President Joe Biden’s previously little-known think tank is under scrutiny over its funding and foreign visitors after attorneys discovered a batch of classified materials at the Washington office late last year.
Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007, said the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement’s opaque funding and operations demanded answers about who stepped foot in the Washington think tank.
Painter said he worried about who may have had access to the classified documents held at the Penn Biden Center, a Washington-based think tank affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania staffed by numerous Obama administration officials. Many have since returned to government to serve in top posts under Biden, who named the university’s former president Amy Gutmann ambassador to Germany.
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Files discovered at the center’s Washington office last year prompted a search of Biden’s residences, ultimately leading to the appointment of a special counsel to look into whether the president or his aides improperly handled secret materials. Biden is also facing pressure to release the visitor logs for his Delaware residences, where the president’s attorneys discovered more secret materials.
But Painter, now a University of Minnesota law professor, said the think tank’s funding, which comes from the University of Pennsylvania, adds urgency to the matter given the center’s focus on national security.
According to its website, the center “engages Penn’s students and partners with its faculty and global centers,” granting potentially broad access to foreign actors.
“It’s a think tank; there shouldn’t be anything confidential going on,” Painter said, noting that government officeholders must return classified materials when their tenures end.
Federal records show the university received millions of dollars in donations from foreign businesses and governments between 2013 and 2019, led by China. Chinese banks, corporations, and other entities gave close to $70 million between 2013 and mid-2019, including 40% recorded from anonymous donors.
Foreign donations to the University of Pennsylvania tripled from $31 million in 2016 to more than $100 million in 2019 after the Penn Biden Center was announced in 2017, according to the Washington Free Beacon. The university named Biden a Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor in 2017, paying him more than $900,000 for speeches and leading the center between 2017 and 2019, according to his financial disclosures.
He said the university must provide records of who visited the office over the years the files were held there and that it was incumbent on Biden to urge the school to provide them.
“This is a center set up by a university president who raised tens of millions [of dollars] from the Chinese,” Painter said. “I don’t think that [Biden] willingly turned over classified information to the Chinese, but I’d be a little surprised if Chinese agents didn’t get into that place.”
Lawmakers questioned Gutmann about the university’s fundraising from China during her Senate confirmation hearing in late 2021. Responding, Gutmann said that given the university’s size and the overall scale of its fundraising efforts, “it’s not surprising that I don’t know of specific gifts and contracts.”
She noted that the university does “no classified research.”
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According to CNN, documents found at the think tank on Nov. 2 held the highest classification in the U.S. government, known as SCI, which refers to information obtained from intelligence sources. Some of the materials related to topics on Ukraine, Iran, and the United Kingdom. The discovery prompted Biden’s attorneys to contact the National Archives.
With the Penn Biden Center thrust into the national spotlight, Painter said Gutmann’s assurances warrant more scrutiny.
“Congress needs to revisit her testimony and call her back from Germany and ask her what was going on,” he said.
