(Headline USA) Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., funneled more than $200,000 from his campaign into a nonprofit organization started by his wife and stepson.
Federal Election Commission records show Sanders’s campaign committee, Friends of Bernie Sanders, made two payments to the Sanders Institute, both for $100,000, in January and March, according to Fox News.
The Sanders Institute was established in 2017 by the senator’s wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, and stepson, David Driscoll. Its mission is to “revitalize democracy by actively engaging individuals, organizations and the media in the pursuit of progressive solutions to economic, environmental, racial and social justice issues,” according to its website.
“The purpose is to revitalize democracy in the support of progressive institutions,” Jane Sanders told the Washington Post in 2017. “Our feeling is at our point in time, our country is at a crossroads, and people are engaged in a political process that can be opaque. So we put together this team to focus on issues, but not in a partisan way, not in a way that just focuses on the latest crazy thing.”
It is not clear what the think tank does, since its website primarily consists of links to articles on other outlets. The organization also briefly halted its operations in 2019 while Bernie Sanders campaigned for the presidency in 2020.
Tax forms from 2021 show more than one-third of the nonprofit’s income was spent on salaries. That year, the institute raised $716,618 and spent $257,000 of it on wages, including $152,653 for Driscoll’s salary and other benefits.
This is not the first time Sanders’s campaign has spent money propping up the institute. In 2021, Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign sent $350,000 to the non-profit.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders harshly criticized Hillary Clinton for her family’s use of the Clinton Foundation.
“If you ask me about the Clinton Foundation, do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of state and a foundation run by her husband collects many millions of dollars from foreign governments, governments which are dictatorships?” Sanders told CNN at the time. “Do I have a problem with that? Yeah, I do.”
