But Berges’ lawyer, William Pittard, replied in a letter that ethical arrangements with the White House and a recent Supreme Court decision prevented him from providing the information Comer requested. Pittard suggested Comer pose his questions to Hunter Biden and his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, “to consider an appropriate path forward.”
The committee said in a statement Berges should produce the documents requested. “We find the objections unconvincing and incoherent,” the statement said.
Comer’s request for information about art sales is contentious because Hunter Biden doesn’t work for the government.
Lowell has already replied to the committee that its request for information about foreign influence peddling was illegitimate for pursuing a private citizen and had no valid legislative function.
“Peddling your own inaccurate and baseless conclusions under the guise of a real investigation, turns the Committee into ‘Wonderland’ and you into the Queen of Hearts shouting, ‘sentence first, verdict afterwards,’” Lowell wrote in a four-page letter to Comer.
Georges Berges kept artwork details private to avoid ethical concerns, lawyer says
Pittard said Berges arranged to keep information about buyers of Hunter Biden’s art and the prices confidential, to avoid ethical concerns with his father.
“In light of these considerations, providing the documents and information requested in your letter seemingly would defeat the efforts of Mr. Biden and the White House to avoid the ‘serious ethical concerns’ that you raise,” Pittard told Comer. “Mr. Berges hopes that you and Mr. Biden can resolve that tension.”
Pittard also cited a Supreme Court decision about demands from Comer’s panel and two others in the investigation of former President Donald Trump, in a case involving his longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA.
The high court ruled “transactions by the President and his family” exceeded the House’s authority, Pittard wrote. The high court also noted demands for personal papers might “aim to harass the President or render him complaisant to the humors of the Legislature,” Pittard wrote.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
