By Jim Geraghty
Monday, May 12, 2025
The United States is cutting its defense budget (once you adjust for inflation)
and eliminating 50,000 to 60,000 civilian jobs in the Defense Department, downsizing our intelligence community, and attempting to drastically cut Voice of America, Radio Free
Europe, and Radio Free Asia — our endeavors to send the truth, our message and
worldview out across the globe. We’ve apparently decided that all these
efforts, which are designed to increase our power and influence in the world,
just aren’t worth the expenditure anymore. Meanwhile, China is increasing its defense budget by 7 percent, Russia
is increasing its defense budget by 40 percent (!), and Iran
is increasing its defense budget by 200 percent (!!).
Why do foreigners make generous gifts to American
universities? Because they’ve decided the benefit is worth the cost. Why would
foreigners want to give a lot of money to an institution associated with a
former, current, or future president? Because they’ve decided the benefit is
worth the cost. Read on, all the way to the end.
It is great that President Trump is requiring higher education and research institutions to provide
full and timely disclosure of foreign funding.
This past week, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office
of the General Counsel accused the University of Pennsylvania of filing “incomplete,
inaccurate, and untimely disclosures” “in possible violation of foreign source
funding statutory disclosure obligations”:
UPenn failed to disclose any
foreign financial funding until February 2019 – brazenly ignoring the statutory
disclosure requirement enacted in 1986 to which other prominent, well-funded
universities had engaged in compliance efforts.
Once it began submitting
statutorily required foreign funding information in 2019, UPenn disclosed 2,042
qualifying financial transactions involving foreign sources, revealing
extremely high levels of foreign funding. According to UPenn’s disclosure reports,
foreign gifts and contracts received by UPenn through 2017 were valued at
approximately $358 million dollars. After the establishment of the Penn-Biden
Center in 2018 , foreign financial influence grew dramatically, totaling
approximately $2.3 billion by 2025— a 542 percent increase in reportable
foreign funding since 2018.
In a released statement, acting DoE general counsel Tom Wheeler said:
OGC will investigate this matter
thoroughly, ensuring that universities cannot conceal the infiltration of our
nation’s campuses by foreign governments and other foreign interests. The
American people and Congress have a right to know the impact of foreign funding
on our universities, including some of our critically important research
universities. We hope the University of Pennsylvania will be cooperative and
forthcoming in response to this investigation.
You may recall that during the controversy of elected officials taking classified
documents home with them, some Biden critics contended the sudden increase
in foreign donations to the University of Pennsylvania after the creation of
the Penn Biden Center was a backdoor way of buying access to the former vice
president and future president.
The America First Legal Foundation filed an IRS complaint, contending that the Penn Biden
Center “functioned as a vehicle for Penn to raise and funnel large amounts of
Chinese Communist money to Joe Biden and his political cronies.” Shockingly,
the IRS did not jump right on that request to investigate the president and his
closest allies. But FOIA requests filed by the America First Legal Foundation found
that Jay Bratt, a prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice’s National
Security Division, aggressively pursued the Mar-a-Lago case but had a much
softer and less confrontational approach to the classified documents found at
the Penn Biden Center.
The Penn Biden Center hasn’t posted on Facebook
since 2021 or posted on X
since 2022. in June 2024, the University of Pennsylvania announced the
creation of “Penn Washington, a new program with a physical hub for the
University in Washington, D.C.” with the Penn Biden Center folded into that
larger organization. The current
faculty adviser for Penn Washington is Ezekiel J. Emanuel, brother of Rahm
Emanuel, and a former member of President Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board.
(You may recall Emanuel was an architect of Obamacare who — after it was
passed, mind you — contended it would, by design, lead to the end of private
health insurance. Also, Ezekiel Emanuel wants to die at age 75 and argues that life
after age 75 is not worth living. He turns 68 in September. Tick, tick,
tick. . . .)
Back in January 2023, House Committee on Oversight and
Accountability Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, contended that the
Penn Biden Center was a “foreign-sponsored source of income for much of a Biden
Administration in-waiting.”
“The Penn Biden Center appears to have acted as a
foreign-sponsored source of income for much of a Biden Administration
in-waiting,” Comer said. “Between 2017 and 2019, UPenn paid President
Biden more than $900,000, and the university employed at least 10 people at the
Penn Biden Center who later became senior Biden administration officials,”
Comer said. “This level of access and opportunity raises questions about who
had access to the classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center.”
