The chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability investigating President Joe Biden and his family says “there’s a pattern” of the family receiving millions of dollars from China and that he wonders what the country got in return, saying he doesn’t think “China would do that out of the goodness of their heart.”
“Well, we know the Biden family’s received millions and millions of dollars from communist China. We don’t know exactly what communist China got in return for that,” Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., told The Daily Signal.
“But what we’ve learned with the document, not just the fact that Joe Biden had mishandled classified documents, but also that the Biden Penn Center, where the documents were stored, received millions and millions of dollars from China through the University of Pennsylvania,” Comer said.
Comer added:
So, there’s a pattern here of millions and millions of dollars coming from China to Biden family interests. I find that suspicious because I don’t think China would do that out of the goodness of their heart.
So that’s why we’re investigating this family. We want to determine exactly what all of Joe Biden’s involvement was, why China has paid this family so much money, and if in fact this administration is compromised because of the millions of dollars it’s taken from China.
The U.S. Department of Justice searched Biden’s home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, last Wednesday amid the news that he kept classified documents from his time as vice president to President Barack Obama, according to a statement from Biden’s personal attorney.
His attorneys found classified documents at his office in the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., and at his residence in Wilmington, Delaware. Classified documents dating from Biden’s time in the U.S. Senate have also been discovered.
Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos similarly mentioned Chinese funding of the Penn Biden Center while discussing the potential risks of the Biden administration and the Department of Education not enforcing Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965.
Section 117 requires colleges and universities to report “contracts with and gifts from a foreign source that, alone or combined, are valued at $250,000 or more in a calendar year,” according to the Education Department website.
“I think we know that there continues to be billions and billions of dollars that are going into these research universities. And at the Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania, more than $50 million in Chinese funding came into that institution in a very short period of time,” DeVos told The Daily Signal.
DeVos noted that after he served as vice president, Biden kept many records at the Penn Biden Center, which gained renewed scrutiny following news of the discovery of classified documents at Biden’s office there last November.
“In fact, it was generally while we [the Trump administration] were in office, and as has been pointed out in other places, this is where all of his foreign policy staff was housed in waiting for his administration. It raises a lot of questions,” she said.
DeVos added:
I think that this is not something we can just sort of look the other way and say it’s an innocuous situation. These are very important research institutions that have a lot of American IP [intellectual property] and lots of secretive things that should not be in the hands of others.
And so, the way that colleges and universities have continued to simply act as though this is a nothing, it’s just simply wrong.
Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., told The Daily Signal in an email, “Joe Biden didn’t just fail to crack down on illicit Chinese influence at our universities, he’s undoing President [Donald] Trump’s efforts to hold the Communist Party accountable.”
“The Penn Biden Center has drawn $14 million in anonymous Chinese donations since Biden took office. If the White House actually enforced prohibitions on malign Chinese influence, they’d end up investigating the president of the United States,” Banks added.
The Penn Biden Center, the White House, and Biden’s attorney, Bob Bauer, did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
Tyler O’Neil contributed to this report.
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