The Patriot Post® · WH to Hide Buyers of Hunter Biden's Art
What constitutes good art may be in the eye of the beholder, but what constitutes sound ethical practice is not. Yet in Joe Biden’s White House, ethics is treated more like art than morality and Rule of Law.
On Thursday, the White House announced its “ethics” plan regarding Hunter Biden selling his crack pipe artwork. (Literally, he creates it by blowing paint through a straw. You can’t make this stuff up.) Hunter is a self-taught “artist” who took up painting just two years ago, and he’s cooked up a deal with artist representative Georges Berges to sell his paintings ranging in price from $75,000 up to $500,000. In an effort to counter the obvious charge of influence peddling, the stink of which wafts from Hunter like the smoke of a crack pipe due to his many dubious foreign business deals, the White House explained that all buyers would be kept anonymous.
“Under an arrangement negotiated in recent months, a New York gallery owner is planning to set prices for the art and will withhold all records, including potential bidders and final buyers,” The Washington Post reports. “Biden’s art sale, expected to take place this fall, comes with potential challenges. Not only has Biden previously been accused of trading in on his father’s name, but his latest vocation is in a field where works do not have a tangible fixed value and where concerns have arisen about secretive buyers and undisclosed sums.”
When pressed on the issue, White House spokesman Andrew Bates insisted that the plan ensures that the sales will be ethical. Swallow your coffee before reading on: “The president has established the highest ethical standards of any administration in American history,” Bates asserted, “and his family’s commitment to rigorous processes like this is a prime example.”
Sure, we trust “the big guy” to manage this on the up and up.
Barack Obama’s former ethics chief, Walter Shaub, also begs to differ with Bates, blasting the Biden administration’s plan as “the opposite of government ethics.” In a series of social media posts, Shaub eviscerated the White House’s decision:
So instead of disclosing who is paying outrageous sums for Hunter Biden’s artwork so that we could monitor whether the purchasers are gaining access to government, the WH tried to make sure we will never know who they are. That’s very disappointing.
Shaub also challenged the White House’s dubious claim that Hunter won’t know who the buyers of his artwork are:
The idea’s that even Hunter won’t know, but the WH has outsourced government ethics to a private art dealer. We’re supposed to trust a merchant in an industry that’s fertile ground for money laundering, as well as unknown buyers who could tell Hunter or WH officials? No thanks.
Regarding Bates’s ridiculous claim that the Biden administration had the highest ethical standards in U.S. history, Shaub observed:
Nobody ever said secrecy was the best disinfectant, but that’s what we have now. And White House officials getting involved in any way other than to request transparency amounts to effectively putting an official stamp of approval on the president’s son trading on his father’s public service.“
If Joe Biden were truly concerned about preventing any semblance of influence peddling, he’d tell Hunter to at least wait until after his term as president was up before selling his artwork. Hunter spending another three and a half years honing his craft could only serve to increase the artistic value, no? Instead, Biden swats away even the objections of his former boss’s ethics chief as if they were purely partisan rancor. And we all have a pretty good hunch why.