It’s no secret that President Joe Biden’s family members have made significant bank off his last name and position.
Now, a trio of Republican senators want to know if Biden himself profited handsomely from his nominee to be the next ambassador to Germany.
Last week, GOP Sens. Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Ron Johnson sent a letter to the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with several questions about the nomination of Amy Guttman, currently the president of the University of Pennsylvania, to “one of the most important diplomatic posts in Europe.”
“We are concerned that Dr. Gutmann, who served as president of the University of Pennsylvania since 2004, does not have the experience necessary for this important diplomatic post. What’s more, we are deeply concerned that our allies will view Dr. Gutmann’s nomination as a quid pro quo,” they wrote.
“It appears that President Biden could be rewarding a friend who previously provided him with more than $900,000 for what seems to have been a no-show job as the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor at the University of Pennsylvania,” they added. “It is our understanding that this position required no active teaching on Biden’s part.”
As The Free Press reported in March, the job appeared to be created for Biden, since he was the first person to hold that post.
The senators want the committee to force Gutmann to answer about her role in recruiting Biden to Penn, the job requirements for the job he was paid almost $1 million to apparently not do, and if Penn has other “honorary” professors who were paid as much as Biden.
The senators also wrote, “In addition to issues surrounding President Biden’s ‘no show’ professorship, there are serious questions around Dr. Gutmann’s acceptance of foreign funds.” The basis for that was a recent Philadelphia Inquirer article that found Penn reaped at least $258 million in foreign cash between 2013 and 2019, with most of that coming from Chinese firms.
Rubio, Cruz, and Johnson also want the committee to find out if Gutmann personally signed off on accepting the donations, if any vetting was done to ensure the money did not come from the Chinese Communist Party or groups associated with the People’s Liberation Army, and did the Chinese entities “attach any strings” to the money or send foreign funding to Penn’s Biden Center.
Lastly, the Republicans raise concerns about Gutmann’s “personal behavior” and her handling of public funding.
They note in the letter that she was paid $3.9 million in 2020, making her the second-highest-paid Ivy League president. “Why did the University reduce compensation for other senior leadership during the pandemic, but not for Dr. Gutmann?” they ask.
Biden is “fond of saying, ‘diplomacy is back,’ but the nomination of Dr. Gutmann raises serious questions, both substantively and ethically,” Rubio, Cruz, and Johnson wrote.
“At minimum, it is critical to establish whether Dr. Gutmann was involved in any quid pro quo tied to Biden’s salary and whether Dr. Gutmann is compromised given the massive influx of Chinese funds into the University. These are important questions that the Committee must clarify before moving forward with the nominee.”
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