by Frank Holmes, reporter
Joe Biden ran for president in 2020 promising to restore “normalcy” — but it’s taken just over seven months before a major bribery scandal has shaken his presidency and drawn questions about his integrity.
Showing unusual guts, Republicans in the House of Representatives have opened a major investigation into “art” sales of the president’s son, Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden burst into the art world at exactly the moment his dad busted into the Oval Office. Biden has spent years making his “artwork” by blowing paint through a straw; some art critics say it’s not much different from schoolchildren’s paintings.
But one thing is different: the price tag. Hunter’s paintings will fetch at least $75,000 per painting—possibly up to half a million dollars for one genuine Biden original.
Real beginners in the art world would do well to see a quarter that much, no matter how good their work is.
This new grift began after scrutiny over Hunter Biden’s multimillion-dollar business deals in Ukraine and China … and how that might affect his father’s foreign policy.
Ethical watchdogs say the new art arrangement is the perfect cover for fraud: A wealthy foreigner or his domestic agent funnels money to Hunter Biden by buying his artwork, then leans on him to pressure his dad, who is the leader of the free world.
As a “compromise,” the White House announced that Hunter’s beauties will be sold by Soho art dealer Georges Bergès, and Hunter would never know who bought his paintings.
But then they scheduled face-to-face meetings with people interested in bidding on Hunter’s paintings at auction: So, Hunter doesn’t know who bought the art, but he knows who was interested in it.
And, of course, Bergès could just tell him.
House Republicans have had enough of Biden’s corruption and are moving to stop it, cold.
As their first act, they’ve demanded that the art gallery turn over all documents related to Biden’s artwork—its prices, every email or communication about it, when it’s being auctioned, who showed up to the auction, and who bought it.
“The prices your gallery has set for these pieces by a new, untrained, celebrity artist are unprecedented,” wrote Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., in a letter to Bergès on September 7.
“Mr. Biden himself admitted that he would be ‘amazed if [his] art had sold for $10,’” Comer added.
So would anyone who’s seen it.
Comer, who is the GOP leader on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, has said he’s looking for exactly one thing: “undue White House influence” … which means he and other Republicans believe the whole art sales arrangement is a charade. It’s a farce. It’s the way foreign agents, special interests, and corporate lobbyists will illegally line the Bidens’ pockets in exchange for favors from the president.
It’s an even bigger problem when you look at who’s doing the selling.
Georges Bergès “regularly features works by Chinese artists and told a Chinese network that he was keen to open other art galleries in Beijing and Shanghai in 2015,” according to The New York Post. And in 1998, police slapped Berges with charges for making “terrorist threats”–a charge they later dropped—as well as assault.
“Given Mr. Biden’s connection to the White House, his network of foreign associates, your efforts to become the ‘lead guy in China’ for art, and history of foreign nations that have ‘used transactions involving high-value art to evade sanctions imposed on them by the United States,’ the extent and nature of your dealings with Mr. Biden must be subject to the same scrutiny,” Comer wrote to him.
But he has problems: Since the House of Representatives is run by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, that means only members of the Democratic Party have the power to issue a subpoena for these kinds of records.
Basically, Congressman Comer can just ask politely … and, you can bet, he’ll be blown off, stonewalled, or given incomplete documents while the dollars, euros, pesos, and yuan keep rolling in. Hunter Biden has already given his opinion of the charges on a podcast in July. When asked, he said, “F—-k ’em,” which means he gives federal investigations the same respect he gives to his brother’s widow.
Hats off to Comer for trying to keep an eye on the Biden crime family’s widening circle of corruption, bribery, influence-peddling, and dereliction of duty. We hope the truth comes to light. America’s foreign policy isn’t up for auction.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”