As more has been divulged about President Joe Biden’s possession of classified information while he was vice president, other members of his current administration have been linked to the scandal.
The classified documents were found at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank that the president started in 2018.
As reported by Fox News, 10 members of Biden’s administration were formally employed at the think tank, including current Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The list also includes Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl and White House Counselor Steven Richetti.
Blinken and Richetti were managing directors at the think tank while Kahl was a consultant.
The organization had recently been accused of accepting large amounts of donor money from China, a revelation discovered by the National Legal and Policy Center, which filed a complaint with the Justice Department in October 2020.
The NLPC found that $22 million had been given to Penn Biden Center by anonymous donors with the money coming from China.
“The University of Pennsylvania has stonewalled all inquiries into the identities of the Chinese donors who made $22 million anonymous donations to the university,” NLPC Chairman Peter Flaherty said in 2021.
All 10 of the linked administration figures reside in the State and Defense Departments and hold high-ranking positions.
Spencer Boyer, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for NATO and Europe policy was a senior fellow at Penn Biden.
Deputy to the U.N. Ambassador Jeffrey Prescott was also a consultant and Ariana Berengaut, a national security advisor, served as a center director.
To round out the list: U.S. representative to the Organization of Security and Cooperation Europe Michael Carpenter, special assistant Juan Gonzalez, speechwriter Carlyn Reichel, and former deputy secretary of state Brian McKeon.
According to the New York Post, longtime University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann and the former head of the school’s Board of Trustees, David Cohen, were also connected to the think tank, both attending Penn Biden’s opening ceremony.
Gutmann has since become U.S. Ambassador to Germany while Cohen was tapped for the Canada ambassadorship.
The documents found at the Penn Biden Center were dated between 2013 and 2016, with some labeled as top secret.
The contents of these docs cover many important events during the President Barack Obama years, including the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, and the Russian annexation of Crimea, as reported by the Post.
The perhaps most interesting thing the documents cover is the early involvement of Hunter Biden with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was appointed to the board in 2014 despite having no energy background.
Biden’s lawyers have since cooperated with the National Archives to hand over the documents for safekeeping.
“The documents were not the subject of any previous request or inquiry by the Archives,” White House counsel Richard Sauber said, according to Fox News.
“Since that discovery, the president’s attorneys have cooperated with the Archives and the Department of Justice in process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in the possession of the Archives.”
When asked about the secret documents in his possession, Biden said, ”I don’t know what’s in the documents. My lawyers have not suggested I ask what documents they were. I’ve turned over the boxes, they’ve turned over the boxes to the Archives, and we’re cooperating fully, cooperating fully with the review, which I hope will be finished soon and there’ll be more detail at that time.”
CORRECTION, Jan. 12, 2023: Amy Gutmann is a former president of the University of Pennsylvania. An earlier version of this article named a different university.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
