The sketchy relationship between Biden and the University of Pennsylvania should have been scrutinized much earlier.
The sketchy relationship between Biden and the University of Pennsylvania should have been scrutinized much earlier.
T he batch of classified documents recently discovered in President Joe Biden’s office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., were taken from the office of the vice president, the position that Biden was about to relinquish, in 2017. This discovery presents more complicated problems than is generally known.
Joe Biden should have been a lot more careful in making sure that nothing left his vice-presidential office that he was not allowed to take. When documents in question are marked “classified,” there is no mistaking it: The tell-tale red, orange, and blue folders that hold them make it obvious. These files matter not just because they were classified (as protecting all classified information is vital to our national security) but because of where they were kept.
The Penn Biden Center was established in connection with Joe Biden’s 2017 appointment by University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann as the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Presidential Practice, a role for which he received $911,000 in salary but taught no classes. At the center, Biden was given free use of a spacious, well-appointed office — with a locked closet.
The fact that these classified files were hidden away in a closet inside an office run by a private university is certainly alarming. Of further concern is that, after 2017, Gutmann raised at least $54 million in donations for UPenn from China. Most of that money was very likely donated by people and businesses connected with the Chinese Communist Party. It is reasonable to assume that UPenn used the Penn Biden Center to host conferences and other events to which big donors were invited.
One would think that some employee of the center or of the university, or some member of Biden’s staff, might have looked in the closet at least once in the past six years. Perhaps Biden himself, or Antony Blinken, who also earned a salary from the Penn Biden Center and is now secretary of state, might have looked. Maybe someone in Congress, or the Department of Justice, or the intelligence community might have looked into this Penn Biden Center further before the classified documents were discovered in 2022. But of course, Washington doesn’t work that way.
But not for lack of trying. Back in July 2021, government ethics watchdogs sent a formal request to Pennsylvania’s then–attorney general, Josh Shapiro, to open an investigation into a possible quid pro quo between UPenn and Biden and possible misuse of funds by a Pennsylvania nonprofit charitable corporation to assist a presidential candidate. (This would also be a violation of federal election law and Section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code.) It certainly had a bad look when President Biden appointed Gutmann to be the U.S. ambassador to Germany. Even with the red flags surrounding that pick, neither AG Shapiro (now the governor) nor anyone in Pennsylvania’s Office of Attorney General responded to that request for an investigation. The classified government files were found only recently, reportedly by accident, as the Penn Biden Center office was being cleared.
This is unfortunate not only for the rule of law but also for the voters. The rules that govern elections were set up to ensure that those elections are run fairly nationwide. Universities with massive private endowments (UPenn’s is over $20 billion) are not allowed to use their funds to assist presidential candidates — and certainly not funds raised abroad (in this case, we’re talking about more than $50 million from China alone). Apparently because no one looked into the classified documents at the Penn Biden Center until late last year, voters didn’t receive a shred of information about them prior to the 2022 midterm elections. Biden thus didn’t have to face the negative attention that Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information received during her presidential run in 2016, or the kind of scrutiny that Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents received post-presidency. We’ll never know how information about the Penn Biden Center stash could have affected last year’s midterm results.
The fact that classified documents were held there was not known to the media until December 2022. The National Archives and the Justice Department knew but didn’t want to talk about it. Even without these new revelations of Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, however, the basic risks of the Penn Biden Center arrangement were obvious. Yet almost nobody bothered to look into it.
In July 2021, after Biden’s appointment of Gutmann as the ambassador to Germany and of David Cohen, the former chair of Penn’s Board of Trustees, as the ambassador to Canada, we called attention to the concerns these two actions raised. Elsewhere in the media, the president’s relationship with these two Penn-affiliated individuals was ignored. Gutmann and Cohen were confirmed as ambassadors, and nobody gave the Penn Biden Center a second thought until some of Biden’s lawyers decided to look in a closet that they would like us to believe nobody else has entered in six years.
The sketchy relationship between Biden, Penn, and Gutmann deserved scrutiny much earlier — scrutiny that would have likely uncovered the existence of these classified documents long ago. Yet about the initial controversy, Gutmann remains unrepentant. At her confirmation hearing in December 2021, she was specifically asked about Chinese money donated to Penn; she replied under oath that she knew nothing about it. Congress should insist that she return to Washington from her taxpayer-funded ambassadorial residence in Berlin to answer questions about what she knew and when she knew it. UPenn should voluntarily provide to Congress the relevant documents, including communications with Chinese donors. If it does not, Congress should issue a subpoena forthwith.
Our elections should be conducted free of foreign influence. Doing so is vital to ensuring that our elections are secure and voters remain empowered. That classified documents were kept at the Penn Biden Center signals an enormous failure, both in terms of national security and in terms of the government transparency that is a hallmark of a republic.
Richard W. Painter is a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and was the chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush. John Pudner is president of TakeBackAction.org.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this report inaccurately described the question Gutmann was asked during her confirmation hearing about Chinese funding.