NeverTrumper Walter Schaub was certainly no MAGA fan.
But some of the current administration’s loose practices have turned the federal government’s former top ethics guru into a Team Biden basher.
Shaub served under President Barack Obama, and then-Vice President Joe Biden, as the director of the Office of Government Ethics. His tenure overlapped with the start of the Trump administration.
The most recent thing President Joe Biden has allowed that set Schaub off involved the president’s ne’er-do-well son, Hunter, who suddenly has emerged as Delaware’s Picasso.
Hunter, as the BCC generously put it, has emerged as a “self-taught artist.” He’s scheduled to hold a show this fall, and early reports suggest his works could fetch a half-million dollars.
Despite past reports about Hunter Biden’s previous shady business dealings in China and Ukraine, which reportedly involved “the big guy,” his father, getting a cut of the action, the White House has green-lighted the art sales.
The administration is satisfied with a hitch that buyers must remain anonymous.
“After careful consideration, a system has been established that allows for Hunter Biden to work in his profession within reasonable safeguards,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Friday. “Of course, he has the right to pursue an artistic career just like any child of a president has the right to pursue a career.”
“I think it would be challenging for an anonymous person who we don’t know and Hunter Biden doesn’t know to have influence,” she added.
Schaub, the ethics expert, took exception.
“They have outsourced government ethics to an art dealer. She mentioned industry standards. It’s an industry that’s notorious for money laundering,” Schaub said in appearing on CNN. “This is just preposterous and very disappointing.”
Schaub noted that there is no way the public will know that Hunter or White House didn’t find out who bought the paintings, and then peddled that as a reason for high-level meeting,
“Maybe we trust Joe Biden not to give preferential treatment because he’s a better human being than Donald Trump, but you don’t run an ethics program on the idea that you hope everybody behaves. If everybody in the world would behave, we don’t even need laws prohibiting murder then,” Schaub said.
“It’s just got the absolute appearance that he’s profiting off of his father’s fame,” Added Schaub, fairly describing Hunter’s entire adult life.
“The White House should have first made its move to have the president try to talk him out of doing this, and if that failed, they should have gone the opposite direction and asked that the name of buyers be released and pledge to the American people that what they would do is let us know any time one of those buyers got a meeting with an administration official so that the public could judge whether or not they were getting preferential treatment,” he noted.
“The problem is, now they’ve set a precedent for the next president,” Schaub continued.
“He can sell art all he wants, but he ought to be abiding by a standard that he shouldn’t be doing things to capitalize on his father’s name. … I know he’s not a government official and isn’t covered by the government ethics laws, but he’s an American citizen, and he has a patriotic duty not to capitalize on his father’s public service, and that’s clearly what he’s doing here.”
This is at least the third time that Shaub has attacked Biden’s administration for ethics lapses.
Last month, for instance, a disappointed Schaub went public with complaints that Biden had backed off his own anti-nepotism pledge and allowed numerous family members of White House staffers to land plum jobs.
He called the hires “ridiculous” and “a f—— failure.”
“When little problems like this, which are so damn easy to avoid, crop up, it’s a sign of much bigger rot. Because if you can’t even do the easy things, you sure as hell can’t do the hard things,” Schaub said in a social media post
“I’m the stupid moron who fell for his false promises,” he added. “I wasn’t naive enough to think he’d be a transformative president. He told us he’d be plain vanilla. But, I thought there was momentum behind his ethics promises. Boy, was I stupid.”
Back in March, in a lengthy op-ed in The Washington Post, Schaub lamented that Biden wasn’t being aggressive enough on proposed ethics reforms.
While he liked what Biden wanted to do, Schaub added, “a new administration that has committed to transparency and broad government ethics reform has just passed the halfway mark in its first 100 days. But while candidate Joe Biden campaigned on those promises, it’s not clear that President Biden is on track to keep them.”
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