We all agree that backdoor payments and cash contribution
to the president and his family are bad, right?
Right?
Because while we’re at it . . .
In what may be the most valuable
gift ever extended to the United States from a foreign government, the Trump
administration is preparing to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet
from the royal family of Qatar — a gift that is to be available for use by
President Donald Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves
office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump
presidential library foundation, sources familiar with the proposed arrangement
told ABC News.
The gift is expected to be
announced next week, when Trump visits Qatar on the first foreign trip of his
second term, according to sources familiar with the plans.
Trump toured the plane, which is
so opulently configured it is known as “a flying palace,” while it was parked
at the West Palm Beach International Airport in February.
ABC News reports, “The highly unusual — unprecedented —
arrangement is sure to raise questions about whether it is legal for the Trump
administration, and ultimately, the Trump presidential library foundation, to
accept such a valuable gift from a foreign power.”
Ya think? The American public is just now hearing about
it, but it sounds like it’s more than halfway to being a done deal.
The Wall Street Journal, May 1:
The U.S. government has
commissioned L3Harris to overhaul a Boeing 747 formerly used by the Qatari
government. The Melbourne, Fla.-based company is tasked with retrofitting the
plane with certain specialized systems to transform the luxury aircraft into a
presidential jet, some of the people said.
Trump wants to have the plane
available for use as early as the fall, some of the people said. He has
regularly asked for updates.
I don’t care if Boeing is completing the next Air Force
One at the speed of George R. R. Martin writing the next Game of Thrones
novel; the president cannot accept a plane that he will fly on during his
presidency from a foreign power, particularly not one described as “one of the world’s
foremost proponents of violent Islamist movements and states.”
Sources told ABC News that
Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump’s top White House lawyer David Warrington
concluded it would be “legally permissible” for the donation of the aircraft to
be conditioned on transferring its ownership to Trump’s presidential library
before the end of his term, according to sources familiar with their
determination.
The sources said Bondi provided a
legal memorandum addressed to the White House counsel’s office last week after
Warrington asked her for advice on the legality of the Pentagon accepting such
a donation.
Hey, you know what Bondi did before she came Trump’s
(second) nominee to be attorney general? She was a registered lobbyist for the government of Qatar, making
$115,000 per month, according to her forms required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act. (On her first day in
office as attorney general, Bondi announced the DOJ would only pursue criminal
charges for FARA violations in “instances of alleged conduct similar to more
traditional espionage by foreign government actors.”
So a former highly paid lobbyist for Qatar says she sees
no ethical problem with the president she works for accepting a $400 million
plane from the government of Qatar.
(Hey, who pays the tariffs on the import of that plane?)
Dear congressional Republicans: Sometimes the president
needs you to step in to save him from himself.
While we’re at it, the president of the United States
should not be selling meme coins or other cryptocurrency while his
administration is crafting federal rules for the regulation of that currency.
[According to a report] an entity
controlled by a foreign regime, the United Arab Emirates, would buy $2 billion
of the Trump family’s new “stablecoin” (a digital currency whose producers
function, and generate income, like a bank) to consummate an investment in
Binance — a crypto exchange. And not just any crypto exchange: Binance is under
U.S. government monitoring because of its criminal violations of federal
money-laundering laws. In 2023, Binance’s founder and now Trump business
partner, Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born Canadian billionaire, pled guilty to a
felony money-laundering charge that landed him in prison for four months. He is
said to be lobbying the president for a pardon.
Zach Witkoff, a founder of the
Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, revealed that a so-called
stablecoin developed by the firm would be used to complete the transaction
between the state-backed Emirati investment firm MGX and Binance, the largest
crypto exchange in the world.
Virtually every detail of Mr.
Witkoff’s announcement, made during a conference panel with Mr. Trump’s
second-eldest son, contained a conflict of interest.
MGX’s use of the World Liberty
stablecoin, USD1, brings a Trump family company into business with a venture
firm backed by a foreign government. The deal creates a formal link between
World Liberty and Binance — a company that has been under U.S. government
oversight since 2023, when it admitted to violating federal money-laundering
laws.
And the splashy announcement
served as an advertisement to crypto investors worldwide about the potential
for forming a partnership with a company tied to President Trump, who is listed
as World Liberty’s chief crypto advocate.
If the name “Witkoff” triggered your Spidey-sense, it’s
because Zach Witkoff is the son of the White House envoy to the Middle East,
Steve Witkoff. You know, the top negotiator who said Hamas duped him and that he doesn’t
consider Vladimir Putin a bad guy.
