Billionaire Mega-Donor at Center of Hunter Biden Art Sales Raises Ethics Concerns

[brwn]

Billionaire Mega-Donor at Center of Hunter Biden Art Sales Raises Ethics Concerns


https://resistthemainstream.org/billion ... -concerns/



A billionaire with a history of using art to steer donor cash and support for the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden is at the center of a recent Hunter Biden art show, raising ethical concerns among watchdogs and experts.

An art, fashion, and entertainment enterprise of billionaire business mogul Moishe Mana named “Milk Studios” hosted a Hunter Biden art exhibition in Los Angeles on Oct. 1, where the president’s son and his Manager George Bergès entertained a crowd of about 200 potential buyers. Mana’s Mana Group website at the time of publishing lists Milk Studios as a business enterprise in its expansive portfolio.



The Daily Caller contacted the prominent Democratic donor to ask about ethical concerns of co-owning the studio space for Hunter Biden’s Los Angeles art event. Mana replied, “Go f-ck yourself u piece of s-it garbage.” The Israeli-American billionaire declined to comment because the Daily Caller is “owned by a crazy..bad guy.” He then referred to the reporter asking the question as “a nazi jew” who should “[g]o find a real journalist job.”

The studio being opened by a political donor who has been involved in Democratic fundraising efforts involving art in particular and using art as a tool for other political purposes, really changes the way that this can be looked at,” Anna Massoglia, an Investigative Researcher at OpenSecrets, a non-profit transparency organization that tracks money in politics, told the Daily Caller.

Along with making personal donations, Mana has a history of leveraging his power in the art world to support major Democratic figures.

According to FEC filings, Mana has contributed over $115,000 to the Democratic National Committee and Democratic political candidates around the country between 2015 and 2018. Mana most notably was a key donor and helped strategize on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. After huddling with fellow Hillary Donors at the 2016 Democratic National Convention,

Mana received national attention when he offered to donate $2,000,000 to a charity of Donald Trump’s choice if he released his tax returns. Two weeks before the 2016 election, Mana co-hosted a Hillary Clinton Fundraiser where he auctioned off hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of art from his personal collection. The “Art in Support of Hillary” event for the Hillary Victory Fund also served as the failed presidential candidate’s birthday party.

“The White House has tried to push a narrative that Hunter Biden’s art is very separate from Joe Biden’s presidency, so the fact that you now have a democratic donor involved to some extent changes how you might consider the studio that was now given to his son. I think it would be really interesting to see whether the studio space was provided to Hunter Biden at the same rate or under the same conditions that it would be provided to other artists and how the financial arrangement works, but the White House has not been really transparent with the exchange of money around Hunter Biden’s art generally,” Massoglia added.

Although Mana supported Pete Buttigieg in the Democratic primaries, once Joe Biden was announced as the Democratic frontrunner, he said in a July 2020 Instagram post that “Joe Biden is my choice and our savior.” Mana then held multiple Biden-Harris campaign events.

The George Bergés Gallery in SoHo this past week also exhibited fifteen original Hunter Biden pieces for sale. The president’s son has previously said, “f**k ’em” in response to those who have criticized the prices of his art. In an Art World podcast, Hunter said, “Look man, I never set my prices — what my art was going to cost, what it costs, or how much it would be priced at. I would be amazed, you know, if my art had sold at, um you know, for $10.”

“Buyers paying outrageous prices to curry favor with the Bidens is a major ethics concern,” says Scott Amey, General Counsel for the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a nonpartisan, independent government corruption watchdog organization.

Concerning Mana’s role as co-owner of Milk Studios, Amey explained to the Daily Caller that “now an additional layer has been added because those affiliated with the studios have pushed a liberal political agenda.”

While Mana wasn’t nearly as vocal in the 2020 election, he used Mana Public Arts, an offshoot of Mana Contemporary, to launch “Project 270,” a campaign to increase voter turnout among millennials and Gen-Z by “flooding the country with Get Out The Vote (GOTV) images, posters, billboards, and other art” in all fifty states, DC, and Puerto Rico. In an Instagram post, Mana points to “The Voter Party” as a collaborator on Project 270. The group organizes artists to engage civically to increase voter turnout and is fiscally sponsored by March On, the organization behind the Women’s March, who in their “Declaration For Our Future,” supports removing corporate money from politics.

In 1983, Mana left Israel with little money in his pocket and came to New York in 1983 overstaying his visa. He worked as a dishwasher before scraping together enough money to start a moving business that soon blossomed into the largest independent moving company in the tri-state area by the 1990s. Now a billionaire, Mana has amassed millions of square footage of real estate around the United States and the globe, becoming the largest private landowner in Miami.

Amidst concerns of the potentially compromising nature of Hunter Biden’s art sales due to his status as the son of the president, Columbia Law Professor Richard Briffault, an expert on campaign finance and law of the political process, told the Daily Caller that “this may be one of those areas where there is not a lot of legal rules.”

“When you have adult children of elected officials, say, presidential children, active in the world and making money, there is always a concern that one of the ways they can make money is from people who want to go through them to get to the president. This is not the first time we’ve come up with concerns about presidential relatives. Look at Billy Carter, Hugh Rodham, or the Trump children; these are all people who at various times had been accused of making money based on the fact that they were the brother, the brother-in-law, or the children of the president.”

With regard to possible legislation that would require more transparency among the family of elected officials, Briffault said that ideally, “the president should have a rule to not talk about any business with his children,” but “it’s hard to enforce anything like this.” The Columbia Law Professor added that it may be beneficial “to have a rule that requires more disclosure on the part of the spouses and children of senior elected officials.”