On the menu today: Lo and behold, one of the buyers of Hunter Biden’s ludicrously expensive paintings is a Democratic Party donor whom President Biden appointed to a federal government commission. Meanwhile, the president’s son’s lawyers get in trouble with the judge. And in light of the whole sordid mess, this is worth chewing over: Just why are so many Democrats so resistant to the idea of nominating anyone else but Joe Biden in 2024?
Hunter Biden, Corruption Artist
The publication Business Insider reported this week that Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, a Los Angeles real-estate investor and big-time Democratic Party donor, is one of the purchasers of Hunter Biden’s artwork. The amount Hirsh Naftali paid isn’t known, but none of the paintings by the president’s son is cheap. In 2021, a gallery listed prices ranging from $75,000 to $500,000. As the New York Times gently put it, those prices were “high for a novice artist.” (You can virtually tour the Hunter Biden exhibition at the Georges Bergès Gallery here.)
The White House assured the public that to avoid any perception of people buying influence with the president, Hunter Biden would not be informed of the identity of any buyers. More than a few people noted that this arrangement, preserving the anonymity of the donors from the public, made it easier to peddle influence, not harder; disclosing the purchasers would at least offer the opportunity for public scrutiny. The arrangement always seemed impossible to enforce, particularly when a spokesperson for the New York gallery said Hunter Biden was expected to meet with prospective buyers at shows.
It will probably not shock you to learn that the promise not to tell Hunter Biden who bought his paintings was broken.
Business Insider reported, “Hunter Biden did, in fact, learn the identity of two buyers, according to three people directly familiar with his own account of his art career. And one of those buyers is indeed someone who got a favor from the Biden White House. The timing of their purchase, however, is unknown.”
In July 2022, President Biden appointed Hirsh Naftali to a position on the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, which “identifies, protects, and preserves cemeteries, monuments, and historic buildings in Eastern and Central Europe that are associated with U.S. heritage.” It is an unpaid position, but it’s not like a wealthy Democratic donor such as Hirsh Naftali needs the money. A position like the commission offers prestige, a boast that the president of the United States thinks you’re the kind of responsible and benevolent person who can be entrusted with this duty.
Apparently, it is the administration’s position that Hirsh Naftali’s paying some unknown but considerable sum for at least one Hunter Biden painting and her appointment to the commission are entirely coincidental. An unnamed administration official told Business Insider that Hirsh Naftali was selected because Nancy Pelosi recommended her.
The publication also reported that some other buyer purchased $875,000 worth of Hunter Biden’s art, but could not determine the identity of that donor.
Back in August 2019, Joe Biden grew irritated with questions about Hunter’s business deals, and insisted that the worlds of his son’s businesses and the elder Biden’s decisions as an elected official had never crossed, and never would cross.
“I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses. Period,” he said. “And what I will do is the same thing we did in our administration. There will be an absolute wall between personal and private [business interests] and the government. There wasn’t any hint of scandal at all when we were there. And I’m going to propose the same kind of strict, strict rules. That’s why I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else — even distant family — about their business interests. Period.”
That explanation did not quite line up perfectly with what Hunter Biden had told The New Yorker a month earlier, saying he had only had one brief conversation about his work with his dad.
And despite Biden’s assertion that “there wasn’t any hint of scandal at all when we were there,” know that Obama administration officials were uncomfortable with Hunter Biden joining Burisma’s board. In a September 2016 email to other senior State Department officials, the acting deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, George Kent, wrote, “The presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine.”
And if you listen closely to White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the administration’s position is no longer that President Biden never discussed Hunter’s businesses with his son. Monday, Pierre said, “I’ve been asked this question a million times. The answer is not going to change. The answer remains the same: The President ha- — was never in business with his son.”
Whatever you want to call all this, it is not, as Biden promised, “an absolute wall between personal and private” interests. The order of events doesn’t matter that much. Perhaps Hirsh Naftali bought the painting to improve her chances of being appointed to a presidential commission, or maybe she bought the painting as an expression of gratitude for the appointment to the commission. Either way, you have people getting presidentially appointed jobs putting vast sums of money into the pockets of the president’s son.
This is backdoor bribery, and the American people can understand it. Yes, big-time party donors often get these sorts of unpaid commission jobs and paid ambassadorial positions overseas. But those donors give their money to the campaign and to the party, all detailed down to the penny in filings to the Federal Elections Commission. What we’re seeing here are massive payments to the president’s family, away from any public scrutiny.
