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To the Clandestine/Substack list, freepmail to get on/off. Lengthy and well researched article. Excerpted.

Director of Penn Biden Center Where Classified Docs Were Found Also Played Role in Trump Impeachment Hoax

As notable as the shady operations of the Penn Biden Center is that it employed a trio of foreign policy heavy-hitters as its managing directors

https://thekylebecker.substack.com/p/director-of-penn-biden-center-where

The Managing Director of the Penn Biden Center, a Biden adviser named Michael Carpenter, now finds himself embroiled in a national controversy that threatens to take down a president. But it isn’t his first time.

Carpenter is implicated in the high-profile scandal since classified documents from Biden’s vice presidency were stored at the Penn Biden Center on his watch. The scandal has led to the quick appointment of a Special Counsel by the highly political Attorney General Merrick Garland.

It turns out, Carpenter was also deeply enmeshed in the Trump impeachment hoax. But first, let us review how Michael Carpenter’s name has again become relevant.

The Penn Biden Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, had quietly developed into one of the most influential foreign policy incubators in the United States. But its days of relative obscurity have now turned to ignominy.

The Biden classified documents scandal broke shortly after the midterm elections. Earlier in January, it became public knowledge that Joe Biden’s lawyers had “discovered” stashes of classified documents that were taken at the end of Biden’s vice presidency.

As reported by National Public Radio, Biden said the documents were “found in a box in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center office in Washington, D.C.. They were turned over to the National Archives as soon as they were discovered by his personal attorneys on November 2, before the midterm elections.”

How and why those classified documents came to be at the Penn Biden Center, an unsecured non-governmental organization, as well as the political timing of their discovery has become a matter of public debate. The documents were reported in January to have been found on November 2 — only days before the midterm elections.

Adding to the oddity of the reports, the Department of Justice directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation not to bother supervising the classified documents being turned over to the authorities. Contrast this exceedingly “polite” treatment with that given to former President Donald Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago home was raided by FBI agents in a style reminiscent of banana-republics, complete with the seizure of numerous documents, including the president’s passports. There is even word the FBI agents ransacked Melania Trump’s underwear drawer.

The Penn Biden Center was opened in 2018, and drawing from the Hunter Biden laptop emails, it was envisaged as operating in a manner similar to the Clinton Global Initiative. It subsequently began raking in tens of millions of dollars in foreign cash; particularly, Chinese cash. There are “dark money” contributions of $250,000 and up.

Penn took in roughly $77 million in gifts and contracts from China between 2014 and 2020, The Daily Pennsylvanian previously reported. Absurdly, Joe Biden and Dr. Michael Carpenter, who would later run the Biden center, would co-author an op-ed warning about foreign “dark money” in 2018. That certainly takes nerve.

But just as notable as the shady operations of the Penn Biden Center is that it employed a trio of foreign policy heavy-hitters as its managing directors.

The Penn Biden Center’s first managing director was none other than current Secretary of State Antony Blinken. He was succeeded in this role by White House counselor Steven Richetti. After him followed a managing director who gained prominence during the first Trump impeachment hearings: The above-mentioned Michael Carpenter.

It is to Carpenter that we now turn. He is a former Director of the National Security Council, and is currently the U.S. representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Although he got in at the ground floor as a Senior Director in 2018, he became the Managing Director of the Penn Biden Center in 2019. He was confirmed as the U.S representative in November 2021.

Dr. Carpenter, readers might remember, was flanked to Biden’s right at the Council of Foreign Relations panel in 2018 where Biden infamously announced that he threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine if it did not fire the prosecutor charged with investigating the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.

[Much more at link]