I cannot say that I am liking the reports that Bernie Sander’s wife is being investigated by the FBI for bank fraud and that the investigation was going on during the campaign for nomination as Democratic Party candidate for the presidency. I am not sure what the outcome of the investigation will be and nor can anyone else but for some reason the story is generating a good amount of nastiness and not just from republicans and hard conservatives but also from democrats who seem to want to trash Sanders, who did trash Sanders throughout the campaign and into its aftermath, people who still want to blame, in anyway they can, Sanders and those who supported him for the devastating loss all good people of this nation have suffered.
This is not to excuse the seriousness of the accusations or to ignore the possibility that Sanders, Ms. Sanders at least, may be guilty of a crime. It does seem that the crime she is accused of was committed, if it actually was, not for personal gain but for advancing the cause of a college she supported and for which she worked in high administration, as the college’s leader, in fact. The charge is, as I read it, that she overstated the amount of money the college had collected in its campaign to finance the purchase of a piece of property to be used for the expansion of the college, the inflated figures submitted for the purpose of collateral toward the sought after loan.
The way I read the Washington Post story on the investigation makes it seem as though this could have been something other than an attempt by Ms. Sanders to intentionally commit bank fraud, the problem one of what could be counted as money toward collateral, some that was claimed being in the form of pledges and not actual money collected.
Again, the problem isn’t that there is a possibility that Ms. Sanders did intentionally commit a crime or that the crime was committed to derive personal gain. What is troubling is how hungry some who identify as liberal are to have Sanders’ head. If I remember correctly, even before Sanders conceded the nomination to Ms. Clinton, he consistently argued the issue of misuse of a personal computer for State Department correspondence was not an issue that he, Sanders, thought to be relevant to the campaign and, as I remember, particularly in debates with Ms. Clinton, he made clear that the use of the misuse of server issue in the campaign was unfair.
So, I have to wonder what motivates those who want to latch on to anything and everything that diminishes Bernie Sanders’ stature as a credible politician. I read little that argues with the points he consistently makes as a spokesperson, the only politician I know of to do so, for a truly progressive agenda. My thinking is that those who are trying to kill off Bernie are really afraid of what a truly progressive agenda succeeding might mean for them.
