Colorado Republican Congressman Ken Buck re-issued his demand that the Department of Justice (DOJ) appoint a special counsel to investigate foreign financial interests surrounding President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.
“The current situation is untenable,” Buck wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland Thursday, where an existing FBI investigation into Hunter Biden’s finances is under purview of the president’s department. “An independent investigation by a prosecutor not reporting to nor subject to being overruled by political appointees at the Department is the only way to ensure the investigation is protected from undue influence.”
Buck called for the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel in the waning days of the Trump administration in December last year, two days before legacy media acknowledged the existence of a federal investigation that other outlets had already reported days before the election.
Letter to AG Garland Re HB … by The Federalist
Since then, a series of new developments has heightened concerns over Hunter Biden’s business of selling presidential influence.
In July, CBS revealed Hunter Biden was scheduled to meet with prospective buyers at a pair of art shows in Los Angeles and New York, where the member of the first family priced his work as high as $500,000. The identity of the buyers would be kept secret from the public, while presumably revealed to Hunter in the course of a gallery tour, undermining the anonymity process outlined by the White House. At least five prints of Hunter Biden’s work have already been sold for $75,000 each.
The high-priced sales come two years after the artist failed to find a gallery to represent his work in 2019, which was long before his father began to run away with the Democratic presidential nomination.
“The art market has become one of the world’s most utilized pipelines for anonymous laundering of dirty money into legitimate assets,” Buck wrote, highlighting a Senate report which found Russian oligarchs exploited the industry to circumvent U.S. sanctions.
On Friday, former President Donald Trump mocked Hunter’s painting business.
“While I have never painted before, Hunter has inspired me to immediately begin painting because I’ve always felt I have a talent at that, and could surely get at least $2 million dollars per canvas—and probably a lot more,” Trump said.
Hunter Biden’s leverage of the family name for lucrative ventures is by no means unique to his father’s presidential term. While Joe Biden served as vice president, Hunter reportedly arranged a D.C. meeting for associates to mingle with the Obama White House’s “public face” towards Ukraine. At the time, Hunter was serving on the board of the notoriously corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma and raked in an excess compensation upwards of $50,000 a month despite no prior experience in the industry.
Hunter Biden also joined his vice president father on a 2013 trip to China while in the process of building a global equity firm. In October last year, the New York Post published emails found on an abandoned laptop belonging to Hunter that revealed Chinese business leaders offered the Biden son $10 million a year for “introductions alone.”
