CNN and MSNBC will be running live coverage for days of the Liz Cheney Show (sometimes referred to as the House select committee hearings on Jan. 6) but can we talk just for a little bit about Hunter Biden openly using access to his president dad for financial gain?
It’s obvious that’s what’s happening, just as it was obviously happening when Hunter was curiously appointed to serve on the board of a seedy energy company in Ukraine when his dad was in the White House as vice president. And yet the national media act like this is nothing more than a matter of bad optics, a brief lapse in judgement that threatens to trip President Biden for a moment before he presses on.
That’s not what this is. The paintings by Hunter Biden — a name that has henceforth never been worth more on a piece of art than mine — will reportedly sell for up to half $1 million a piece.
A major story in the Washington Post three weeks ago revealed that White House officials were working with Hunter’s dealer (His art dealer, a distinction we unfortunately have to make), supposedly in the name of transparency. To that end, they came up with an arrangement wherein nobody, including Hunter, would ever know who his buyers were, thus, in theory, shielding him from any conflicts of interest related to his president dad.
It’s preposterous. Of course he’ll know. No one wanting anything to do with Hunter Biden is making overtures in hopes that their new painting will remain a discreet addition to the wall of their bedroom.
Honey, look what I bought at the gallery! Oh, that’s interesting. I hadn’t noticed that it’s signed by Hunter Biden. Let’s just keep that between us!
That’s precisely the opposite of what Hunter’s customers will do. Fox News reported this week that Georges Berges, who will represent Hunter in the art deals, publicly stated in 2015 that his interests lie with China, the same country that Hunter was lobbying on behalf of, again, when his dad was vice president.
“My plan is to be the lead guy in China; the lead collector and art dealer discovering and nurturing talent from that region,” he said in an interview at the time. “I plan to find and discover and bring to the rest of the world those I consider China’s next generation of modern artists.”
Ah, yes. Hunter Biden, leading the pack of China’s next generation of modern artists. (Maybe he’ll don his jock strap for the occasion.)
The case here is closed. Ted Bundy was convicted with less evidence.
But the media continue talking about it like the jury is still out. Let’s get an opinion from just one more ethics expert!
That very important Washington Post story on Hunter’s new art selling arrangement said any sales would create “potential challenges” for the president. Things might get tricky for Joe Biden as his son pursues what the Post described as “a new career.”
Bullshit. This isn’t a new career. It’s the same career Hunter had before, but this time instead of pretending he knows anything about the energy industry in Eastern Europe or finance in China, he gets to mix primary colors and call access to the highest levels of government “art.” There is nothing remotely innocent about Biden’s “new career.”
But Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty, who covered the White House as a news reporter for years, had little more to say than tut-tut on what she called “tricky ethical issues that may arise around Hunter Biden’s budding career as an artist.” She said the arrangement with the dealer is “not the way to go about it.”
His what?
Remember that hour-long meeting between former President Trump’s family and a Russian woman in 2016? There is nothing we don’t know about that meeting, after the media and Robert Mueller spent several years piecing it together second by second.
We know who was there and what was discussed. We know that the meeting did not result in the Trumps receiving what they had thought they were there to get. We even know that one attendee, a man, showed up wearing hot pink jeans and the same color t-shirt.
Hunter? He’s just a young man embarking on a “new career” as an artiste. Maybe he could be a little more careful but that’s all!
Let’s ask another ethics expert!
We don’t need anymore experts. There is nothing to get to the bottom of. We’ve hit bottom, a place Hunter knows very well.
Call his “new career” what it is, the same way that the media saw no such ambiguity during the Trump years.
It’s corruption.
