BURLINGTON, Vt. — If Jane O’Meara Sanders had had her way, a stretch of prime real estate in Burlington along Lake Champlain would have become a college campus. Instead, it became a cloud lingering over her reputation and her husband’s presidential campaign.

In 2010, as president and would-be savior of Burlington College — a tiny alternative school without a campus in this small offbeat city — Ms. Sanders championed a deal to buy a waterfront spread from the local Roman Catholic diocese. Within a year, she was ousted, and the college limped toward obsolescence, buried under debt.

Then the story of the failing college turned into a political storm.

A local Republican grandee financed a commercial in 2014 attacking Ms. Sanders’s $200,000 severance as a “golden parachute.” As her husband, Senator Bernie Sanders, ran for president in 2016, the Clinton campaign included the episode in the opposition research it circulated, with the heading “O’Meara Sanders beleaguered tenure.”

Finally, the top Trump campaign official in Vermont filed a complaint, leading to a federal inquiry that examined whether Ms. Sanders had inflated donor commitments to secure a bank loan for the property, and whether her husband had pressured the bank to make the loan.