The Focus Switches To The University of Delaware -- But What Are They Looking For?

In yesterday's news:

On March 13, 2017, less than seven weeks after concluding his second term as vice president, Joe Biden announced the founding of the Biden Institute at his home state’s University of Delaware (UD). According to the announcement, part of Biden’s “vision for the institute is an annual conference at UD, similar to the World Economic Forum or the Aspen Institute.”

. . . Prior to hosting the Biden Institute, UD had never disclosed any funding from China. One year later (and just two months after the Penn Biden center opened its D.C. office), anonymous donations from China to UD skyrocketed. The first payment came in April 2018 in the amount of $3,204,070 from an anonymous donor in China. In December 2018, another anonymous donation from China arrived for $1,869,515. A third anonymous China-linked payment, for $624,904, arrived in December 2019.

In 2020, the year that Biden was campaigning for president, anonymous Chinese state-linked entities sent three more payments totaling $1,005,761 to UD, the bulk of which arrived after Biden had been declared the president-elect.

In this morning's news:

The FBI raided the University of Delaware twice in recent weeks while probing President Joe Biden's mishandling of classified documents, but didn't find any secret papers.

A source familiar with the investigation told CNN that agents and investigations carried out two searches on two separate days at the college in Biden's home state.

No classified material was found, the Wall Street Journal later reported.

Separate batches of materials retrieved from the university were taken from at least two different locations at the school and are now being reviewed by the FBI.

DailyMail.com revealed earlier this month that the business partner of the president's son Hunter Biden was tasked with moving archives to the university in 2010. The documents Eric Schwerin was moving were sensitive enough to require the involvement of White House lawyers.

It looks like the Biden Institute in Delaware was, or is, basically just a clone of the Penn Biden Center, about which the same questions have arisen:

[T]here is growing concern about how donations to UPenn from foreign countries reportedly tripled in the two years after the Biden Penn Center opened. The Washington Free Beacon reported most of the $61 million in gifts and contracts between 2017 and 2019 came from China, citing records from the Department of Education. Republicans and others have long warned of Biden’s potential for conflicts of interest, especially with the multi-million dollar dealings of the president’s son Hunter involving China and other countries.

But from the sketchy information we have, the problem is something beyond just classified documents, since the FBI in some recent searches like the ones in Delaware didn't find any of those, but nevertheless took others that "are now being reviewed".

And let's recall that Biden personally hired M Patrick Moore, Jr, a Boston law firm partner and former White House counsel under Obama, during 2022 to perform unspecified work at the Penn Biden Center, in the course of which he ran across classified documents. It's gradually become known that this led to a much more elaborate effort to sort the situation out, which was initially concealed from the public:

. . . emails released Friday due to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Bloomberg, show the Archives secretly coordinating with and accommodating Biden’s personal attorneys to retrieve classified records. The emails also show questions were raised about whether classified materials were also stored in Boston and Philadelphia.

The initial reason or cause for the search at the Penn Biden Center by Biden’s attorneys remains unknown.

But whatever the reason, the search keeps widening, and it looks to me as though the focus isn't necessarily on classified documents. Not only that, but

What’s also interesting about this report is that it appears to have been leaked to multiple news organizations by “two senior law enforcement officials,” in the words of NBC. So someone wants us to know this was going on, even if the White House isn’t telling us.

And let's keep in mind that M Patrick Moore, Jr, who represented Biden personally in the Penn Biden Center project and had some Penn Biden materials shipped to his Boston office, quietly withdrew from representing Biden soon after the classified documents case went public last month. Something is bothering some people, but we have no idea so far what it is.