Those Questions About China and the Penn Biden Center Where the Classified Docs Were Found

It was quite the bombshell when it dropped on Monday that Joe Biden had classified documents kept in his office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., documents from the time he was vice-president. Unlike a president, he doesn’t have the cover of the Presidential Records Act and he didn’t have the power to declassify anything. Plus, since the Center was founded in 2018, and he left the vice presidency in Jan. 2017, they had to have been kept someplace else in the meantime even before they got to the Center. So that raises additional questions about when he knew about them.

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But you may recall that we’ve written about the Penn Biden Center in the past. The Center had drawn the attention of a watchdog group because it refused to be transparent about the sources of its funding. Back in 2020, the National Legal and Policy Center filed a complaint to get them to disclose the sources of their funding.

As we reported, “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 was in “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.

As we reported at the time:

The donations included a $502,750 “monetary gift” in October 2017 from the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, a Chinese government agency that helps administer the regime’s “Thousand Talents Plan.” Federal prosecutors claim the program is linked to Chinese espionage operations at American universities and have prosecuted academics for hiding their involvement in it. Other contributors included China’s Zhejiang University, the China Merchants Bank, and the China Everbright Group, a state-owned investment group, according to federal records.

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That’s not all.

The Biden Center is part of the University of Pennsylvania’s “Penn Global” department, headed by Biden’s campaign health care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel, which handles the university’s foreign research and outreach programs.

Those programs have become increasingly focused on China in recent years. According to the Penn Global website, the university has “over 20 international partnerships with Chinese institutions” and has conducted “over 350 research projects and instructional activities in China.”

In 2022, a University of Pennsylvania spokesman denied that any anonymous Chinese money had gone to the Center.

But when you aren’t transparent about the sources of your funding, there are all kinds of Chinese money pouring in and we already see all the questions about the Bidens and China, I don’t think you accept a simple denial without further information about where all the funding came from. There are all kinds of games people play when it comes to funding. And when we see all the Chinese connections to the university, we have to also ask about what the documents were and does this raise any connections to China. We all know had this been President Donald Trump, the Democrats would have seen these connections and been screaming espionage.

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