Joe Biden is an influential man.

And sure enough, the University of Pennsylvania, which runs something called the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, has been the recipient of $54 million in anonymous donations from China.  You know, anonymous, like Hunter Biden's art buyers. 

The New York Post has been on the job:

A government watchdog is demanding the US Attorney probing Hunter Biden in Delaware investigate tens of millions in anonymous donations from China to the University of Pennsylvania, where an academic center is named for his father, President Biden.

The Ivy League college 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.

Most of the anonymous donations came after the university announced in February 2017 that it would create the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Joe Biden, whose term as vice president had just ended, was to lead the center and was also named a professor at the university.

The center, which is located in Washington, DC., opened its doors in February 2018. Antony Blinken, whom Biden named as Secretary of State, briefly served as its managing director.

The Ivy League university received $15.8 million in anonymous Chinese gifts that year, including one eye-popping $14.5 million donation in May 2018, records show.

This might be nothing.  Maybe there is no link, none whatsoever, between those Chinese donations and the fact that the university hosts the Penn Biden Center.  Maybe China was just excited about Penn.  The university has refused to say if any of the cash went to the center itself, or how the king-sized donations were used at all.  But we know that money went there, the donations to Penn went up as Joe got closer to public office, and someone from China was buying (or laundering) something for its money.  "Some people," as Rep. Ilhan Omar might put it.

Now, maybe the Post is just paranoid.  But the abandoned laptop of Hunter Biden does show that Hunter himself was an influence-peddler, taking on board seats and other no-show jobs despite having no experience in fields like energy or venture capital at hefty cash payouts from foreign sources — from places like Russia, Ukraine, China, and possibly Kazakhstan and Romania, where such corruption is common.  Would the Penn money dump from Chinese sources be out of the ordinary?  So much stuff of this kind was going on among the Bidens and from so many different directions.

We also know that China doesn't spend cash here in the States out of the goodness of its heart.  If it spends cash, it expects something in return.  Maybe the donors of the $54 million to UPenn were buying something other than House Biden's loyalty, but it's hard to think who could be more important to them than the Bidens, who, similar to Hillary Clinton with her Clinton Foundation, had a convenient lily pad at the University of Pennsylvania.  The university denies that it allowed the Biden center itself to take donations, but that's a pretty flimsy shield, given that the university got the cash and won't say how it spent it.

Another thing we know is that China, and Hunter Biden, according to the emails on his abandoned laptop, had Chinese business interests that wanted him to lobby for him, but Hunter didn't want to register as a foreign agent.  How potentially convenient to have Penn as a repository, then.

As we learned from some of the recent University of Southern California scandals, such as this one, where city contracts were kicked over to the university in exchange for its "'taking care of" a big politician's wastrel son, sometimes direct lines don't actually matter.

Activist watchdog groups, who discovered the curious coincidences, are calling on the U.S. attorney to investigate this matter to see if there is any connection to the curious cash washing in from China, which looks rather funny at this point.  To be fair, such donations from China happened not just at Penn — these Chinese donors also donated to other fancy schools (with political clout), such as Harvard and Yale.  How anything honest could happen with an A.G. probe and Joe Biden as president now is hard to imagine, but it would be the fair thing if it happened, and they are right to press for it.  After all, if big political fish in Los Angeles could go down, why shouldn't "the big guy" and "the smartest guy" he claims to know? 

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of images from Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0; Acaben via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0; PxFuel, public domain; and SKopp via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.