Kevin Morris, an entertainment lawyer, told Congress last week that Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020 had nothing to do with his decision to loan Hunter Biden money that year to pay his outstanding taxes.
Morris said that instead, the impeachment proceedings against former President Donald Trump related to Ukraine were likely the political “risk” he had been alluding to in a highly scrutinized email he sent on Feb. 7, 2020, according to a transcript of Morris’s testimony that lawmakers released Tuesday.
However, the impeachment proceedings effectively ended two days before Morris sent the email, as the Senate acquitted Trump on Feb. 5, 2020.
“I believe that, you know, remember that the Trump impeachment process was going on at this time. And, you know, they were waiving around the possibility of calling Hunter, you know, right until the very end. I believe that it wrapped up. I believe that was the emergen — I believe that, you know, that was the thing prompting us — you know, this is about preparing his tax returns,” Morris said.
The email in question, sent from Morris to an accountant working for Hunter Biden, read, “We are under considerable risk personally and politically to get the returns in.”
A committee aide pressed Morris during the interview on how Trump’s impeachment proceedings could have created an urgent need to address Hunter Biden’s unpaid taxes.
“I’m guessing. I’m speculating that that’s what I was talking about. It’s 4 years ago I looked at the calendar; what was going on there,” Morris responded, according to the transcript.
The aide continued to grill Morris, asking him what specifically he meant when he said “personally and politically” in the 2020 email.
“Look, this is a general description of things. You know, I’m happy to — personally — you know, again, there’s no cardinality between these two things. We shouldn’t try to establish it differently. They work together. It’s a quick email from an attorney, asking his accountants to hustle up. And, you know, personally, he hadn’t filed his taxes. Okay? That’s his personal problem. And then, politically, could — you know — look, there was an impeachment proceeding going on. His name was and face was everywhere in the world,” Morris said.
Morris loaned Hunter Biden millions of dollars beginning in 2020, including to pay for his taxes, housing, money owed on his Porsche, security, and legal fees, according to his testimony.
Hunter Biden would later be indicted on nine charges related to tax crimes, including failure to file and pay taxes until 2020, when Morris entered the picture.
Morris said the pair met at a fundraiser for Joe Biden in Brentwood, California, at the end of 2019. Morris, who donated thousands of dollars to help Joe Biden win his election in 2020, said he began helping Hunter Biden financially less than two months after meeting him for the first time.
IRS criminal investigators who worked for years on the federal government’s case against Hunter Biden told Congress they had weighed whether Morris’s assistance to Hunter Biden amounted to a campaign donation, considering how the payments could have quashed a significant public relations problem for Joe Biden during an election year.
If Morris’s support were a campaign donation, it would be far above the legal limit, and the IRS whistleblowers indicated to Congress that they had an interest in investigating it as a campaign finance violation.
Handwritten notes from one of the whistleblowers, Gary Shapley, revealed that a top prosecutor then on the case, Lesley Wolf, may have inhibited investigators from looking into the allegation. Shapley said Wolf had said she was not “personally” interested in investigating the matter.
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Wolf in her own recent testimony to Congress did not directly address the claim that she brushed off investigating Morris for a campaign finance violation. She expressed that the Justice Department had not authorized her to speak on the matter but that she had at all times followed department policies while working on the government’s case against Hunter Biden.
Special counsel David Weiss, who is overseeing the case, is expected to release a detailed report of his prosecutorial decisions once he concludes his investigation and prosecution of the first son.
