In a lengthy feature, Politico magazine reports that the investigation into Jane Sanders began in 2016 under then U.S. President Barack Obama. His administration was notified of Sanders’s alleged financial irregularities by Brady Toensing, a Republican lawyer who headed up Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in Vermont.
Toensing was alerted to the story after a local Vermont paper, Seven Days, published an article about the $10 million of debt Burlington College was in. Toensing looked at the school’s loan documents and allegedly saw that Jane Sanders had convinced a bank that the college—which had an annual budget of $4 million—could repay the sum. He passed his findings on to VTDigger (another local news site), which found Sanders had assured the bank and a state agency that donors had pledged $2.6 million to secure the loan. In reality, two donors had been listed as pledging more than they had, while a third—who had authorized a donation to be made after she died—was down as willing to donate it over the next few years.