So Hunter Biden’s paintings are supposed to go for as much as $500,000.
Meanwhile, a painting by Pablo Picasso that had sat in a closet in Maine for the last 50 years just sold for just $150,000.
So you are telling me Hunter’s paintings are worth three-times more than a Picasso piece. And I’m sure the name and the potential for access has nothing to do with the price.
The White House has reportedly crafted a plan, so the purchasers of Hunter Biden’s artwork will be kept confidential. They claim that the buyer's name will be even kept from Hunter himself.
Sure.
Ethics experts are calling out the plan.
"…the arrangement is drawing detractors, including ethics experts as well as art critics who suggest that Hunter Biden’s art would never be priced so high if he had a different last name. Bergès has said that prices for the paintings would range from $75,000 to $500,000.
“The whole thing is a really bad idea,” said Richard Painter, who was chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007. “The initial reaction a lot of people are going to have is that he’s capitalizing on being the son of a president and wants people to give him a lot of money. I mean, those are awfully high prices.”
A foreign government could front someone to make a purchase, Painter said, or lobbyists could try to buy the art to win goodwill from the White House. Art purchases are notoriously hard to track, and last year the Treasury Department warned that the secondary market for high-value art, and the anonymity of purchasers, could allow foreigners to circumvent sanctions and gain access to the U.S. economy.
“Because we don’t know who is paying for this art and we don’t know for sure that [Hunter Biden] knows, we have no way of monitoring whether people are buying access to the White House,” said Walter Shaub, who headed the Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017. “What these people are paying for is Hunter Biden’s last name.”...
“The basic presumption is adult kids are able to make a living . . . as long as a reasonable amount of distance is maintained from the White House,” said Norm Eisen, who developed White House ethics rules under President Barack Obama. “That means things like the White House should not be promoting the art show, which as far as I know they’re not doing.”
Eisen, who was known as “Mr. No” for his willingness to rule out questionable arrangements, said he would warn White House aides to stay away from anything involving the sale of art. He would also warn the president and first lady Jill Biden to be sensitive to any suggestion that they are promoting the work, he said."