Hunter Biden’s Art Heist

‘A rt,” proclaimed Andy Warhol, “is what you can get away with.” For the Bidens, ethics is defined the same way.

Will they get away with it?

Hunter Biden, who is not what you would call a famous or gifted artist, is having his first gallery show, and his works will be priced by Georges Bergès at as much as $500,000 per. “They’re not the worst thing a rich and powerful person’s son has ever put to paper and called art,” writes art critic Ben Davis. “Even if they were mind-bending contemporary-art breakthroughs, that would put Biden—who has never had an art show before, and started blowing ink on Japanese paper as a kind of therapy as he attempted to recover from multiple well-documented personal disasters—in the very top tier of emerging artists.”

Every political family has its black sheep. Jimmy Carter was embarrassed by the money-grubbing antics of his brother, Billy. Bill Clinton had Roger, and Hillary Clinton had Bill. Hunter Biden apparently is determined to make sure that Hunter Thompson doesn’t go down as the most drug-addled Hunter on the American scene, but Thompson, for all his drug-fueled madness, was good at his work and did the work, putting in his eight hours a day of writing.

Biden, not so much. He knows that he has been put into several lucrative sinecures because of who his father is — and he has admitted as much, telling the BBC that he was given a $50,000-a-month board position with a Ukrainian energy company because “they saw my name as gold.”

No doubt.

I am not without sympathy for Hunter Biden. Addiction is tough. But cancer, poverty, and being born stupid are tough, too — and we don’t treat those as an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card.

Hunter Biden’s so-called art, like his so-called business career, is an invitation for interested parties — parties who think his name is “gold” — to funnel money to the Biden family. Biden could have sold his art under a pseudonym if he didn’t want to trade on his name, or he could have used his own name but declined to take any money for it. In both cases, we would have a better, less distorted, less corrupted picture of what exactly the demand for Hunter Biden works is. My guess is: approximately zero. But I could be wrong.

I don’t blame former politicians for getting paid. And I don’t even blame their families for getting paid. Not really. I have my doubts about whether Mrs. Clinton’s $8 million book advance made sense in pure commercial terms, but there is more to the publishing business than that. It’s not that $8 million was nothing for Simon & Schuster — its revenue was only $814 million in 2019 — but it is worth something to have the prestige of being Mrs. Clinton’s publisher. (Yes, that’s real prestige in some quarters — de gustibus, etc.) With $16 billion a year in revenue, Netflix can afford to throw a couple hundred million at the Obamas. Al Gore became a rich man after leaving office.

But those people are retired. President Biden is — whatever you may hear on the radio! — not. He’s the president of these United States of America. And that makes things a little stickier.

Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state and thought to be the likeliest Democratic nominee in 2016 when her daughter, Chelsea, took a job as a “special correspondent” for NBC News, for which she was paid $600,000 a year to do precious little. If we dismiss as entirely implausible that NBC News hired Chelsea Clinton for her talent and work ethic, what do we think was going on there? Maybe NBC News thought Chelsea brought cachet worth $600,000 a year. Chelsea was having a moment there, for a half a second. But it is just as likely that NBC’s corporate parent was spreading around a little bit of petty cash to ingratiate itself with the possible future president.

During the Trump administration, Democrats raised a ruckus — not without some justification — about favor-seekers and foreign potentates running up big bills at Trump properties, enriching the president and his family. The Trumps might argue in their defense — plausibly — that their business is not like a securities portfolio that can be put into a blind trust, and that the president and his family could not have disentangled themselves from the business during his time in office even if they had tried — it would have taken longer than that. Reasonable? Sure. Unseemly? Absolutely. Corrupt? Almost certainly, at least to some extent, even if entirely legal.

Do you know why we have so many lawyers in office? To be in American politics, you need to be rich enough that you can live the way you want while earning the (relatively) modest salary of a legislator or agency chief, but not so rich that your financial situation is too complex for you even to understand fully, to say nothing of being able to unwind your position during the time between winning an election and being sworn in. Lawyers fit the bill: They can make a fair living, keep their affairs relatively tidy, separate themselves from embarrassing or ethically challenging clients, and then — if the very worst should come to pass and they should be forced to go back to work — more or less pick up where they left off.

A great many Americans would be tickled pink to try to figure out how to live off a senator’s $174,000 a year and generous benefits. But the reality is that that is chickenfeed for the sort of people who tend to seek and secure political office. They have to pretend to be regular guys, and we’ll beat the hell out of them if they step out of character for ten minutes and book a room at the Ritz in Cancun in order to avoid a blizzard. But that is silly. We should try to be a little more grown-up about this.

But one of the things about being rich is that you tend to have some choice about how and when you get paid. You’d think that a century of playing Whac-a-Mole with corporate income and the fortunes of the Very High Rich would have taught Washington that. But Washington has a way of not learning.

The problem for the Bidens is that Joe is probably not going to feel like putting in the effort to chase a little bit of money once his administration is at a close, and Hunter knows he has to make his paper now, because there isn’t going to be any Clinton-style quasi-dynastic gravy train for him to ride. It’s gross and embarrassing, but what do you expect from the son of a man who lied about the circumstances in which his wife and infant daughter died in order to extract a little more political juice from the ghastly accident?

I get why people preferred the Bidens to the Trumps. But don’t try to sell me on their decency.