House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) on Monday wrote a letter threatening art dealer Georges Bergès with a subpoena if he continues to fail to provide relevant information regarding Hunter Biden’s anonymous art buyers and high-dollar art transactions which could compromise President Joe Biden.
Bergès, an art dealer with ties to the Chinese art market, has refused to provide Comer with the requested information about who has bought Hunter’s art for sale for between $75,000 and $500,000. (Bergès was reportedly arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon in the late 1990s.)
“Mr. Bergès has refused to provide any information regarding who is buying Mr. Biden’s art,” wrote Comer, who is investigating the Biden family business to ascertain if President Joe Biden is compromised by communist China. “This information will inform our legislation on matters that are within the jurisdiction of this Committee.”
Comer told Breitbart News in November he is 95 percent sure Hunter’s sold artwork has found its way to China, potentially compromising the president.
“[T]he prices of the artwork—reportedly ranging between $75,000 and $500,000 — even caused the Obama-era head of the Office of Government Ethics, Mr. Walter Shaub, to raise these ethics issues publicly,” Comer explained. “Mr. Shaub stated the White House has ‘basically outsourced government ethics to a private art dealer and they’re depending on unknown art purchasers to help keep the secret.’”
The White House has praised Hunter for his art venture and defended him against ethical concerns. “The president remains proud of his son,” former White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in response to the fears. The president’s 52-year-old son has also remained defiant toward his critics, responding “f*ck’em” when asked.
Despite Hunter and the White House’s position, the art market is known for corruption. A Senate subcommittee report detailed in 2020 how the art market serves as a vehicle for money laundering:
The art industry is considered the largest, legal unregulated industry in the United States. Unlike financial institutions, the art industry is not subject to Bank Secrecy Act’s (“BSA”) requirements, which mandate detailed procedures to prevent money laundering and to verify a customer’s identity. While the BSA does not apply to art transactions by art dealers and auction houses, sanctions do. No U.S. person or entity is allowed to do business with a sanctioned individual or entity.
“The Committee is reviewing legislative solutions that address the ethics and money laundering issues raised by certain high-end art deals, and your information is critical to our investigation,” Comer said.
“Although your client has refused to produce any documents, the Committee will extend another opportunity for Mr. Bergès and the Georges Bergès Galleries LLC to adequately respond to our request,” Comer wrote to Bergès lawyer. “He has chosen to obstruct.”
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism.
Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
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