It's Heating Up: More Questions About the Penn Biden Center and Hunter Biden

We saw reporters ask White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ask some very important questions about the classified documents that were found in Joe Biden’s office at the Penn Biden Center. Then even more classified documents were found.

One of the questions that the reporters asked and that I think they need to continue to press on was why was there a personal attorney packing up Biden’s old office. The reporter asked if there was a reason an attorney was there and was the attorney looking for something. Jean-Pierre of course refused to answer the question. But it seems more than a little odd that you would have a high-paid attorney packing up an old office. But you might have an attorney there if someone else had discovered the documents and/or if you knew there were things to find but you weren’t sure where they were. So that’s why I think they need to keep asking that question.

It’s also important because of all the other people related to the Penn Biden Center from the Biden administration. I wrote about some of those folks — including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House Counselor Steve Ricchetti — on Thursday. Not to mention the connections that the University of Pennsylvania has to donations from China. Exactly how many people had access to that office and potentially to those documents? And now we have to ask that question about the other documents as well. The Biden team appears too afraid to even mention where those other documents were found which makes me think that must also be pretty bad.

But now there’s a new twist to the story and of course, it involves Hunter Biden.

The Penn Biden Center was opened in February 2018. But it was long in discussion while Biden was still vice president according to emails from Hunter’s laptop and there was some discussion of Hunter having an office at the Center.

On April 25, 2016, Creative Artists Agency (CAA) agent Craig Gering emailed Hunter with “confidential notes from our meeting,” in which Gering listed apparent plans that were discussed for the vice president upon leaving office.

One of those plans included “wealth creation,” with no further explanation, and another included an apparent reference to the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., with a possible job opportunity for Hunter.

“The Biden Institute of Foreign Relations at the University of Pennsylvania,” Gering’s email read. “Focus on foreign policy. In addition to the institute at U of Penn, the school has an existing office in DC that will be expanded to house a DC office for VP Biden (and Mike, Hunter and Steve?). Operates like The Clinton Global Initiative without the money raise.”

Hunter then confirmed Gering’s notes but emphasized that they needed to be “very confidential” because they were not set in stone.

“Yes,” Hunter replied, “in theory that’s the way I would like to see it shake out— BUT please keep this very confidential between us because nothing has been set in stone and there’s still a lot of sensitivity around all of this both internally and externally. He hasn’t made any decisions and this could all be changed overnight.”

10 days earlier the laptop showed an email reflecting a meeting scheduled at the White House between Hunter, Joe Biden, and the University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann.

Then after Biden left the vice presidency, he was named a “professor” at Penn where he was paid almost double what a normal professor would get, getting $776,527 in 2017 and 2018, despite never teaching a class and just giving a few talks on the campus.

Then, this year Gutmann was confirmed in February to be Ambassador to Germany.

So this raises more questions about contacts with the Biden Center. Did Hunter have an office? Were the documents found in Joe’s office?

Republicans are now calling for a Special Counsel, particularly after more classified documents were found.