Meanwhile, as Hunter Biden’s proposed plea bargain with the Justice Department comes up for approval from a judge, you can be forgiven for thinking the president’s son is being represented by Lionel Hutz, the notoriously incompetent and unethical lawyer from The Simpsons. Because calling up the court and pretending to be someone else in the context of legal cases constitutes fraud:
The judge who will review Hunter Biden’s plea deal on Wednesday accused a member of Biden’s legal team of misrepresenting herself in a phone call to the court — a bizarre episode that prompted the judge to threaten sanctions even as Biden’s lawyers insisted it was all a misunderstanding.
In a brief order Tuesday afternoon, U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika wrote that an employee at Latham & Watkins, a law firm representing the president’s son, had called the court clerk’s office and falsely claimed to work for a Republican lawyer in the hopes of persuading the clerk to remove documents that apparently contained Biden’s personal tax information.
Why Stick with Biden?
Earlier this week, the sharp-minded and sarcastic John Ekdahl asked why the Democratic Party won’t just cut its losses with Joe Biden. “I remain a bit baffled why the media and Democrats are going trench warfare for this guy,” he wrote. “He’s a disaster. He’s unimpressive. And he’s a scandal machine. Just swap in Newsom and jettison this clown show. I don’t get it.”
It’s a fair question, but similar questions were asked at the height of the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. Had Bill Clinton resigned in, say, mid 1998, and then-vice president Al Gore assumed the duties of the presidency, Gore may well have won the 2000 election, as he would have been a quasi-incumbent at a time when the economy was roaring from the dot-com boom. Democrats fought tooth and nail to prevent Republicans from making a change through impeachment that likely would have helped the Democrats in the long run.
Decades later, in the middle of the #MeToo revelations, Democrats could belatedly acknowledge that their full-throated insistence that there was nothing wrong with the president of the United States having sex with a much younger intern and then lying about it under oath may well have had some bad consequences in our culture. The Democrats, in their blind insistence that the Republicans couldn’t possibly be right that their guy was always an abusive creep and that women like Paula Jones deserved to be taken seriously, sent the signal to every powerful man that if you’re important enough, you can treat your workplace underlings like a harem. As another powerful man with political ambitions observed a few years later, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
But Democrats couldn’t let go of Bill Clinton in 1998 because it would have represented a concession that the opposition had been right about their guy, going back to Gennifer Flowers.
It’s something like the sunk-cost fallacy: The Democrats can’t give up on Biden now, because they’ve spent too much time, effort, and political capital defending him over the years. Admitting that Biden is a senile, incompetent, corrupt hack today would mean admitting they were wrong about him, after they spent most of 2020 insisting that Joe Biden — good old reliable, honest, ethical, kindly grandpa-licking-an-ice-cream-cone Biden — was just the right man to lead America at a challenging time.
The other ironic aspect of this is that most Democrats never expected to be stuck defending Biden for two presidential cycles in a row. Traditionally, Democratic presidential-primary voters are looking for that next young charismatic rising star — the next JFK, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama. In 2020, seemingly every ambitious young officeholder in the Democratic Party chose to run for president — Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, Michael Bennet, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and a slew of others. And by and large, they all flopped, with many of them dropping out before the primary voting started. One reason they flopped is that the sheer number of them made it impossible for any of them to stand out on a crowded debate stage, alongside better-known, longtime party stalwarts such as Biden and Bernie Sanders.
And back in 2019, everyone knew that Joe Biden was quite old for a presidential candidate and there was a lot of talk, including in Biden’s inner circle, about him serving just one term. But that plan counted on Kamala Harris becoming a serious option as president. She hasn’t, and if you don’t believe me, ask yourself why we haven’t seen a single liberal columnist or Democratic lawmaker argue that Biden should not seek reelection and that Harris should be the party’s 2024 nominee.
So as long as Biden is healthy enough to maintain the appearance of being able to handle his duties, the Democrats are stuck with him until at least midafternoon on January 20, 2025.
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In case you missed it yesterday, Ron DeSantis is making a much-needed reboot of his presidential campaign, and the Washington Commanders might be getting another name change — and just might bring back a classic helmet logo.