The discovery of potentially classified documents at President Joe Biden’s former office space at the Penn Biden Center raises concerns in light of the center’s ties to China and potentially to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to Paul Kamenar, an attorney for the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC).
The Biden administration publicly announced the discovery of these documents on Monday, Jan. 9, more than two months after they turned them over to NARA.
In an interview with NTD News, Kamenar raised concern about the discovery of these documents in light of the approximately $63 million the University of Pennsylvania has received from China in recent years.
“There is a direct connection here because the Penn Biden Center is funded, of course, by the University of Pennsylvania,” Kamenar said. “And our investigation, in fact, our complaint against the Biden center with the Department of Education is that they are getting a lot of money from China, from the Chinese Communist entities there that are really unaccounted for.”
“There’s about $63 million that was given to the University of Pennsylvania over the last few years. Of that, $22 million is listed as anonymous. And there’s one single donation of $14.5 million from one single anonymous source in China. That was given in 2018 when the Biden center opened, and there’s more money given after Biden announced in 2019 that he is running for president. So the question is, how is this Chinese money getting to the Biden center?” Kamenar told NTD News.
According to Kamenar, the University of Pennsylvania insisted the Penn Biden Center is funded through the university’s general treasury, but he said that answer “avoids the question” of are the anonymous Chinese donations to the university related to Biden’s connection with the school?
Discoveries Raise Questions of How and When Documents Were Moved
In addition to the initial discovery of documents at the Penn Biden Center on Nov. 2, the White House has admitted another set of documents was found at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware on Dec. 20, 2022, followed by another discovery of documents at the home on Jan. 12, 2022.Kamenar suggested that the Biden administration decided to delay disclosing their initial document findings until after the 2022 midterm elections.
“The original set of documents were discovered on Nov. 2, six days before the midterm election so I could see why they kept it secret until after the elections. But now it’s two months later, and we’re finally learning about this. I think they were trying to keep this under wraps,” Kamenar said.
The potentially classified documents found in Biden’s former office space and in his home could have come from his time as the vice president before leaving office in 2017.
Kamenar said the document discoveries raise questions about when they were potentially removed from the White House and where they were stored during the time between Biden’s term as vice president and when he returned to the White House as the president. Biden became an honorary professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017 and the Penn Biden Center opened in 2018.
“In terms of when were these documents transferred from the White House would [be] when Biden left the White House in 2017, they apparently went to his home in Delaware, and from there, University of Pennsylvania, back to the Biden center here,” Kamenar said.
Kamenar also questioned the timing of the decision to finally close down the Penn Biden Center in November of 2022—about two years after Biden won the presidency—and the involvement of lawyers in that move.
Comparisons to Trump Mar-a-Lago Documents
Kamenar also addressed comparisons between the discovery of documents at Biden’s office and home to the FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to recover potentially classified documents on that Florida property.The attorney said there’s not much of a fundamental difference between the Trump and Biden’s cases.
“They both involve mishandling classified information. And sure there’s more documents at Mar-a-Lago. But that’s not a legal distinction,” he said.
“President Trump had the authority to declassify the documents he took from the White House down to Mar-a-Lago,” Kamenar said. “Joe Biden, as vice president, did not have that authority. So he could not claim that, ‘Oh, I declassified these documents.’ So that’s a difference that actually favors Donald Trump.”
Following the initial disclosure of documents found at the Penn Biden Center, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said Biden’s team “appear[s] to have taken immediate and proper action” by notifying NARA after they found the documents.
Sauber said Biden “takes classified information and materials seriously,” adding that “we are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake.”
Kamenar praised Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint a special counsel to review the documents found at Biden’s home and office to show that both Biden and Trump’s cases are being treated seriously.
“At the end of the day, it was important that there be a special counsel appointed to look into the Biden documents, because that’s what they did with Trump and the American people needs to see that justice is being equally handled out here and [in] both cases,” Kamenar said.
