It was quite a shocker when the news broke Monday that Joe Biden kept classified documents in his Washington, D.C. office at the Penn Biden Center. These documents were from his time as vice president. He doesn’t have the Presidential Records Act cover and didn’t have any power to declassify documents. He also left the vice presidency in January 2017 and the Center was established in 2018. They had to be kept somewhere else while they were there. This raises further questions about his knowledge of the classified documents.
You may also recall that we have written previously about the Penn Biden Center. A watchdog group was alerted to the Center’s refusal to disclose its sources of funding. The National Legal and Policy Center filed an accusation against them in 2020 to demand that they disclose their sources of funding.
Between March 2017 and the end of 2019, the University of Pennsylvania received a total of $61 million in gifts and contracts from China, 21 million of which were labeled as anonymous gifts. The University received $15.8 million in anonymous Chinese gifts in the year Biden created the Penn Biden Center, including one eye-popping $14.5 million donation in May 2018, records show.
We reported the following:
In October 2017, the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs gave a $502,750 “monetary donation” to the university. This was a Chinese government agency that administers the “Thousand Talents Plan.” Federal authorities claim the program was linked to Chinese espionage operations at American universities. They have also prosecuted academics who tried to hide their involvement. According to federal records, other contributors include China’s Zhejiang University and China Merchants Bank. The China Everbright Group is a state-owned investment company.
This is not all.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Global department houses the Biden Center. It is headed by Ezekiel Emanuel (Biden’s campaign health care advisor), which oversees the university’s outreach and foreign research programs.
These programs have been increasingly focused on China in recent decades. Penn Global reports that the university has more than 20 partnerships with Chinese institutions and has carried out “over 350 research and teaching activities in China.”
A University of Pennsylvania spokesperson denied that any anonymous Chinese money had been sent to the Center in 2022.
If you don’t disclose the source of your funding, we already know that there is a lot of Chinese money coming in. I don’t believe you can accept a denial of funding without more information. When it comes to funding, there are many games. When we look at all the Chinese connections to the university we need to ask what documents were found and if this raised any Chinese connections. As we all know, if this had been President Donald Trump’s office, the Democrats would have seen these connections as well and screamed espionage.
