Hunter Biden mingles with potential art buyers he's not supposed to know

(Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

When Hunter Biden, the scandal-plagued son of Joe Biden, came up with the idea of selling his amateur art for half a million dollars, there immediately were concerns the conduit simply would be a way for outsiders who want favors from the Biden administration to funnel cash into the family’s coffers.

No worries, said the White House. They’ll be sold through a process that would not allow Hunter Biden to know who was buying his work.

But now the Daily Mail has reported that Hunter Biden was seen “hanging out with star-studded potential buyers of his half-million-dollar art at LA’s Milk Studios debut show, despite White House claims he will have no idea who is buying his pieces.”

The publication confirmed Hunter Biden was at “his first art exhibition for potential buyers and celebrity guests including World Champion boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, Moby, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti …. despite White House claims the president’s son will have no idea who is buying his pieces.”

The Mail said it obtained video and photographs showing Hunter Biden and his art dealer Georges Berges with some 200 people at the Milk studios in Hollywood just days ago.

The report explained the foundation for the concerns: “The eye-watering sums, unheard of for a debuting artist, have prompted serious concerns by former White House ethics chiefs, who fear that money for the works could be used as proxy political donations or to curry favor with President Joe Biden and his family.”

The Mail reported LA-based writer Hannah Bhuiya attended the event, and reported, “Most people looked like they were conservatively wealthy and would look to be buying the work. I think that’s who was invited and who came.”

She said she overheard multiple comments that people were “surprised” the work was “good.”

The Mail said it was unclear if any works were sold, and art critics have confirmed that a beginner would not normally get high prices – unless “his last name is significantly inflating their price.”

It was Sebastian Smee, the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic, who said the work was like that of a “café painter,” with, “You see a certain kind of art in coffee shops, and some of it is OK and a lot of it is bad, and sometimes it’s surprisingly good. But you wouldn’t, unless you were related to the artist, spend more than $1,000 on it.”

Peter Schweizer, chief of the Governmental Accountability Institute and author of the best-selling books “Profiles in Corruption,” “Secret Empires” and “Clinton Cash,” recently wrote in a column that he wanted to know why Congress is not investigating the “scam” by Hunter Biden to channel money into his family’s coffers.

Schweizer raised the questions in a column at the Gatestone Institute, where he is a distinguished senior fellow.

The issue is Hunter Biden’s plan, as a novice artist, to sell paintings for as much as $500,000.

Schweizer explained that financial manipulation has been going on in the Biden family for some time already.

“My investigative team at the Government Accountability Institute has the 30,000 emails contained on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the corroborating email records that establish their authenticity. We have been going through these emails by hand and have identified concrete examples of Hunter Biden paying bills for his father while the latter was Vice President. As I said on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox News program recently, that is illegal,” he noted.

He noted the financial trails have been followed before to Democrats.

“We at GAI have seen this kind of thing before. The story of the Clinton Foundation that we broke in 2015 was full of this kind of ‘bank-shot’ influence-peddling and corruption. Companies seeking to influence Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State under President Barack Obama were, inexplicably, suddenly donating enormous sums of money to her family’s charity. We were able to identify the donors and their real interests through tax and corporate records, even as the Clinton Foundation itself would not reveal all of its donors. We could, as investigative journalists, corroborate the coincidences through public records with a lot of digging.”

He said such tracking likely can’t happen with Hunter Biden’s artwork, to be sold through dealer Hunter’s new art dealer, Georges Bergès, “especially if the purchasers are foreign interests from countries where tax laws are not so rigorous. Bergès himself has said he is eager to expand his business into the Chinese market. Who will know if China’s art-loving billionaires, all connected deeply to the Communist Party and in some cases to the Chinese military, are Hunter’s benefactors? Are we really supposed to believe that the anonymity of the buyers will remain a tight secret, and that Chinese government-connected buyers will not somehow let the Bidens know they are Hunter’s newest and biggest fans?”

He pointed out a Senate Homeland Security and Government Oversight committee report last year called the art market as the “largest legal, unregulated market in the United States” – and a significant weakness in the nation’s sanctions and anti-money laundering regimes.

“Why is this not being scrutinized?” Schweizer wrote. “The ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., has sent letters to Bergès demanding the complete documentation of transactions involving Hunter’s art sales. Comer is unlikely to get it: only the Democrat majority on the committee can authorize subpoenas to compel those records. As the Wall Street Journal noted in a recent editorial, the committee’s chairwoman, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N,Y., seems uninterested in doing so.

“Why are they failing to scrutinize what is so obviously a back-door scheme to funnel money to the president’s son from foreign sources? Every American who cares about transparency in government should be outraged.”

The author cited other “scams” involving Hunter Biden and lots of money.

“First, it was his being named, with no expertise whatsoever in either Ukraine or the oil and gas business, to the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian oil and gas company under investigation for fraud. Then it was the deluxe payday in 2012 for his Rosemont-Seneca real estate investment partnership, which was bankrolled to the tune of more than $1.5 billion by Chinese investors with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Hunter had little or no experience in private equity, either, but he had just arrived in Beijing aboard Air Force Two with his father the Vice President, just two weeks before that enormous deal was announced.”

Joe Biden also has shown a willingness to intervene in his son’s activities.

He met, as vice president for Barack Obama, with Ukrainian officials at a time that Burisma was under investigation for corruption, and he returned home to brag about how he threatened the nation with withholding $1 billion in American aid if they didn’t get rid of the prosecutor.

A French website reported the prosecutor, Victor Shokin, later filed a criminal complaint naming Joe Biden and accusing him of committing a “criminal offense” in his campaign to get Shokin fired.

Columnist Byron York, at the time, explained why the stories about Hunter Biden’s dealings are so important:

“Remember a key fact here: Joe Biden has said repeatedly that he never knew about his son’s business dealings. If what [New York Post columnist Miranda] Devine is reporting is correct, Biden made those claims after having financially benefited from his son’s business dealings and after having been a part of some of his son’s business events. Again: The Hunter Biden laptop story is not about Hunter Biden. It’s about Joe Biden,” he wrote.

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