The University of Pennsylvania in 2022 successfully lobbied the Department of Justice to shut down the FBI's China Initiative, a program launched during the Trump administration to counter Beijing's theft of American intellectual property, Just the News reported.
Penn, an Ivy League school with deep ties to President Joe Biden, raked in $54.6 million from 2014 to 2019 in donations from China, including $23.1 million in anonymous gifts starting in 2016. Most donations came after the university announced in 2017 that it was creating the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and that Biden, whose term as vice president had just ended, would lead the center.
The DOJ announced the China Initiative in 2018 to combat the Chinese government's campaign to steal U.S. secrets, technology, and cutting-edge research.
In January 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau had more than 2,000 China-related cases.
"There is just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, our innovation and our economic security than China," Wray said at the time in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
A month later, 160 faculty members from Penn signed a letter demanding the program be shut down on grounds it had deviated from its stated mission and that it was "harming the United States' research and technology competitiveness" and "fueling biases that, in turn, raise concerns about racial profiling."
The DOJ ended the program about two weeks later.
"While I remain focused on the evolving, significant threat that the government of China poses, I have concluded that this initiative is not the right approach," Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen said in a speech at George Mason University announcing the move.
Retired FBI intelligence chief Kevin Brock told Just the News that China is able to have a "major impediment to its strategy of targeting American academic researchers across the country completely removed courtesy of Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland" by donating a "stunning amount of money to an American university with deep ties to Biden."
Brock added: "Bottom line, the FBI's China Initiative worked against a known national security threat. The idea that it was racially biased is absurd and certainly less so than the common practice of admissions discrimination against Asian American students so common in many Ivy League schools."
Penn and the DOJ failed to respond to Just the News' questions on whether the university lobbied the agency to end the program.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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