How far one lawyer is willing to go to help Hunter Biden
Sarah Bedford
Video Embed
“We have 8 SDNY prosecutors on our team,” attorney Kevin Morris boasted in texts to a conservative operative last year. “All it took was one phone call.”
Hunter Biden’s close adviser and personal benefactor has attracted attention for the level of support he’s given to the president’s son.
NINE TAKEAWAYS FROM THE DEVON ARCHER TRANSCRIPT
Morris lent Hunter Biden the money to pay off his tax bill, owns some of Hunter Biden’s paintings, frequently flies Hunter Biden around on his private jet, and serves on Hunter Biden’s defense team in the federal investigation of his business dealings.
Morris has also spent months sporadically exchanging threats with at least one person working with a conservative organization that has published emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, the diary of the president’s daughter, Ashley Biden, and other documents related to the Biden family. The bizarre episode underscores how aggressively Morris has advocated Hunter Biden.
At several points in messages to the operative that began last year, Morris suggested that he knew the FBI and Justice Department were monitoring the activities of MarcoPoloUSA, a right-wing group, and its founder, Garret Ziegler.
“[Y]ou have no idea who has turned against him,” Morris warned in March.
And in one particularly aggressive set of texts from April, Morris appeared to threaten the operative with exposing an alleged abortion obtained by a woman he had impregnated by sending a letter to the operative’s pastor, according to messages obtained by the Washington Examiner.
A person who claimed to work for MarcoPoloUSA had impersonated a Hunter Biden ally last year in messages to Morris, who appeared to believe briefly that he was speaking to a friend.
The exposure of the hoax sent Morris into a flurry of threats, including the one involving what he claimed were friendly federal prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York who, Morris claimed, would soon be taking up the matter.
In April, Morris filed a lawsuit against Ziegler for harassment and criminal impersonation.
Ziegler has denied being the operative behind the initial hoax.
The operative goaded Morris frequently in texts in March and April of this year, insulting and taunting him. A MarcoPoloUSA employee claimed that the correspondence with Morris was “obviously trolling and catfishing Morris in an attempt to get him to reveal information” but said the person involved is not employed by the group.
Morris stated in his lawsuit that he received threats and suffered emotional distress as a result of the group’s activities. He did not respond to a request for comment. The lawsuit is due to see another day in court next week.
Morris’s vicious threats against a perceived enemy of Hunter Biden come as he continues to offer sweeping support for the president’s son, who is navigating legal troubles and the personal fallout from his years of addiction.
Morris may have spared Hunter Biden from more serious criminal charges related to his taxes in 2020 when he paid off $2 million in outstanding tax bills for Hunter Biden, categorizing the payment as a loan.
He appeared at a Delaware courthouse on July 26th with Hunter Biden as the president’s son prepared to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors as part of a plea deal that collapsed. Hunter Biden changed his plea to not guilty.
Morris has also helped Hunter Biden’s artistic career flourish. He is one of two individuals known to have acquired Hunter Biden’s pricey paintings, which sell for as much as $500,000, and has reportedly helped develop the plans to market the paintings.
Hunter Biden’s 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things, benefited from Morris’s help. The Hollywood lawyer reportedly helped secure Hunter Biden a literary agent to facilitate the book deal.
As Hunter Biden dealt with a child support lawsuit in Arkansas over the past several years, Morris provided aid as well. Hunter Biden arrived at court hearings in Morris’s private jet during the legal battle over payments to the mother of the child he fathered.
But Morris’s support appears to extend beyond the financial.
Morris is said to be funding a documentary that will paint Hunter Biden in a flattering light.
Upon Hunter Biden’s return home to Los Angeles after his court appearance, the New York Post published images of a filmmaker taping Hunter Biden’s arrival on the tarmac. The project has been described as an attempt to portray Hunter Biden as the victim of Republican attacks, another element of Morris’s campaign to help the president’s son.
And Morris came under scrutiny when, in another bizarre episode in 2021, he allegedly flew to Serbia to impersonate a documentarian focused on investigating the Biden family on the set of a documentary production that was actually investigating the Biden family.
Morris allegedly interviewed people involved with the unflattering documentary, My Son Hunter, to learn what they were doing.
The incident became the subject of a complaint the documentary’s creators filed with the California State Bar, a spokesperson for which told the Washington Examiner that Morris’s profile “shows no public discipline” and denied this reporter’s records request under an exemption that covers all communications about disciplinary matters.
The House Oversight Committee sought answers from Morris starting last year about the financial arrangement that resulted in the resolution of Hunter Biden’s tax bill. An Oversight Committee spokesperson declined to comment on the status of efforts to contact Morris.
A pair of IRS whistleblowers told Congress that the tax payment caught the eye of federal investigators.
Joseph Ziegler, an IRS whistleblower, declined to answer the House Ways and Means Committee’s questions about whether the tax payments Morris made were still under investigation by the IRS.
But Gary Shapley, the other IRS whistleblower, said Morris was high on the list of witnesses investigators wanted to interview.
In fact, FBI and IRS agents had received approval to interview Morris in 2020 on what they called their “day of action,” the point at which investigators had finally been given the green light to take overt investigative steps and approach key witnesses for unannounced interviews. Agents put together a plan to conduct multiple simultaneous interviews across several states on the same day in December 2020.
Shapley said his task that day had been to seek interviews with Hunter Biden himself and with Morris but that the chance to do both was scuttled when the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office tipped off the Biden transition team about the plan, and neither interview occurred.
Morris made his name and fortune in Hollywood, representing various recognizable celebrities and brokering the deal that brought the animated show South Park to television screens.
Hunter Biden has not been the only benefactor of Morris’s generosity. President Joe Biden was boosted by massive donations from Morris in the 2020 race.
Morris donated $10,000 to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Donald Trump group. He also gave $2,800, the maximum legal amount, to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign; and $25,000 to American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic political organization that supported Joe Biden during the race.
As Hunter Biden prepared to face an onslaught of congressional investigations last year following Republican victories in the midterm election, Morris reportedly convened Hunter Biden’s associates and urged a more aggressive approach to swatting down allegations against the president’s son.
The advice appears to have been heeded.
Abbe Lowell, a more recent addition to Hunter Biden’s legal team whose arrival made waves in the White House, sent a series of letters in February to federal and state law enforcement agencies demanding an investigation into the Trump associates who helped spread the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop.
And Morris’s vicious threats against the operative who impersonated an ally suggest that, behind the scenes, Morris has indeed gotten more aggressive in his efforts to discredit Hunter Biden’s detractors.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Whether Morris truly had federal prosecutors on his side remains unclear.
The Justice Department has faced claims, from the IRS whistleblowers and others, of offering preferential treatment to Hunter Biden by slow-walking or blocking parts of the five-year investigation into Hunter Biden’s business and financial dealings.