As influence-peddling allegations dog President Joe Biden, the University of Pennsylvania and their think tank offspring, the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement, the head of the House’s new committee on China is again warning U.S. higher education is “addicted” to Communist China Party money.
Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI-08) has long been monitoring the Biden administration’s lax enforcement of Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires colleges and universities to disclose any foreign gift greater than $250,000 publicly. But as chairman of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, expect the congressman’s focus to be even sharper.
“The Penn Biden Center underscores an area of significant concern: our colleges and universities are addicted to CCP money,” Gallagher told The Star News Network Wednesday. “This leaves higher education institutions extremely suspectable to foreign influence operations on campus.”
As The Star News Network has reported, government watchdog organizations have warned about foreign entanglements, influence peddling, and clear encroachments on campaign finance laws at the Penn Biden Center and its university sponsor long before the president’s classified documents scandal. in which multiple batches of classified records have been found at Biden’s think tank and at his personal residence.
In 2020, the National Legal and Policy Center asked then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and DOE’s General Counsel Paul Moore to open an investigation into the University of Pennsylvania and the Biden Center for failing to disclose anonymous gifts and contracts from China in violation of Section 117.
NLPC found Penn had received more than $67 million from China sources at that time.
“More significantly, after the Penn Center opened here in Washington, D.C., in February 2018, the China gifts poured in all the more, and continued after Biden announced his candidacy of the presidency …, “NLPC’ letter to DeVos stated. The “gifts” included more than $22 million in anonymous donations.
DeVos did nothing, according to NLPC counsel Paul Kamenar.
On Wednesday, the Washington Free Beacon reported the University of Pennsylvania took $14 million from unnamed contributors in China and Hong Kong and $2.4 million from unnamed contributors in Saudi Arabia since 2021.
Gallagher said the Trump administration did begin rigorously enforcing Section 117 in 2019 and 2020 to track cash foreign cash coming in. But things changed after Biden entered the White House.
In late 2021, Gallagher raised questions about the nearly $1.5 billion decline in reported foreign gifts to U.S. colleges and universities since Biden took office. He sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona noting that the number of reported foreign gifts had plummeted. Between July 1, 2020, and Jan. 20, 2021, U.S. schools reported $1.6 billion in foreign gifts. Since Jan. 20, 2021, however, schools reported just $4.3 million in gifts over a longer time period.
Gallagher told Fox News Digital that the math didn’t add up.
“And making matters worse, it appears that the Biden administration has not launched even one new investigation into foreign funding in universities,” he said in the 2021 interview. “So, in my mind, that leaves us with two scenarios: either spigots for foreign gifts were turned off, or the Biden administration is giving universities a pass, directly violating federal law, and in the process, allowing the Chinese Communist Party free reign to influence American academia without any transparency.”
U.S. Rep. James Comer (R-KY-01), chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, is seeking records detailing donations from China to the University of Pennsylvania and the Penn Biden Center. Comer also wants a list of all donors from China to both institutions since the end of the Obama administration.
“It is imperative to understand whether any Biden family members or associates gained access to the classified documents while stored at the Penn Biden Center,” Comer wrote in a letter to University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill dated Wednesday.
Comer said the Oversight committee is “concerned about who had access to these documents given the Biden family’s financial connections to foreign actors and companies,” referring to questionable oversees business transactions involving the president’s troubled son, Hunter Biden.
Gallagher said it appears the Biden administration has stopped any efforts to enforce laws governing contributions to colleges and universities from foreign actors.
“If Secretary Cardona continues to not enforce this law, he will have to answer to Chairman Comer and a House Republican majority,” the congressman said.
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Mike Gallagher” by USGLC. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
