It was a family affair Wednesday when Hunter Biden finally showed up at the Manhattan art gallery where his novice paintings are being offered for up to $500,000 each amid concerns about influence-peddling by the president’s son.
Biden, 51, carried his 1-1/2-year-old son Beau on his shoulders as he, wife Melissa Cohen and daughter Maisy Biden were escorted by owner George Berges into his eponymous Soho storefront for a party more than two weeks after the exhibition opened to a mere trickle of prospective buyers.
About 60 guests gathered for the belated event, including President Biden’s younger sister, Valerie Biden Owens, and reality TV star Meghan King of The Real Housewives of Orange County.
But the festivities took place behind curtains that covered the windows and two Secret Service agents, a team of private security guards and a K-9 stood guard outside.
Earlier in the day, The Post saw the delivery of food from the D’Artagnan poultry company along with an array of soft drinks — but no booze for the party celebrating the new career of Hunter Biden, who’s acknowledged repeated struggles with drug and alcohol addictions.
Upon leaving the party, Owens declared her nephew’s artwork “spectacular” and art critic Donald Kuspit said of Hunter Biden, “He’s a serious artist. The work is terrific.”
But Kuspit, who recently reviewed Hunter Biden’s work in Whitehot Magazine, said the self-taught painter didn’t ring up any sales during the opening.
“It really had nothing to do with money. It was just a social event,” he said.
Hunter Biden, who wore dark blue jeans and a forest green shirt-style jacket, left around 9 p.m. and got defensive when The Post asked whether he’d gotten back his infamous laptop computer since it was seized by the FBI after being left at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019.
“There’s always a smart-ass in the bunch,” he snarked after initially flashing a tight grim.
Cohen, who wore a full-length, military green leather coat and a long black leather skirt with a dangerously high slit in the front, then jokingly chimed in, “It doesn’t exist.”
That claim belied her hubby’s admission earlier this year that the abandoned hardware “certainly” could be his.
In October 2019, The Post exclusively revealed that a hard drive holding the contents of the computer contained a trove of emails detailing Hunter Biden’s controversial overseas business dealings, as well as explicit photos and videos.
One especially raunchy video appeared to show him smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with an unidentified woman.
Hunter Biden has since revealed that he’s under investigation for possible tax fraud and he told “CBS This Morning” in April that he had no plans to strike a plea deal.
Wednesday’s party followed Biden’s debut in Los Angeles last month, where the guests included boxing legend Sugar Ray Leonard, who posed for photos bumping fists with the first son.
Other attendees at the Hollywood show included Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti — the president’s nominee to be ambassador to India — as well as musician Moby and artist Shepard Fairey, who created the iconic “Hope” poster for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
The White House has said that the identities of any buyers of Hunter Biden’s art will be kept secret to prevent them from holding sway over President Biden’s administration — claim that’s been widely derided by experts including Walter Shaub, who ran the Office of Government Ethics under then-President Barack Obama.
“There is no ethics program in the world that can be built around the head of state’s staff working with a dealer to keep the public in the dark about the identities of individuals who pay vast sums to the leader’s family member for subjectively priced items of no intrinsic value,” Shaub tweeted last month.
“If this were [Donald] Trump, Xi [Jinping] or [Vladimir] Putin, you’d have no doubt whatsoever that this creates a vehicle for funneling cash to the first family in exchange for access or favors. Nor would you doubt that the appearance of monetizing the presidency was outrageous.”
