President Joe Biden’s former private office in Washington, D.C., where roughly a dozen classified documents were discovered earlier last November, was recently a site for high-profile University of Pennsylvania internships.
Administrators of the Philadelphia-based Ivy League school brought the former vice president aboard as a professor in the winter of 2017 to coincide with the “soft opening” of the 13,800-square-foot Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Just under a year later, the think tank officially commenced operations with a stated aim of engaging “our fellow citizens in shaping this world, while ensuring the gains of global engagement are widely shared.”
A 2018 report in the Daily Pennsylvanian student newspaper described the center as a forum for promotion of foreign policy to advance democracy abroad. The piece also noted Biden used the Constitution Avenue site as his main office while working in Washington. How much scholastic value Penn got for the institute and its figurehead’s presence at the school — the latter costing $900,000 in salary between 2017 and 2019 — is not entirely clear.
Since becoming president in winter 2021, the longtime federal official made much of his stint at the university, averring that “for four years, I was a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania.” But shortly after coming to Penn, Biden’s spokesperson Kate Bedingfield stated her boss would not teach courses. Even the left-leaning watchdog site PolitiFact concluded, “Biden’s duties did not include the same degree of teaching, research and administrative responsibilities that some may associate with the term ‘full professor.’”
While students did not get regular instruction time with Biden, some undergraduates worked as interns at the center that bore his name, participating in foreign-policy-research and social-media projects. At least initially, the internships went only to Penn students.
Reports that the office at which those students worked housed classified federal materials came out earlier this month. Last weekend, Special Counsel Richard Sauber announced he had become aware that even more classified documents from the Obama-Biden administration were kept at Biden’s Wilmington, DE home.
Use of the Penn Biden Center to keep records allegedly not authorized for release has compounded controversy that already surrounded the think tank, most notably its receipt of more than $67 million from sources based in communist China.
The revelations have also put the president and his political allies on defense insofar as they excoriated former President Donald Trump for his own handling of federal records. At the direction of Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched Trump’s Florida resort home last August to recover classified materials.
In the wake of the raid at Mar-a-Lago, Biden exclaimed, “How that could possibly happen? How anyone could be that irresponsible. And it just — totally irresponsible.”
According to the Presidential Records Act, White House documents must be left in the care of the National Archives. Speculation that Trump’s alleged retention of such records could result in prosecution has been tempered with the news that Biden also kept such materials. Last week, Garland tasked John Lausch, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, with investigating how and why the records came to be located in Biden’s office and home.
Many media figures, some of them normally friendly toward Biden, have acknowledged this turn of events could spell some trouble for the president.
“I think the trouble primarily is political trouble,” The Hill associate editor Niall Stanage said in an appearance on D.C. News Now. “This is something that threatens to bog down the president and the Democratic Party in negative headlines for quite some time. I’m sure Republicans in Congress will clearly try to keep the focus on this issue.”
Conservative journalist Eli Lake, in an appearance on the Commentary Magazine Podcast, likewise opined that seeming hypocrisy on document handling will hurt Biden and politicians who align with him.
“This is the petard to which the Democrats have hoisted themselves yet again,” he said.
Lake added however that Congress might now want to think about forming an ad hoc panel to consider how to deescalate what he calls “the weaponization” of the federal government’s investigatory powers which ensnare members of both parties.
“There is so much overclassification that I am not taking anyone’s word” on the severity of either Trump’s alleged misdeeds or Biden’s, he said.
– – –
Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Joe Biden” by Penn Biden Center.
HOUSE OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN @REPJAMESCOMER (R-KY) ON WEDNESDAY DEMANDED TREASURY SECRETARY JANET YELLEN CONVEY BANK RECORDS FROM THE BIDEN FAMILY BUSINESS THAT WERE FLAGGED BY U.S. BANKS AS SUSPICIOUS. https://T.CO/9FLRQG4ITG
— BREITBART NEWS (@BREITBARTNEWS) JANUARY 11, 2023
Doesn’t matter who is running around, lack of this or that, etc. Vice presidents are not entitled to have classified documents. Where is the AG? Fbi raids? Warrants? Impeachment? Arrests?
What about crooked Hillary!!!!!!’
Compare to Mara Lago case
Light years difference
We will never know to what extent any documents were either viewed by or taken from the center by students or Chinese visitors; or what damage may have been done to our national security.
Set up a foundation with the sole function to launder pay-to-play money. The go to for political elites.
Why isn’t President Obama houses and records being searched for classified documents ?
I guess to me the big difference between Trump and Obama versus Biden is that they were actually Presidents and had the right to declassify documents. Biden wasn’t a President and didn’t have the right to take or declassify any documents. The question with Trump is did he declassify the documents he took? The question with Biden is what was he doing with classified documents he had no right to have in the first place. Given the subject of the documents, Hunter’s ties with the subjects of those documents, Hunter’s ability to obtain, read, or copy those documents, Hunter’s possible monetary gain from the subjects of those documents, and the fact that he did get money from those subjects certainly leaves one wondering exactly what was going on!