The GOP is Starting a Bernie Sanders Witch Hunt
From Paste magazine: You'll Never Believe This, but Republicans are Starting a Bernie Sanders Witch Hunt. (Well yeah, I can believe just about anything evil Republicans can do):
If you’re unfamiliar with this newest GOP inquisition, you can read a story by Harry Jaffe on Politico that promotes the “scandal” as a byzantine, mysterious, and potentially sordid affair with no easy answers. However, I recommend that you do not read that story, because it’s godawful in its desperate attempt to paint this as something more than drummed-up political hackery. Jaffe manufactures fog for fog’s sake, all to give the story a veneer of something more substantial than the baseless partisan witch hunt of the kind that Republicans adore. I advise you to skip it entirely.
In fact, the outline of the real story is pretty damn simple. Here’s what’s happening:
1. In 2004, Jane Sanders, Bernie’s wife, became the president of Burlington College in Vermont. She orchestrated the purchase of lakefront property at a discount from a Roman Catholic diocese who were financially burdened by lawsuits. It was a bad move—she had to take out a bunch of loans from various quarters, and the anticipated financial benefits never materialized. The deal was finalized in 2010, and Sanders was forced out in 2011, partly because of financial matters, and partly because of personal conflicts. Burlington College closed in 2016. It seems fair to say that Jane Sanders was not the ideal leader for this institution.
2. Brady Toensing, a Republican apparatchik in Vermont who chaired Trump’s campaign in the state and has never liked Bernie Sanders, managed to get federal investigators involved, and soon introduced allegations (with absolutely no supporting evidence) that Bernie Sanders used his position as Senator to exert pressure on certain banks to approve the loans for the land deal. Toensing is famous for launching attacks on Democrats in the state, including the former Governor—he even tried to nail Bernie Sanders on a bogus campaign finance charge in 2016, and his mom was one of the Benghazi power players—but this is frivolous even by his standards, which we’ll see in a moment.
3. This, in turn, forced the Sanders’ to hire lawyers. Jaffe, or some editor, decided to title his article “Jane Sanders Lawyers Up,” as though hiring a lawyer is an implication of guilt.
4. If Trump really wanted to stick it to Sanders, he could appoint someone like Toensing as U.S. Attorney for Vermont, and Toensing could go full Benghazi with this thing.
Buried deep in the Politico story is Toensing's admission that:
The evidence for that charge seems to be thin, at best. According to sources familiar with the matter, the alleged “pressure” may have simply been a casual suggestion—perhaps chatter by a Sanders staffer over lunch, instead of a written document or email—and though such a suggestion might still be improper, it would be difficult to prove a direct connection to the senator.
I recommend reading the Paste mag story, NOT the Politico smear piece.
Edited to add: This was cross-posted to GD. I wonder how long it will be before it gets a hide, because it comes from a mag that also has posted articles critical of HRC and other Democrats; although it's generally a music magazine not a political magazine.
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it's on our doorstep.. 
