https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/who-ordered-the-review-of-papers-at-the-penn-biden-center/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MJ_20230119&utm_term=Jolt-SmartBy JIM GERAGHTY
January 19, 2023 8:33 AM
On the menu today: One of the reasons that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre keeps getting hit with questions about the classified documents found in Biden’s home and private office is due to her vague explanation of how and why they were discovered there. In 2018, former vice president Biden announced the creation of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., the second new university-affiliated institution named after him in a year. And yet, by November 2022, the Biden team was preparing to “vacate office space” at the Penn Biden Center. Why? What prompted that move? And who decided that one of Biden’s personal lawyers should go through his old papers at that time?
The Penn Biden Center Mystery
Why was one of President Biden’s personal lawyers going through his papers at the Penn Biden Center in November? Jonathan Turley cracks, “It seems a fairly pricey moving crew.”
Richard Sauber, special counsel to President Biden, said last Monday that “The documents were discovered when the president’s personal attorneys were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the” Penn Biden Center.
But that explanation only raises more questions. Why were Biden’s closest and most trusted aides — covered by attorney-client privilege — preparing to vacate office space at a center named after him? Who decided that the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement was not a good place to store documents from Biden’s time as vice president, and why?
The Penn Biden Center officially opened its doors on February 8, 2018. It’s not a remote campus for the University of Pennsylvania, although sometimes small groups of UPenn students traveled down to Washington for meetings and guest speakers.
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As president, Biden described himself as “a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania,” but that isn’t an accurate label. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2019 that, “The former vice president collected $371,159 in 2017 plus $540,484 in 2018 and early 2019 for a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.” Note the words “on campus,” meaning that while the Penn Biden Center would intermittently host once-a-week class sessions, it wasn’t primarily used for classes or teaching.
The Penn Biden Center also wasn’t a vice-presidential library, although clearly Biden stored some of his papers there. Biden himself had a sizable office at the center, but CNN reported that, “It wouldn’t be uncommon to be told during a visit that Biden himself didn’t spend much time there,” citing a source familiar with the office and its layout.
In fact, the Penn Biden Center was the second major university center named after himself that Biden had founded in about a year. In 2017, the former vice president unveiled the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware’s Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration. But the Penn Biden Center offered a much more glamorous and cosmopolitan home base for the former vice president and his staffers than Newark, Del.
The Penn Biden Center is located at 101 Constitution Avenue, an office building that touts itself as “the front seat to power” and boasts that it is “the closest commercial office building to the U.S. Capitol.” A university press release noted that, “To Mr. Biden’s particular joy, it is only a few blocks from the Amtrak hub, Union Station.”
As you would imagine, leasing office space in that building costs a pretty penny. Rand Construction and Jacobs designed and developed the 13,800 square foot space. Right now, leases in the building are currently going for $40 per square foot per year, so the lease for a space the size of the Biden Center costs about $552,000 per year.
When Biden opened the center, he described its mission as cutting through the clutter:
At a time when there seems to be so much clutter and misinformation involving global issues, it’s Biden’s hope to “cut through it,” he said, and to do so by reaching out and working with Penn’s brilliant minds. He wants to, from his perspective, provide a clear sense of what’s at stake, and what the U.S. must do to sustain growth, security, and leadership in the world.
“I know that sounds grandiose, but that’s literally what we are trying to do with this center,” he said.
“Cutting through the clutter” apparently involved operating like any one of the other small think tanks in Washington, D.C., by issuing reports, cosponsoring programs, and hosting events.
The center launched various projects, including the Refugee Admissions Project, which generated a report calling for a dramatic increase in the number of refugees permitted to resettle in the U.S., and the Democracy Project, which commissioned a national survey in partnership with Freedom House and the George W. Bush Institute. The center also cosponsored the Kakehashi Project, a program that brings graduate and undergraduate students to Japan for a week of cultural exchange. The center’s “leaders dialogue” featured only two events, a Biden discussion with Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, and another discussion with Sir Nick Clegg, the former U.K. deputy prime minister.
The center also became the employer for the future Biden administration-in-waiting; among the employees were future Secretary of State Antony Blinken, White House counselor Steven Richetti, and at least eight others who would go on to serve in the administration.
The Biden Institute at the University of Delaware was one of the other big employers of future administration officials. The initial Biden Institute staff featured current White House senior adviser Mike Donilon; Don Graves, the deputy secretary of the Department of Commerce; Ben Harris, the assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department; Stefanie Feldman, a deputy assistant to President Biden at the White House; Sophia Sokolowski, the director of intergovernmental affairs in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative; and Catherine McLaughlin, whom Biden nominated to the AmeriCorps Board of Directors.
The America First Legal Foundation filed an IRS complaint this week, contending that the Penn Biden Center “functioned as a vehicle for Penn to raise and funnel large amounts of Chinese Communist money to Joe Biden and his political cronies.”
The University of Pennsylvania has a $4 billion per year operating budget, and more than $1 billion of its revenues come from federal grants. Thus, it wouldn’t be surprising if UPenn determined it needed a permanent base in the nation’s capital to help maintain working relationships with congressional appropriators, as well as grant-writing institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense.
CNN’s coverage of the Biden document controversy mentions this curious detail:
The documents were discovered in November by the president’s personal attorneys when they were packing files housed in a locked closet as they prepared to vacate the office, the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, according to Biden’s White House lawyer. They were preparing to vacate the space less than five years after Biden had cut the ribbon to unveil it. [Emphasis added.]
The center opened in February 2018, and yet Biden’s team was vacating the space by November 2022. What happened? Back in November 2020, the university told the Inquirer, “The center was always intended to continue even after Biden moved on.”
The desire to go through boxes of old documents before moving them indicates some interruption of the usual bureaucratic inertia. Nobody goes through boxes of old government papers for fun; someone was looking for something. In fact, CNN reported, apparently these boxes had moved from one office to another several times, without anyone going through them and noticing the classified papers:
Many of the boxes of personal items — not deemed covered by the records requirements to submit to the National Archives — were transported from the vice president’s office to a temporary facility about one block away from the White House, run by the General Services Administration. From there, they went to another temporary office before eventually being moved to the offices of the Penn Biden Center.
That CNN report also offered a few more details:
It was a manilla folder marked “VP personal” that contained one of the classified documents that was first discovered last November by the Biden attorney, setting off the chain of events, according to one person familiar with the find.
Among the items from Biden’s time as vice president are 10 classified documents including U.S. intelligence memorandums and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom.
Biden’s lawyer felt comfortable opening a manilla folder labeled “VP personal.” That sounds like a thorough review of everything in those boxes, much more than a routine moving of boxes from one storage closet to another. What was Biden’s lawyer looking for? What did he expect to find?
Perhaps the most intriguing possibility in all this was whether Biden’s lawyer was specifically looking for classified information that had been left over from Biden’s time as vice president. After all, about a month or so earlier, Biden appeared on 60 Minutes and asked, with stern disapproval, how anyone could possibly be so irresponsible as to take classified information out of a government facility. Did someone on Biden’s team belatedly realize that Biden or one of his staffers may have done the same?
By the way, notice how Biden’s initial answer on the document controversy makes it sound like his office was at the main university, then makes it sound like it’s in the U.S. Capitol Building, and then again insists that he was a professor: “When my lawyers were clearing out my office at the University of Pennsylvania, they set up an office for me — a secure office in the Capitol, when I — the four years after being Vice President, I was a professor at Penn.”
The Penn Biden Center is quieter these days. The last tweet from the center was in May 2022.
