Washington Free Beacon ^ | 5/21/20 | Alana Goodman / FR Posted by Artemis Webb
When Joe Biden announced he was opening a foreign policy center at the University of Pennsylvania, the goals for the project were ambitious. At its founding in 2018, Biden described the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement as "a place where policymakers here and abroad will know they can be in touch with some of the best minds."
The center is one of several organizations Biden founded since leaving the White House in 2017, including the domestic policy-focused Biden Institute at the University of Delaware and the Biden Cancer Initiative, all launched in 2017. All three entities have refused to reveal the sources of their funding, a potential landmine for the Democrats' presumptive presidential nominee that raises questions about the influence of individual, corporate, and foreign donations on the presidential candidate.
The lack of transparency has drawn the attention of a watchdog group that is now demanding that the federal government investigate whether foreign money has flowed to the Biden Center in Philadelphia. (Excerpt) Read more at freebeacon.com ...
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John Cochran, chairman of the Board of Trustees, on the left in a 2018 photo with Biden. (Kathy F. Atkinson / University of Delaware)
In a January 1998 American Spectator article headlined "Biden, The Senator from MBNA," columnist Byron York recounted how Cochran, then MBNA's vice chairman, paid "top dollar" for Biden's home in February 1996, just prior to his Senate re-election bid, and that "MBNA gave Cochran a lot of money—$330,000—to help with 'expenses' related to the move." The $1.2 million sale was a "pretty darned good deal for Biden," York wrote, noting that "Cochran simply paid Biden’s full asking price" even though the "house needed quite a bit of work; contractors and their trucks descended on the house for months after the purchase." Asked how Cochran and Biden found each other for the sale, an MBNA spokesperson told York: "That’s a very personal question."
Federal election records also showed top MBNA executives apparently made a "concerted" effort to donate to Biden's campaign, York reported.
Shortly after the house sale, Biden's son Hunter was hired on at MBNA. Rachel Mullen, a former senior personal banking officer at MBNA from 1994-2001 who later went into Republican politics, tweeted that managers referred to the younger Biden as "Senator MBNA" after he was hired into a lucrative management-prep track right after he graduated from Yale Law School.
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Biden operatives accessed secret Senate records at University of Delaware before mid-March, report says
By Gregg Re | Fox New
Joe’s Biden’s campaign dispatched operatives to the University of Delaware’s library in the past year to rifle through his secretive Senate records there, Business Insider reported Thursday — raising the possibility they accessed documents related to Tara Reade’s accusation that he sexually assaulted her when she worked for him in 1993.
The development comes as both The Atlantic and The Washington Post argued that Biden should instruct the university to turn over the records, saying they “could contain confirmation of any complaint Ms. Reade made, either through official congressional channels or to the three other employees she claims she informed not specifically of the alleged assault but more generally of harassment.”
Biden dropped off 1,875 boxes of “photographs, documents, videotapes, and files” and 415 gigabytes of electronic records to the University of Delaware in 2012. The university initially said it expected to make the records “available to the public two years after Biden’s last day in elected public office.”