The Other McCain

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The Penn Scandal: Ivy League University Was Funnel for Biden’s Chinese Cash

Posted on | January 21, 2023 | 1 Comment

The University of Pennsylvania is an elite private school, where the annual cost of attendance is $81,340 including room and board. This Ivy League institution paid Joe Biden nearly $1 million between the time he left office as vice president in 2017 and the time he announced his presidential campaign in 2019. So far as is known, Biden made a grand total of nine appearances on the Penn campus in exchange for this lucrative remuneration, and also got a free university-provided office in D.C. as part of the “Penn Biden Center” deal, which is now under scrutiny because classified documents were found at the D.C. office. But there’s more to the story, as Gabrielle Etzel reports at Campus Reform:

UPenn announced the creation of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in February 2017, and officially opened its Washington DC center in February 2018.
Biden was named the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor at UPenn in 2017. Prior to his bid for the Presidency, the DC think tank was designed with an office suite dedicated to Biden’s use while in the capital city.
UPenn paid Biden nearly $1 million for his contract between 2017 and 2019, according to the New York Post. Biden appeared on UPenn’s campus a total of nine times prior to suspending his professorship when he announced his presidential candidacy in April 2019.
At the inauguration of the Penn Biden Center, former president of UPenn Amy Gutmann stated, “The unmatched personal connections Joe Biden has with world leaders is equally important to our students, our faculty, policymakers, and the work of this new Center…in furthering [the] diplomacy and global engagement that is needed to advance the world order.”
Investigative reporting from The Washington Free Beacon reveals that, between 2017 and 2019, UPenn received $61 million in gifts and contracts from China. By comparison, UPenn received $19 million from Chinese investments between 2014 and 2017.
Following this report, the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) filed an official complaint with the US Attorney’s Office alleging that UPenn and the Penn Biden Center may be in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

Can anyone explain the Chinese Communist government’s sudden increase in generosity toward Penn once the university made its deal with Biden? As Guttman said, the selling point for the deal was Biden’s “unmatched personal connections . . . with world leaders,” and maybe what she meant was, “We’re going to get lots of Chinese payola.”

We can perhaps only speculate about Beijing’s motives, but certainly there is more reason to suspect Biden was beholden to China than there ever was to suspect Trump of being beholden to Russia.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)



 

 

Category: Joe Biden

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One Response to “The Penn Scandal: Ivy League University Was Funnel for Biden’s Chinese Cash”

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