Hunter Biden’s art gallerist, George Bergès, told House impeachment investigators that over the course of three years, he helped sell $1.5 million worth of art created by the first son. Mr. Bergès, who supported President Trump in the 2020 election, also says he never spoke with the Biden White House about any kind of ethics agreement meant to create a wall between the president’s duties and the first son’s art sales, as was claimed by a former White House press secretary, Jen Psaki. 

Mr. Bergès says he was introduced to Mr. Biden in 2019 by a mutual friend, a filmmaker named Lanette Phillips. The two men began the “process” of forming an artist-gallerist relationship, but it did not fully materialize until 2020. 

“It was just a process,” the gallerist responded. “It was a relationship. I liked his art. I liked the trajectory. I liked his story, you know. I always like to tell people that, you know, Hunter, like so many of us, faced a crossroad in his life. And he could keep going and die or do the hard thing, which is to change, and he did the hard thing.”

Mr. Bergès likened Mr. Biden to the Sylvester Stallone character Rocky Balboa, saying he was not someone people were meant to root for, yet he got up and kept fighting anyway. 

The chairman of the Oversight Committee, Congressman Jim Jordan, asked Mr. Bergès about the exact dollar amount for which Mr. Biden’s art sold. The gallerist said the total was about $1.5 million over three years. 

Investigators pressed Mr. Bergès on an art purchase made by Mr. Biden’s wealthy Hollywood attorney friend, Kevin Morris, who bought nearly $900,000 worth of artwork from the gallery, which Mr. Bergès described as “an outlier.” Most of Mr. Biden’s paintings sold for between $15,000 and $40,000, which is very high for a self-taught painter at the beginning of his career. 

“If I look at the totality, if I look at the whole picture of this artist objectively, I would say, okay, this is great that we got someone to do a major acquisition, but let’s look at the general response and what the value is,” he told lawmakers and committee lawyers. “I would have said, you know, it’s not that impressive.”

During Mr. Biden’s child support battle last year with the mother of his fourth of five children, Lunden Roberts, a former stripper, he said his only source of income was the paintings. If one divided the sum of his art sales by three — for three years — and deducted what were likely stiff gallery fees and taxes, the remaining income would be substantial for a typical American, but insufficient to fund Mr. Biden’s luxury lifestyle, which includes a $17,000-a-month house at exclusive Malibu, California, as well as a Porsche. In a separate interview with impeachment investigators, Mr. Morris acknowledged loaning Mr. Biden millions of dollars, paying his rent directly as well as covering his payments on the Porsche.

Mr. Bergès, in his interview with the investigators, also said that prospective buyers were initially unaware that the “Hunter Biden” listed as the artist was President Biden’s son and were surprised when they found out who had done the paintings. At the time, the younger Mr. Biden had just burst onto the scene as a national political figure thanks to the harsh spotlight he came under during the 2020 election. 

“In fact, I’ve had people that are completely shocked because they tend to be on the right, and they love the piece, and they find out who it is, and they start laughing,” he said. 

Republicans on the committee were anxious to hear more about the ethics guidelines the White House had announced regarding Mr. Biden’s art sales. 

In 2021, when Mr. Biden began selling his paintings, Ms. Psaki told reporters that “a system has been established to allow Hunter Biden to work in his profession within reasonable safeguards. 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.”

Mr. Bergès said he was “surprised” when he heard of such an ethics agreement because he had never discussed that with anyone in the administration and has not to this day.

A committee lawyer pressed Mr. Bergès about that alleged ethics agreement. “When you’re seeing in the press that the White House is putting in certain safeguards regarding an ethics agreement, but you’ve had no conversations with the White House, I mean, did you ever say to Hunter Biden, ‘Hey, where’s this coming from?’”

“I probably did, yeah,” the gallerist responded. “Because I hadn’t had any communication with the White House about an agreement.”

The chairman of the Oversight Committee, Congressman James Comer, said in a letter to Mr. Bergès last year that he wanted to speak with him about the Biden “family’s foreign and domestic influence peddling schemes,” which Mr. Comer claims were facilitated by the art gallery by allowing the first son to get rich in exchange for political favors from the White House. There is no evidence that the president was ever aware of his son’s art patrons or that those purchases influenced government policy. 

The only example of an art purchaser receiving favors was that of a wealthy Los Angeles heiress, Elizabeth Naftali, who was appointed to the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. She had also been a major donor to the Democratic Party and served on the finance committees for both the elder Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign and Senator Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Appointments to such commissions — like low-stakes ambassadorial nominations — are typically awarded to major campaign fundraisers. 

Ms. Naftali has also been subpoenaed by the GOP investigators, and has yet to comply. She did, however, tell a guest on her new, liberal podcast that she’s cooperating fully.