Broadcasters are familiar with the term payola, an illegal practice of bribing someone like a disc jockey to play a record or promote a single.
On Thursday, 710 WOR’s Mark Simone compared Hunter Biden’s artwork to a payola scheme being carried out with foreign adversaries. According to The New York Times, Biden has been painting for decades. Although he has no formal training, many of his paintings have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
President Joe Biden is currently embroiled in a classified documents controversy. Pundits have suggested that Hunter may have had some involvement or even leaked classified information to America’s enemies.
“You have Hunter with all of this money flowing in and obviously he’s kicking it back to the big guy, Joe Biden,” Simone said. “He’s paying $50,000 a month in rent to live in the house with Joe Biden. If you can afford $50,000 a month, you don’t need to move back in with your parents.”
Simone noted that the “Hunter Biden painting scam” is even more of a head-scratcher given the fact the White House will not divulge who the paintings are being sold to.
“These are junk paintings, these are finger paintings that people are paying $500,000 a piece for,” he said. “It’s a way of giving money to the Bidens. I don’t know if it’s technically illegal but it’s unethical. It’s money laundering.”
Simone said the practice started in the 1950’s with commercial rock radio stations.
“Back in the 1950’s payola was everywhere in rock and roll radio,” he said. “Alan Freed and all those guys would take money to play your record on the radio and make it a big hit. You would just show up and give the disc jockey $10,000 in cash and he would play your record.”
The payola scandal heated up in 1960 when President Dwight Eisenhower declared it a public issue.
