Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has infiltrated into every major U.S. university.
“The Chinese Communist Party’s inside every major American university today with research dollars and with their students,” Pompeo said during the “Sunday Morning Futures” program on Fox News on Jan 29.
He pointed to the University of Pennsylvania, which was in the spotlight recently after classified documents surfaced at its Penn Biden Center. President Joe Biden worked there from mid-2017 through 2019 until he started campaigning for the 2020 election.
“They’re at the University of Pennsylvania, too,” Pompeo said, referring to the invasion of the CCP.
The New York Post reported in April 2022 that the University of Pennsylvania received a sum of $54.6 million between 2014 and 2019 from China, based on public records.
“We now know that this Chinese money, these Chinese officials met classified documents in that space. They were in the same place,” he said.
“We need to find out if the Chinese Communist Party actually may have had access at the University of Pennsylvania, where President Biden clearly had documents that would have been a pretty open space,” Pompeo said.
“We need to know if there’s any risk they might have gotten a hold of them,” he added.
Pompeo echoed the statement of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), saying, “we need to know what’s in those documents, what the serious seriousness of them is, what potential breaches there are.”
Shutting Down of Trump-era “China Initiative”
The former secretary pointed to the Biden administration’s termination of the “China Initiative,” a Trump-era counter-espionage program in February 2022.
The initiative was launched by the Trump administration in 2018 to combat the Chinese regime’s state-sponsored espionage and theft of trade secrets. The program led to the prosecution of some two dozen U.S. academics, most of them Chinese people, who were alleged to have concealed funding ties with Chinese institutions and state-backed recruitment plans.
By Hannah Ng
