The Department of Education revealed that it is scrutinizing the University of Texas’s financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as part of its broadening investigation of foreign funding by China and other countries on U.S. campuses.
Reed Rubinstein, the Education Department’s acting general counsel, sent a seven-page letter to University of Texas Chancellor James Milliken on April 24, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Friday, with the government saying it did not have confidence that the school had reported all of its foreign contracts, including with the Wuhan lab, as required by Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965.
The letter said the University of Texas’s Medical Branch is responsible for the operation of the Galveston National Laboratory, which, in turn, has “substantial contractual relations” with a maximum biocontainment laboratory, or MCL, in Wuhan, China. That lab is owned by the Chinese government’s Chinese Academy of Sciences.
State Department cables in 2018 warned about biosecurity and management problems at the lab. The U.S. intelligence community is currently investigating whether the novel coronavirus originated in a wet market or through an accidental release from the lab.
The Education Department noted that from 2014 through 2019, the University of Texas “reported approximately twenty-four contracts with various Chinese state-owned universities and ten contracts with Huawei Technologies, all purportedly worth a reported total of $12,987,896.” But “it is not clear, however, whether UT has in fact reported all gifts from or contracts with or relating to the Wuhan MCL, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and/or all other foreign sources, including agents and instrumentalities of the government of the Peoples’ Republic of China,” the agency said.
To verify the school’s compliance with the law, the government asked it to hand over within 30 days a tranche of China-related records from 2012 through the present, including copies of each donation agreement and contract reached by the University of Texas with the Wuhan lab or the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The Education Department also asked for a complete list identifying anyone at the school who had been involved “in any capacity” with the Wuhan lab and asked the school to provide the contact information of those people.
“The Department recognizes that the COVID-19 virus may have a significant impact on certain University of Texas operations,” the letter said. “Nonetheless, the critical importance of the Department’s investigation into the accuracy of UT’s foreign source reporting with respect to the Wuhan MCL and other Chinese Communist Party-related persons and entities is not diminished. Accordingly, the Department expects UT’s timely response to this investigation.”
Investigators also asked for “all records” related to the Wuhan lab, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, or Wuhan lab researcher Shi Zhengli, who has been dubbed “Bat Woman” for her years of work with bats and bat coronaviruses.
The government asked the University of Texas to search its emails, mobile devices, hard drives, computers, network drives, cloud storage, and archives, as well as warned the school not to modify the content or scrub the metadata.
The University of Texas did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment, but the Wall Street Journal reported that the school “said it plans to respond to the department in a timely manner and declined to provide information about any potential links to the entities mentioned in the letter.”
In April, a small political firestorm erupted when it was revealed that between $3.4 and $3.7 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health had gone to EcoHealth Alliance, which provided U.S. grants to the Wuhan lab. “I’ve been hearing about that,” President Trump said on April 17, adding, “we will end that grant very quickly.” GOP Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida sent a letter to House and Senate leadership on April 21 “to urge you to ensure that no stimulus funding is sent — directly or indirectly — to China’s controversial bio-agent laboratory the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
NIH Deputy Director Michael Lauer sent a letter obtained by Breitbart to EcoHealth Alliance that said, “It is our understanding that WIV studies the interaction between corona viruses and bats.”
“There are now allegations that the current crisis was precipitated by the release from WIV of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19,” he said, adding, “given these concerns, we are pursuing suspension of WIV from participation in federal programs.”
EcoHealth Alliance insisted that “international collaboration with countries where viruses emerge is absolutely vital to our own public health and national security here in the USA” and “we stand by our work and by our mission.” The group’s spokesman told Politifact that, of the $3.4 million, the Wuhan lab received just under $600,000.
The Education Department warned in its University of Texas letter that “whenever it appears an institution of higher education has failed to fully comply with the law, the Secretary of Education may, among other things, request that the Attorney General commence an enforcement action.”
The Department of Education’s Foreign Gift and Contract Report website shows that the University of Texas System received $429.1 million in foreign funding between 2014 and 2019, including $60.9 million from China. From that amount, there was nearly $1 million in gifts from Confucius Institutes Headquarters and tens of millions in contracts from numerous Chinese universities. Across all universities, those figures totaled $15.76 billion in foreign funding, including $1.17 billion from China.
The Education Department asked the University of Texas for copies of every gift agreement or contract between the university and 23 different China-linked entities, including Huawei, 15 Chinese universities, and the Communist Party of China itself as well as “its agents, employees, representatives, and instrumentalities.”
Huawei and the Wuhan lab did not respond to a request for comment.
Investigators also asked the school to turn over any information about gifts or contracts tied to Zoom or to Zoom’s CEO, Eric Yuan.
Zoom told the Washington Examiner that Yuan hasn’t given any gifts to the school, and said, “If Zoom is on such a list, it is in error and indicates the authors did not do their homework.” The spokesperson said, “Zoom is an American company, publicly traded on the NASDAQ, with headquarters in California and a founder and CEO who is an American citizen.”
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Sen. Rob Portman, released a 109-page bipartisan report in November concluding foreign countries “seek to exploit America’s openness to advance their own national interests” and “the most aggressive of them has been China.” It found China used its Thousand Talents Program over the past two decades to exploit access to U.S. research labs and academic institutions. “China unfairly uses the American research and expertise it obtains for its own economic and military gain,” they said, criticizing the federal government’s failure to combat the problem.
The subcommittee released an initial report last February warning about foreign funding and Chinese influence both in K-12 classrooms and university campuses nationwide, noting that “foreign government spending on U.S. schools is effectively a black hole.”
These reports spurred the Education Department into action.
A November letter from the agency to Portman stated that Secretary Betsy DeVos “is correcting this historically lax oversight and under her leadership this Department is moving aggressively to remedy past failings.”
“This is about transparency,” DeVos said in February. “If colleges and universities are accepting foreign money and gifts, their students, donors, and taxpayers deserve to know how much and from whom. Moreover, it’s what the law requires. Unfortunately, the more we dig, the more we find that too many are underreporting or not reporting at all. We will continue to hold colleges and universities accountable and work with them to ensure their reporting is full, accurate, and transparent, as required by the law.”
Some of the universities currently under review are Georgetown, Texas A&M, Cornell, Rutgers, the University of Maryland, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of Texas.
Earlier this year, the government opened investigations into Harvard and Yale as part of a review that it says has found U.S. universities failed to report at least $6.5 billion in foreign funding from countries such as China, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
