Joe's Interregnum And The Penn Biden Center

Joe's own classified document scandal has been off the agenda for almost a year, and with it, there's been little scrutiny of the Penn Biden Center, but I think this is a productive path of inquiry regarding Joe's finances after he left the vice presidency on January 20, 2017. My governing assumption has been that Joe and his family have expensive lifestyles, as well as several with expensive addictions, which Joe's Senate pension (the vice presidency has no pension otherwise) wasn't going to cover. Joe was going to need a continuing income flow beyond that.

But the Penn Biden Center is only the start of another set of shadowy questions. Let's start with Joe's decision not to run for president in 2016. Almost no attention has been paid to this, except to cite his own stated reasons:

According to Biden himself, the reason was personal. His son, Beau Biden, who was Delaware's attorney general and had his sights set on the governor's office, died in May 2015 after a battle with brain cancer.

"I had planned on running before Beau got sick," Biden told the Los Angeles Times last year. "I have great respect for Hillary [Clinton]. She would have made a hell of a president. But I thought I was far and away the most qualified person to finish the job Barack [Obama] and I started."

For 12 weeks before announcing his decision, Biden maintained that he was unsure if he would run. But at a press conference in the White House Rose Garden in October 2015, he announced his decision with his wife Jill by his side.

All well and good, but that's all we have, and as we've learned in the years since, Joe lies about everything. I simply doubt that's the real reason, and my sense of the dysfunctional Biden family dynamic is that Beau wasn't the golden son anyhow. Joe didn't give two flips about Beau, any more than Hunter did. Within weeks of Beau's death, Hunter was smoking crack with Beau's widow, Hallie, and Joe was always fine with this.

There had to have been a more compelling reason, and my guess is it had to do with a consensus view among the lizard people that it was Hillary's turn, and Obama told Joe how it was gonna be. To Obama, Joe was nothing but comic relief in any case, and seeing the writing on the wall, Joe dutifully dropped out.

The record we have suggests that throughout 2017, with Joe out of the vice presidency, the vice presidential payoff income stream would run down. In March, Burisma cut Hunter's director's fee in half, although he remained on the Burisma board until April 2019, apparently resigning due to Joe's decision to run in 2020. I've got to assume that other payoffs to the Biden family continued, although at a reduced rate, after Joe left the vice presidency, but among other things, Hunter's extravagant spending, which had only increased, would require new income sources for the family. So Joe couldn't stand pat.

On February 8, 2018, Joe opened the Penn Biden Center for Global Engagement. The focus up to now has mostly been on its role as a repository for classified documents that Joe wasn't authorized to have, as well as a holding pattern for Biden retainers like Antony Blinken, Susan Rice, Steve Ricchetti, Michael Carpenter, and Kathy Chung. But more important was its role in furthering the Biden family finances:

The University of Pennsylvania received more than $30 million from Chinese donors shortly after the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which functioned as an office for Joe Biden before he was elected president, was announced in 2017, according to public records.

“The Penn Biden Center is a dark-money, revolving-door nightmare where foreign competitors like China donated millions of dollars to the university so that they could have access to future high-ranking officials,” said Tom Anderson, director of the Government Integrity Project at the Virginia-based National Legal and Policy Center.

The University of Pennsylvania raked in a total of $54.6 million from 2014 through June 2019 in donations from China, including $23.1 million in anonymous gifts starting in 2016, according to public records.

Its role as a Biden income source grows in importance when we see via that link that although the Biden Center was formally opened only in February, 2018, Penn had announced its creation in 2017, soon after Joe left the vice presidency.

Most of the anonymous donations came after the university officially announced in February 2017 that it would create the academic center named for Biden, whose term as vice president under Barack Obama had just ended. In addition to leading the think tank, Biden was named a professor at the school.

But Joe, although Penn named him a professor, never taught a class there.

[W]hile Biden served from 2017 to 2019 as the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Professor of the Practice, there is no record of him teaching classes.

In fact,

US President Joe Biden apparently lived the life of his dreams after leaving the vice-president's office in 2016 as he kept getting handsomely paid by the University of Pennsylvania, for never teaching a class. Biden became an honorary professor at the Philadelphia School in 2017 and didn’t leave the position until becoming the president in 2021. However, the University of Pennsylvania granted him an unpaid leave of absence as soon as he announced the run for the presidency in 2019. As per the report, Biden was paid nearly $1 million between 2017 and 2019. He was paid $371,159 in 2017 and $540,484 in 2018 and 2019.

A few people have asked what Joe was being paid for if he didn't teach classes at Penn, or indeed, if he almost never showed up at the Penn Biden Center. It seems fairly plain that he was being paid for exactly what the family was being paid for through Joe's time as vice president, his ability to influence policy -- but if he'd left the vice presidency in 2017, why was he still worth paying?

This leads to the question of Joe's position of de facto president-in-waiting after Hillary's loss in 2017. How did this happen? As best we can surmise, Joe was continuing to collect big bucks after 2017, even after his perceived value as an influence peddler in the Obama administration had come to an end. Was this because there was some sort of consensus among the lizard people that he'd return to the White House in 2020?

It's a set of questions that nobody's asking, but it seems as if a lot of people had at least put serious money on the prospect after 2017. Everyone's concentrating on Burisma and Hunter, but Joe needed more than the Burisma money all along, and he needed just as much money after 2017 as before. What he was getting through back channels after 2017, in fact, had to be at least as much as he was getting as vice president, and that means there had to be significant sources in addition to Penn.

Nobody seems to be looking seriously at Joe's income during the interregnum, and beyond that, why Joe's future return to power was apparently such a sure thing. There'd be no other reason to pay him what he was being paid.