Sunday, May 21, 2023

Kevin Morris Reemerges

It's been a few weeks since Kevin Morris has been in the news. According to Breitbart,

As the husband of Gabrielle Morgerman, “one of the most powerful women in the entertainment industry,” Morris is a legal heavyweight with tentacles in nearly every aspect of Hunter Biden’s professional life.

In 2022, news reports surfaced that Hunter Biden retained Morris to oversee his public relations and media strategies. In turn, Morris reportedly paid Hunter’s over two-million-dollar IRS tax delinquency and bankrolled his $30,000-a-month apartment in Malibu, California.

This link gives more background on the power couple:

Gabrielle Morgerman, a 1981 Huntington High School graduate, is senior vice-president and head of the talent department at the prestigious William Morris Agency in Beverly Hills, CA. She earned an undergraduate degree at Smith College.

In Dec. 1991, Ms. Morgerman, known as Gaby, married Patrick [Kevin] Morris, who obtained an undergraduate degree at Cornell Univ. and a law degree at New York University. He is a founding partner in what today is one of America’s top entertainment law firms, which is based in Los Angeles. He has represented clients ranging from Matthew McConaughey, Minnie Driver, Mike Judge (voiceovers and animator Beavis and Butt-head, Spy Kids, creator of Beavis and Butthead, Spy Kids, King of the Hill, etc.) and Mike Newell (director, producer of numerous hit movies) to the creators of “South Park.” At the time of the couple’s wedding, Ms. Morgerman was in the agent in training program at the William Morris Agency.

Ms Morgerman's position may explain the publication of Mr Morris's first (but apparently still only) collection of short stories in 2014, White Man's Problems. According to this review, it's "A superb literary gallery of men who can’t understand why life has given them what they want."

Morris, an entertainment lawyer, producer and journalist, knows his characters and their worlds like the back of his hand. . . . “Jim Mulligan stood in boxers and a T-shirt in the refrigerator light, beer bottle in hand, in the same spot as countless American men before and since, at once living the whiteness and watching it, a picture within a picture, hoping for a miracle snack.” . . . The result is a cleareyed, finely wrought and mordantly funny take on a modern predicament by a new writer with loads of talent.

Well, sounds like the same world that's inhabited by David Brooks's Patio Man, huh?

I don’t know if you've ever noticed the expression of a man who is about to buy a first-class barbecue grill. He walks into a Home Depot or Lowe's or one of the other mega hardware complexes and his eyes are glistening with a faraway visionary zeal, like one of those old prophets gazing into the promised land.

. . . The man approaches the barbecue grills and his face bears a trance-like expression, suggesting that he has cast aside all the pains and imperfections of this world and is approaching the gateway to a higher dimension. In front of him are a number of massive steel-coated reactors with names like Broilmaster P3, The Thermidor, and the Weber Genesis, because in America it seems perfectly normal to name a backyard barbecue grill after a book of the Bible.

This is a world where you can gain literary acclaim by making fun of middle-class, specifically white Republicans, although the real problem is that Jim Mulligan and Patio Man were both Democrats a generation earlier. But this, as far as I can tell, is just part of the whole rich and intricate context of the Hunter Biden boondoggle, in which Kevin Morris plays a supporting role. Most recently,

Hunter Biden cried poverty at his Arkansas child-support hearing earlier this month — despite flying to and from the courthouse aboard a luxury private jet owned by his close friend Kevin Morris.

The $6 million jet took off from Los Angeles on April 30 just after 7 a.m, according to flight records reviewed by The Post.

. . . The 7,326-mile round trip likely cost between $55,000 to $117,000 all in — or the value of up to six months in child-support payments to Hunter Biden’s baby mama, aviation experts told The Post.

Here we have yet another illustration of the Hunter conundrum that for me won't go away. Hunter has been working -- some might call it masterminding -- the Biden family grift since before Joe was elected vice president in 2008: in September of that year, likely foreseeing the election result, he founded Seneca Global Advisors; the next year, he, Devon Archer, and Christopher Heinz founded Rosemont Seneca Partners. So basically, Hunter has been at this particular line of business, collecting influence payments based on his relationship to the big guy, for 15 years.

The problem that keeps coming up for me, as it has now and then for others, is that over this 15-year period, marked by all sorts of frenzied meetings with B-list Chinese, Romanian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, and whatever else businessmen, wannabes, and fixers, so few of these supposed deals paid off. We have lots of meetings, trips on Air Force Two, and optimistic talk, but then whoever is involved seems to disappear, get sent to prison, or just fall off the map, and nothing else comes of it.

The stories that now emerge from the Comer committee involve a million here, ten million there, coming in over a period of years and getting split among nine, a dozen, maybe more, Bidens and their cronies, of whom Ashley, Caroline, Hallie, and Hunter himself are cocaine addicts, while the rest have extravagant lifestyles. At least by the end of Hunter's career as a family fixer, his expenses for drugs, luxury rehab, girlfriends, hookers, cars, and five-star hotels far exceeeded anything he was bringing in, and apparently Joe was making up the difference.

And again, if Hunter was bringing in the big bucks on Biden family deals, why did Joe need to get him side gigs like the Amtrak board or the short-lived Navy job as a no-show PR flack -- which Hunter was dumb enough to lose with his first drug test? If Joe actually thinks Hunter is the smartest guy he knows, what on earth does that say about Joe?

This is the recurrng conundrum: how can anyone smart enough to make serious money have taken Hunter as anything but a con artist? I've got to think the various B-list Chinese, Romanian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, and whatever else businessmen, wannabes, and fixers who put money into Hunter's schemes were marks, and if they were dumb enough to give Hunter money, they were also dumb enough to get rubbed out, sent to prison for corruption, liqudated, and whatever else, which seems to be what happened to many of them.

I would guess that many of Hunter's other deals fell through because the foreign marks were phonies themselves and never came up with the money they promised. By 2014, Christopher Heinz, who'd been a partner in Rosemont Seneca and by far Hunter's most prestigious associate, cut his ties with him, presumably on the basis that he risked too much by working with Hunter compared to any potential reward.

So this brings me back to Kevin Morris. Just in paying Hunter's $2 million IRS debt, we know that Morris has sunk multimillions into the Hunter black hole, but it also appears that he's funding Hunter's legal expenses, both for his child support case and his pending federal indictments, at the level of millions more. He's apparently paid for Hunter's Malibu rental. Six-figure costs for flying him back and forth from Washington to Arkansas are just incidentals.

What on earth is Kevin expecting to get from this? I'm actually starting to wonder if he and his wife (who must be aware of the spending) are just marks themselves. Poor Kevin writes stories about white guys who can't understand how they've gotten where they are in life. At least in the photo at the top of this post, he doesn't look all that bright himself. Well, as they say in creative writing class, write about what you know.