz:
The investigation stems from an Jan. 10, 2016 letter sent to the then-U.S
Attorney for Vermont, Eric S.
Miller. The law firm diGenova & Toensing LLP, [that would be Joe
diGenova and Victoria Toensing – ed.] representing local parishioners, contend
that Burlington College President Jane
Sanders engaged in fraud when her school purchased land from a
Catholic diocese.
In 2010, the now-defunct Burlington took out a bank loan to
make the deal, but that required a minimum commitment of $2.27 million in grant
and donations. The letter, authored by Bracy
C. Toensing, said she supplied evidence saying they had $2.6 million
in the needed money.
But it didn't turn out to be the case, Toensing said.
"At the end of fiscal year 2001 (six months after
closing on the loan), Ms. Sanders had collected only $279,000 in donations,
which was less than 25 percent of the $1.2 million Ms. Sanders guaranteed to
the bank that she would have collected in that year," he wrote.
Politico elaborates:
Backed by six exhibits and a dozen documents, the four-page letter described
how Jane Sanders had "orchestrated" the purchase of 33 acres along
Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont's largest city, where her husband had
minted his populist political brand as mayor. The deal closed in 2010,
when the senator's wife was president of Burlington College, a tiny, obscure,
nontraditional school that always seemed to be struggling for students and
funds. The letter alleged that to secure a $10 million loan and execute her
grand plan to expand the college, Jane Sanders had falsified and inflated
nearly $2 million that she'd claimed donors had pledged to repay the loans.
Sanders had "successfully and intentionally engaged in
a fraudulent scheme to actively conceal and misrepresent material facts from a
federal financial institution," the letter alleged. It pressed for a
federal investigation into potential bank fraud.
The
media ignored the letter, but the FBI didn't.
Here
is how the deal fell apart.
When Jane Sanders made the offer to the Roman Catholic
Diocese, Burlington College was nearly broke – with an annual budget just below
$4 million. In order to finance the property, Sanders secured a $6.5 million
loan from People's United Bank in the form of a tax exempt bond purchase, and
the Catholic Church agreed to carry a $3.65 million second mortgage on the
property. Sanders told both institutions that Burlington college had $5 million
in likely donor pledges and $2.4 million
in confirmed pledges to be used to pay off the debt.
But wait – that
was just for the property!
What Jane Sanders didn't plan for was the $6 million or so
required to actually build
out the campus on the property to include green space, athletic
fields, lecture halls, and walkways. Oops!
Disaster…
Sanders' original
claim of $2.4 million in confirmed donor pledges was quickly reduced to $1.2
million according to documents filed in the first fiscal year
after the purchase – yet in records obtained by VTDigger, Burlington College received only $279,000. Despite
hopes by Sanders and college trustees that they could boost enrollment and
expand the student body, nothing changed – and the school failed at raising the
money to satisfy it's loans.
And then Jane Sanders was fired, with a $200,000 severance package.
In order to try and avoid bankruptcy, Burlington college
sold off pieces of the 33 acre property to a local developer – which allowed
the institution to pay off some of the debt Jane Sanders had accumulated,
however in April 2016 the bank called it's loan – and on May 28th, the college
closed it's doors after 44 years in operation.
Joe Patrice offers a defense of
sorts for Jane Sanders:
You can have confirmed, contractual deals for $1.2 million
and only actually receive $279,000. Those are two completely different things.
One could argue that only actualizing about a quarter of the total committed
says something about the trajectory of the college's finances, but that's a
much more nuanced argument than these two sentences suggest.
A third donor had offered a $1 million bequest, to be paid
upon her death. Instead, the college's loan application counted it in funds to
be paid out over the next few years.
Um… welcome to accounting. This
account sounds shady, but – without vouching for any specific
accounting principles – recognizing revenue in installments even if it's coming
in a lump sum is perfectly acceptable. Again, that's not saying it was the
appropriate way to account for this request, but the way this report reads
makes counting funds over time seem like an insane tactic when it's just not.
Um...people
do go to prison over accounting
decisions on recognizing revenue and misleading shareholders, regulators, or
lenders.
For
the moment, Jane Sanders probably is less worried about being convicted by a
Vermont jury than she and Bernie are about paying for those lawyers. For
all their posturing against greed, Bernie and Jane are thrilled with the
financial consequences of Bernie's campaign. They rushed out and spent more than their reported net worth on
a third house last
August like some seven-figure jackpot lottery winners. Saving and
financial planning are not their strong suit, which is why people like Bernie
and Jane should never be put in charge of anything, even a little hippie
college.
I have
known ambitious leftists like them – affluent, but with modest net worths – and
almost without exception, they feel underprivileged when it comes to wealth, no
matter how comfortable they may appear. Envy is the fuel of their
radicalism, and they resent people who have more than they do. Deep down,
they want the same stuff.
Paying
for lawyers can ruin the net worth of a couple like Bernie and Jane.
We'll know that the case is serious when they launch a legal defense fund.