Remember, people buy cryptocurrency and meme coins with
real money. I know this is going to shock you, but it turns out that the
purchase of Trump’s meme coins have not turned out well for those who bought them:
A memecoin is a type of crypto
token with no inherent value, often based, as the name suggests, on a meme or
cartoon character. Popular examples of this are dogecoin (DOGE), shiba inu
(SHIB) and pepe (PEPE). The craze reached a climax in January when Trump touted
his own TRUMP token on social media, followed by MELANIA— named after his wife.
TRUMP, which hit a day-one peak
of $77.26, is now trading at $10.80, down a whopping 86%. MELANIA slumped even
further, losing more than 97 percent of its value in four months to trade
recently at 33 cents. . . .
The token’s creators netted a
whopping $320 million in trading fees, although it’s worth noting that around 5
percent of the fees went to the decentralized exchange Meteora, which hosted
the launch.
The good news is that the evidence suggests it is
gullible foreign investors who are losing their shirts on Trump’s meme coins.
The bad news is this means lots of foreigners are putting money in the pockets of
the U.S. president:
More than half of the top holders
of President Donald Trump’s memecoin — who are jockeying for dinner with the
president — have used foreign exchanges that say they ban US users, suggesting
that many of the purchasers are based outside the US.
An analysis by Bloomberg News
shows that all but six of the top 25 holders who have registered on the
website’s leaderboard used foreign exchanges that say they exclude customers
living in the US. More broadly, at least 56 percent of the leaderboard’s top
220 holders used similar offshore exchanges.
Speaking of cryptocurrency, while there’s no problem with
the U.S. government having a cryptocurrency reserve consisting of
cryptocurrency that was seized from criminals, there is no need for the U.S. to spend a dime purchasing any additional
cryptocurrency. And the U.S. government should sell whatever cryptocurrency
it owns whenever it wants. At the White House “crypto summit,” Michael Saylor,
the former longtime CEO of MicroStrategy, and a major investor in Bitcoin,
proposed that the U.S. government buy more Bitcoin, every day for the next
decade — maintaining consistent demand, which would discourage price drops, and
likely encourage price increases — and then never sell it. The upside for
Saylor is clear; how this benefits the rest of us is less clear.
They call it “crypt-ocurrency” because if you put your
life’s savings into it, your financial future is dead and buried.
Trump also never disclosed who funded the presidential transition effort.
The Trump inaugural committee did disclose its donors, as required by
law:
The three largest contributions
came from a poultry producer, Pilgrim’s, which donated $5 million; a crypto
company, Ripple Inc., which donated just under that; and Warren Stephens,
a Republican donor who gave $4 million on the same day, Dec. 2, that Mr. Trump
named him as his pick to be ambassador to Britain.
The committee raised $239 million in total. If that seems
like a lot, it’s because it is:
Inaugurations, even with several
days of elaborate dinners and other events, have never cost anything near
roughly a quarter-billion dollars, and the amount raised by the committee will
resurface questions about where any leftover funds might go. The committee has
not said how much money it has spent, but the president’s allies have said that the remaining amount will
be funneled to other Trump-sponsored projects, primarily a nonprofit
organization that will build his presidential library.
Sorry, MAGA fans, but the first half of this newsletter
about the gobs of foreign money coming into the University of Pennsylvania was
a lure to get you to read about all the shady stuff your guy’s doing.
An observation about the Biden and Trump families:
They’re already rich. They already have palatial homes and fancy cars
and fine suits and a comfortable financial cushion. If they never accepted a
dime from any foreigner seeking influence, both families were already
guaranteed to live out their days with more financial resources than probably
99 percent of all Americans.
But apparently, that just wasn’t enough for them.
Oh, and remember, your daughter is just going to have to get by with fewer dolls
for the foreseeable future.
ADDENDUM: Credit to the Pew Research organization for attempting to
figure out how many poll respondents “do not answer questions sincerely;
instead, they attempt to complete surveys with as little effort as possible to
earn money or other rewards.”
In February 2022, they asked, “Are you licensed to
operate a class SSGN (nuclear) submarine?” The pollster found, “in the opt-in
survey, 12 percent of adults under 30 claimed this qualification, significantly
higher than the share among older respondents. In reality, the share of
Americans with this type of submarine license rounds to 0 percent.”
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