President Joe Biden originally served as the de facto administrator of the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. However, the center hasn’t had any notable activity in over a year and its fate is questionable.
Classified Documents Found at Center
The facility in Washington, D.C. is where Biden allegedly spent most of the time between the conclusion of his vice presidency in 2017 and his 2020 presidential campaign.
Biden got a salary of about $900,000 from 2017 to 2019 for a Penn professorship that didn’t need him to hold regular classes.
As the location where almost a dozen top-secret government documents were found in November, the institution has stirred much debate. Federal investigators also keep discovering classified info at the president’s Delaware residence.
In the first three years of the think tank’s activity, charitable contributions and contract payments from organizations in communist China grew to $61 million, according to some experts.
This raises concerns about possible Chinese influence on the institution and about who might have had access to the top-secret information.
The Penn Biden Center has apparently been a ghost shop for nearly a year now. https://t.co/uplUGO3zLM
— Bradley Vasoli (@BVasoli) January 24, 2023
The Penn Biden Center served as a corporate hub for foreign policy experts who later joined the Biden administration for a large portion of its duration. The official website currently has no staff listed.
The think tank produced little to no actual research, according to a story posted last week in The Pennsylvania Daily Star.
Yet, during the past 12 months, its press production has been especially scarce. Its most recent web announcement was made in April last year; since May, there have been no social networking postings.
An email from the Daily Star requesting information about the center’s administrators, operating expenses, and future plans for its 13,800 square feet of Constitution Avenue space received no response.
Daily Star reached out to the University of Pennsylvania’s communications office, the Penn Global initiative, or the institute itself.
Penn Biden Center Inactive and Seemingly Leaderless for Nearly a Year https://t.co/7EatQLLjtq
— Gyneth. đ± (@gyneth007) January 25, 2023
In October 2018, Joe Biden was listed as the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor on the Penn Biden Center’s initial leadership roster.
Michael Carpenter and Antony Blinken were listed as senior directors and managing directors, respectively, on the website.
Former Obama administration foreign policy professionals Blinken and Carpenter would later serve as the secretary of state and the ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, accordingly, in the Biden administration.
Fellows Gain Prominence
Others among the center’s first senior fellows and consultants would later go on to have prominent positions during the Biden presidency.
That would include Juan S. Gonzalez, who serves as senior advisor and special assistant to the president, Spencer Boyer, who is currently the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO, and Daniel P. Erikson, who works as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the western world.
There are also many others.
This article appeared in The Patriot Brief and has been published here with permission.
