‘Joe’s ethics best ever’?
WH flack denies charges of rampant nepotism
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Monday said President Biden’s administration is the most ethical “in history,” despite jobs flowing to relatives of senior aides and potential conflicts of interest involving First Son Hunter Biden’s shady new art career.
Obama administration ethics chief Walter Shaub last week tore into Biden for alleged nepotism.
Shaub on Monday also slammed a high-dollar art auction from Hunter Biden, who hopes to fetch up to $500,000 for his paintings from buyers who will be kept confidential, as “shameful and grifty.”
Psaki said at her daily press briefing, “We have the highest ethical standards of any administration in history, a number of ethics officials have conveyed that . . .
[and] that . . . applies [to] how hiring is done.”
Shaub, director of the US Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017, unloaded on what he called “illegal” nepotism in a Friday Twitter thread. He said that it “royally sucks” and is “a real ‘f--k you’ ” to ethical governance.
Shaub, a frequent critic of
former President Donald Trump, on Monday told Fox News that he’s also outraged at the pending Hunter Biden art show.
“Just as hotel charges and real-estate purchases created a risk of unknown parties funneling money to the Trump family . . . Hunter Biden’s grotesquely inflated art prices create a similar risk of influence-seekers funneling money to the Biden family,” he said.
“A president’s son . . . selling art at obviously inflated prices and keeping the public in the dark about who’s funneling money to him has a shameful and grifty feel to it,” Shaub said.
Relatives of many of Biden’s closest aides have scored government gigs.
J.J. Ricchetti, son of White House counselor Steve Ricchetti, recently got a job at the Treasury Department. Steve Ricchetti’s daughter, Shannon Ricchetti, works for the White House social secretary, and his brother runs a DC consulting firm, also drawing ethics concerns.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed’s daughter, Julia Reed, is Biden’s scheduler.
Most Executive Branch appointments are reviewed by the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, which is led by Cathy Russell, whose daughter, Sarah Donilon, works at the National Security Council.
A White House official anonymously told The Washington Post that Russell does not influence NSC hiring. Russell’s brother-inlaw, Mike Donilon, is a senior adviser to Biden.
Psaki’s sister, Stephanie Psaki, works at the Department of Health and Human Services as a senior adviser.
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s wife, Monica Medina, has been nominated to be assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and science.
Democrats routinely criticized Trump for appointing his daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, to be unpaid White House advisers.