When the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement opened five years ago, University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) President Amy Gutmann bragged of how Joe Biden’s “unmatched personal connections” would help “advance the world order.”
Now, after classified documents were discovered at the Washington, D.C., think tank, concerns are being raised about foreign benefactors, particularly from China, and the revolving door of university employees who made their way into now-President Biden’s administration.
“This level of access and opportunity raises questions about who had access to the classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center,” wrote House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) in a recent letter to UPenn President M. Elizabeth Magill. “It is imperative to understand whether any Biden family members or associates gained access to the classified documents while stored at the Penn Biden Center.”
UPenn’s prestigious Beltway outpost opened in February 2018 with high expectations. The think tank promised to become a hub for advancing diplomacy by bringing together staff and students and leaders from all across the global stage. “The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement was founded on the principle that a democratic, open, secure, tolerant, and interconnected world benefits all Americans,” a UPenn spokesperson told The Daily Wire.
Biden became UPenn’s Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor in 2017, shortly after leaving the vice presidency. He stayed with the university until April 2019, when Biden took an unpaid leave of absence upon announcing his campaign for president.
UPenn paid Biden more than $900,000 for a position that did not involve regular classes but did result in about a dozen public appearances on campus, according to a 2019 investigative report from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Citing higher-education experts, the article surmised Biden probably wasn’t paid so much for lectures as he was “for something less tangible: the prestige of associating with a former vice president and senator who had burnished his reputation as a global figure.” That didn’t stop Biden from exclaiming last year that he worked as a “full professor” at UPenn for four years, a claim which PolitiFact determined was “Half True.”
Nowadays, the website and social media accounts for the Penn Biden Center are relatively quiet, with no new posts since the spring of 2022. But in recent weeks the think tank reemerged as the epicenter of controversy rocking Biden’s presidency.
CBS News broke the story last month that on November 2, days before the midterm elections, Biden’s attorneys found about 10 documents marked classified while clearing out Biden’s office at the center. The news outlet later reported the FBI searched the Penn Biden Center in mid-November, though it was unclear whether investigators found any additional classified materials.