Several top White House officials worked for Biden at his think tank where classified docs discovered

Secretary of State Antony Blinken among several current administration officials who previously worked at Penn Biden Center

At least 10 senior Biden administration officials were hired to their current or former positions after stints at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, the president’s think tank where a trove of classified documents was recently found.

The Washington, D.C.-based Penn Biden Center — a foreign policy think tank President Biden opened in 2018 — previously employed current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl and White House counselor Steven Richetti. Blinken and Richetti both served as managing directors while Kahl was a strategic consultant at the center.

In addition, Spencer Boyer, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO policy, was a senior fellow; Jeffrey Prescott, the deputy to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was a strategic consultant; Ariana Berengaut, a senior adviser to the national security adviser, was a director; Michael Carpenter, the U.S. representative to the organization for security and cooperation in Europe, was a managing director; Juan Gonzalez, a special assistant to the president, was a senior fellow; and Carlyn Reichel, a special assistant to Biden and senior director for speech writing and strategic initiatives, was the director of communications at the Penn Biden Center.

Brian McKeon was a senior director at the think tank and was the deputy secretary of state for management and resources until last month.

According to financial disclosures filed with the Office of Government Ethics, the Penn Biden Center paid Carpenter a salary of $208,183, Kahl a salary of $185,317, Prescott a salary of $85,714 and Blinken a salary of $79,666, which was during first six months of 2019.

Biden also selected former University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann and David Cohen, the former chairman of the university’s board of trustees, to be ambassadors of Germany and Canada, respectively.

Gutmann and Cohen were both present at the Penn Biden Center grand opening ceremony, where Biden sat down for an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, a Penn alum, and referenced a previous interaction with Gutmann, who also spoke at the ceremony.

“President Gutmann, when you came to me before the [Obama] administration was up and asked me whether I [would] consider to be a professor at Penn, the first thought I had was that it sounded like an intriguing idea, but it became even more intriguing after the outcome of the [2016] election when you said I could bring along with me some serious, serious people,” Biden said during the opening ceremony in February 2018.