OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
If there is one topic Joe Biden does not want to talk about more than any other it is the dealings of his son Hunter Biden.
In a video shared to Twitter by the Republican National Committee, Biden is seen walking with a group of people as reporters shouted questions at him.
One reporter was heard asking the president how his allergies were but the reporter who caused Biden to snap was not interested in his allergies.
“Are you concerned about potential corruption with your son’s art sales?” the reporters asked the president.
“You got to be kidding me,” Biden snapped back.
REPORTER: “Are you concerned about potential corruption with your son’s art sales?”
JOE BIDEN: "You got to be kidding me" pic.twitter.com/y1hWghSsx5
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 9, 2021
Even CNN reported that Hunter’s recent art show raised ethics concerns for the White House.
Last weekend, images posted on social media and shared in the press emerged showing Hunter Biden displaying his work in Los Angeles at Milk Studios — a Hollywood venue that typically hosts video and photo shoots.
One attendee at the LA event was the city’s mayor, Eric Garcetti — President Joe Biden’s nominee to be the next US ambassador to India and a former national co-chair of his 2020 presidential campaign. Harrison Wollman, the press secretary for Garcetti’s office, confirmed that the mayor had attended the show but said he did not purchase any art.
Garcetti was not the only political attendee at Hunter Biden’s art preview. Michael Tubbs — a former mayor of Stockton, California, who is now a special adviser to California Gov. Gavin Newsom — posed with the President’s son for a picture at the show. CNN reached out to Tubbs for comment about the show. Instagram posts show Hunter Biden’s daughters Naomi and Maisy in attendance. Other attendees reportedly included former pro boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, artist Shepard Fairey and the musician Moby.
Project on Government, a government watchdog group, executive director Danielle Brian said that Hunter being at the event “undermined the White House’s early claims that neither he, nor the White House, would know who bought his art.”
“The silver lining to this dark cloud is now the rest of us also know the universe of who might be interested in buying the paintings — which will make it easier to track if those people are attempting to curry favor with the White House through the President’s son,” she said.
In July, the man who served as ethics chief for former President Obama was furious about Hunter’s foray into art.
The former director of Obama’s Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub blasted the Biden administration over reports that it had enabled the president’s son, Hunter Biden, to sell “outrageously” priced art while maintaining the secrecy of the buyers’ identities.
“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 reported.
“Biden’s art sale, expected to take place this fall, comes with potential challenges,” the publication reported. “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.”
According to the Post, the deal would keep the purchases secret “even from the artist himself.”
Shaub previously took aim at the administration over another report in the Washington Post detailing how children of numerous top aides in the Biden administration had procured “coveted jobs” working for the White House, as reported by the Daily Wire.
“I’m sorry, I know some folks don’t like hearing any criticism of him. But this royally sucks,” Shaub wrote on Twitter on June 18. “I’m disgusted. A lot of us worked hard to tee him up to restore ethics to government and believed the promises. This is a real ‘f— you’ to us—and government ethics.”
Shaub ripped the administration over the art arrangement, which would allegedly allow him to sell his art for up to $500,000 to anonymous buyers. Shaub warned that it would open the United States to embarrassment from hostile foreign powers.
“Imagine you’re a Kremlin official looking for a way to embarrass the U.S., and one day you read that the White House negotiated with a private art dealer to keep secret the names of buyers who pay outrageous sums at an upcoming auction for artwork by the president’s lawyer son,” Shaub wrote on Twitter. “Imagine you’re the White House official who came up with the idea to outsource government ethics management to an art dealer, and you suddenly realize Russian oligarchs like art too.”