WARREN IS AN ADVOCATE FOR NO-
STRINGS AMNESTY FOR 40 MILLION
LOOTING MEXICANS WHO HAVE VOTED
DEM FOR MORE!
Sander's fraudulent claims to be leading a “political
revolution” against the “billionaire class” were designed to
corral popular anger and promote illusions in the
Democratic Party, one of the two parties of the American
corporate-financial aristocracy, as a party representing the
interests of working people.
"Democrat Elizabeth Warren, who parlayed
her brief tenure as a rubber-stamp banking
regulator during Obama’s first term into a
Senate seat."
Hey Bernie! Welcome to the millionaire’s club!
By Tom Hall
13 June 2017
13 June 2017
Personal finance disclosure forms submitted by Bernie Sanders, and widely reported in the media, reveal that Sanders’ income was more than $1 million last year. This figure includes both his $174,000 annual salary as a senator and $858,750 from book royalties, including a nearly $800,000 advance for a book, Our Revolution, about his 2016 presidential primary campaign.
The threshold for the wealthiest 1 percent by annual income
in the United States is $389,436, according to the Economic
Policy Institute. Sanders’ income would put him somewhere
in the top one-fifth of one percent, according to US Census
data.
The wealth of the average US senator and representative has skyrocketed in recent years, earning Congress a reputation as a “millionaire’s club.” In 2014, the average personal wealth across both houses of Congress surpassed $1 million for the first time in history, with the median net worth of the Senate surging from $2.5 to $2.7 million.
However, few members of Congress are able to amass as much wealth in a single year as Bernie Sanders did last year. Opensecrets.org shows that Sanders’ book royalties alone would been the third-highest outside income in the Senate in 2014, the last year for which the site has figures. At $1.2 million, first place that year went to fellow “progressive” Democrat Elizabeth Warren, who parlayed
her brief tenure as a rubber-stamp banking
regulator during Obama’s first term into a
Senate seat.
Opensecrets.org’s records show that, for years, you have been forced to subsist on income levels at or around the threshold of the top 1 percent, in the low-to-mid six figures. This, no doubt, is what you had in mind during a primary debate last year when you described yourself as “one of the poorer members of the United States Senate.”
But 2016 was a turning point in your career. The $1 million
payday you received last year is payment for services
rendered during your intervention in last year’s Democratic
primaries. Your fraudulent claims to be leading a “political
revolution” against the “billionaire class” were designed to
corral popular anger and promote illusions in the Democratic
Party, one of the two parties of the American corporate-
financial aristocracy, as a party representing the interests of
working people.
And while you attracted considerable interest from left-leaning workers and young people with your false claims to be a socialist, you rejected basic socialist measures such as the nationalization of key industries, endorsed American imperialism’s wars of conquest, and defended a truculent nationalism which pitted American workers against their brothers and sisters internationally.
Your intervention was all the more crucial as the Democratic Party was preparing to nominate Hillary Clinton, who was widely and deservedly hated as a stooge of Wall Street and the military. You threw your support to her in the Democratic National Convention and presented her candidacy as a continuation of your so-called “political revolution.” You declared that electing Clinton was an urgent necessity to defeat Trump, in spite of the fact that her pro-war, anti-working class agenda was no less reactionary than Trump’s.
But your work was not yet done. When this produced a debacle for the Democrats in the November election, you were elevated to a more responsible position within the Democratic political hierarchy, working closely with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, whose election campaigns have received tens of millions of dollars in funding from Wall Street. You crossed the country stumping for Democrats with the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, former Obama cabinet member Tom Perez.
You have even emerged as a de facto leader of a wing of the Democratic Party concerned that the party’s focus on the right-wing campaign over Russia against Trump at the expense of posturing over social issues could open the door to the emergence of a mass popular movement outside the control of the Democrats, a potential threat to capitalism. Nevertheless, you have supported the Democrats’ unsubstantiated accusations of Russian collusion with Trump, which are designed to force a confrontation with the world’s second largest nuclear power.
In your campaign to corral social opposition behind the Democrats, you have received the crucial aid of the middle class, pseudo-left organizations which function as satellites of the Democratic Party. They all presented as good coin your calls for a “political revolution” and either endorsed your candidacy, as in the case of Socialist Alternative and the Democratic Socialists of America, or, like the International Socialist Organization, issued mildly worded tactical criticisms of your decision to run as a Democrat rather than continuing the charade of running statewide in Vermont as an “independent.” As with your own campaign, their goal was to prevent the emergence of a genuine socialist movement within the working class capable of challenging American capitalism. Many of them made the trek to Chicago this weekend to hear you speak at the People’s Summit, an annual gathering of what passes for the Democratic Party’s “left.”
The pseudo-left is also being handsomely rewarded for their services to capitalism. Last year, the Ford Foundation announced that it was donating $100 million to Black Lives Matter; it has since cashed in through such investments as a “black debit card” and other projects promoting black capitalism.
Last year’s million, you have reason to hope, will be the first of many. Given the explosive character of the political and economic conditions in the United States, and the broad hostility workers feel towards both the Trump administration and his Democratic opponents, the ruling class will very likely continue to value your political services.
THE SMELL OF MONEY:
Senator Bernie Sanders Takes the Crooked Road For Obama’s Crony Banksters for KILLARY KROOKED KLINTON
Much more here:
http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2016/10/sandsers-and-clinton-closet-republicans.html
“The response to the publication of these speeches by so-called “socialist” Bernie Sanders exposes the utterly fraudulent character of his entire presidential bid. While he postured during the Democratic Party primaries as a proponent of a “political revolution” against the “billionaire class,” Sanders now functions shamelessly as a sideshow for the Clinton campaign, browbeating his (now much smaller) audiences with admonitions to vote for the preferred candidate of the “billionaire class” he claimed to oppose.”
THE GIG JOB ECONOMY…. To keep wages DEPRESSED
As Barack Obama invites hordes to jump our borders jobs, welfare offices and voting booths…. WHAT IS LEFT FOR THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS HE HATES SO MUCH?
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-gig-economy-america-no-legal-need.html
FOLLOWING THE CRIMES OF BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON BECOMES AMERICA’S ROAD TO REVOLUTION
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/bill-and-hillary-clintons-global.html
Transcripts released by WikiLeaks of Clinton speeches to Wall
Street bankers, for which she received six-figure paychecks,
show her praising the recommendations of the 2010 Simpson-
Bowles deficit-reduction commission, which called for sweeping
cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the elimination
of 200,000 federal jobs; a tax on employees’
"Hillary Clinton is a known liar, a criminal of monstrous proportions; others have gone to prison for crimes she has committed over and over: lying to Congress, lying to the FBI, violating national security laws by which she was bound as Secretary of State, etc. It's a long list."
Clinton, the candidate favored by most of Wall Street and the corporate elite and large sections of the Republican Party establishment, is seeking to assemble something akin, within the framework of the US political setup, to a grand coalition between the Democratic Party and the Republican leadership.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/clinton-preparing-bipartisan-government.html
Transcripts released by WikiLeaks of Clinton speeches to Wall Street bankers, for which she received six-figure paychecks, show her praising the recommendations of the 2010 Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission, which called for sweeping cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the elimination of 200,000 federal jobs; a tax on employees’ health benefits; and huge cuts in income taxes for the wealthy and corporate taxes.
“But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at
the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly
entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their
friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core
beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every
person on the planet by now.”
Wikileaks exposes Obama’s bankster-infested
administration!
BARACK OBAMA …… the banksters’ RENT BOY!
“Citigroup’s recommendations came just three days after then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which allocated $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall Street banks. The single biggest beneficiary was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion in cash in the form of a government stock purchase, plus a $306 billion government guarantee to back up its worthless mortgage-related assets.”
MUCH MORE HERE:
“As president, Obama not only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for the orgy of speculation and swindling that led to the financial collapse and Great Recession, and he personally intervened to block legislation capping executive pay at bailed-out firms.”
“So when Clinton was hobnobbing with Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein in 2013, while investigations of wrongdoing by Goldman and the other Wall Street banks were still ongoing, she was consorting with a man who belonged in prison.”
CRONY BANKSTER LOOTING OF AMERICA
THEIR GOLDEN AGE OF PLUNDER IS NOT OVER!
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS NOR INFESTED HIS ADMIN WITH BANKSTER CRONIES MORE THAN OBAMA!
And while the Obama administration worked systematically
to bail out the banks and make the financial oligarchy richer
than ever, shielding the architects of the Great Recession
from criminal prosecution, it did impose fines for some of
the banks’ grossest swindles, including the sale of worthless
subprime mortgage-backed securities, the rigging of key
global interest rates such as the London Interbank Offered
Rate (Libor), drug money laundering, illegal home
foreclosures and other illicit activities.
BARACK OBAMA , HIS CRIMINAL
BANKSTERS AND THE LA RAZA
MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS….
There’s more than one way to destroy America’s white middle class!
HSBC laundered hundreds of millions
and perhaps billions of dollars for drug
cartels responsible for the deaths of tens
of thousands of people over the past
two decades. The bank transferred at least
$881 million of known drug trafficking
proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa
Cartel in Mexico, which is known for
dismembering its victims and publicly
displaying their body parts.
THE CRIME DUAL OF HILLARY &
BILLARY, THE “HOPE & CHANGE”
HUCKSTER OBAMA
"But the Clintons personify this corruption just as much as
Trump, even if they made use of a different mechanism and
on a somewhat smaller scale. They amassed a fortune
exceeding $150 million in the decade after Bill Clinton left
the White House, mainly through six-figure fees for
addressing corporate and Wall Street audiences. Barack
Obama will shortly take a similar path, reaping his reward
from the financial aristocracy whose interests he safeguarded
so assiduously over the past eight years."
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