Sunday, November 19, 2023

Kevin Morris Reemerges

I'm a contrarian on many things, but I'm especially contrarian on the subject of Kevin Morris, the Hollywood lawyer who's been funding Hunter Biden's lifestyle since the wheels came off in 2019-20 and more recently, as best anyone can surmise, paying Hunter's lawyers and guiding his overall legal strategy. How's that going? Well, this past summer, the tentative plea deal and diversion agreement negotiated by Chris Clark, Hunter's attorney who was apparently paid and supervised by Morris, collapsed in a Delaware courtroom, and apparently at Morris's order, Clark withdrew from the case, replaced by Abbe Lowell.

This controversy forced Attorney General Garland to take the leash off the Delaware prosecutor, David Weiss, and make him a full special counsel with the ability to pursue the case in other districts. Now, as a result,

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig suggested it doesn’t bode well for Hunter Biden that a California grand jury is being used in a special counsel’s investigation into the president’s son.

“It’s bad news for Hunter Biden any way you slice this,” Honig said during an interview on “Anderson Cooper 360″ on Thursday evening. “Let’s remember, he already has a pending indictment in the federal district court in Delaware for the firearms-related charges.”

. . . CNN said the move by Weiss indicates he may be seeking new charges against Biden after previously bringing gun charges against him in Delaware. Honig said Biden may be looking at a second indictment out of California.

Morris has got to be some lawyer, huh? As I've been saying, he's an entertainment lawyer whose career seems to have prospered, at least for a time, because his wife, William Morris partner Gaby Morgerman, is one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood. But the projects he's been asssociated with, South Park (1997) and the musical The Book of Mormon (2011), are old news. He left his former law firm Morris Yorn Barnes & Levine in 2020, oddly at the same time that he became heavily involved in Hunter's business and personal affairs.

But as I posted here, Morris appears to have lost interest in his law practice years earlier. In 2009, he "decided to become a writer" and seems to have worked full time at writing and publishing a collection of short stories, White Man's Problems (2014), and two novels, All Joe Knight (2016) and Gettysburg (2019). By most accounts, he met Hunter in 2019 at a Joe Biden fundraiser, Hunter impressed him, and the rest is history. He seems to have dropped his aspiration to become the John Updike of his generation, as well as his entertainment law career, and undertaken Hunter as his full time project.

The conventional wisdom is more or less as follows:

Kevin Morris, an entertainment attorney and novelist who earned a fortune representing the co-creators of “South Park” and won a Tony Award as the co-producer of “The Book of Mormon,” footed Hunter Biden’s overdue taxes totaling over $2 million — more than twice what was previously reported, a source familiar with conversations between the two told The Post.

Morris, whom Hunter Biden’s friends call his latest “sugar brother,” has also been funding the 52-year-old’s lifestyle in Los Angeles — including his rent and living expenses, the source said.

Plus, now, Hunter's astronomical attorney fees as well. These payments, which by now must certainly be well into eight figures, have been loosely characteried as "loans". As House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer puts it,

It sure seems that the Bidens get a lot of ‘loans’ that raise many questions. Kevin Morris is reportedly helping Hunter Biden pay off his legal bills and China debt, which the Biden team claim are ‘loans.’ These ‘loans’ have occurred both during Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and presidency, which raise serious ethical concerns.

The House committees have begun the process of obtaining more information from Morris on what I assume must be the total of his financial support for Hunter and how this is characterized -- adding multimillions in legal fees from nationally prominent lawyers, Hunter's tax debts, which appear to be considerably more than $2 million, other legal fees for his child custody case, lease expenses for a Malibu residence and likely an additional residence for his wife, Melissa Cohen, and payments to his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, it's hard to avoid wondering how anyone at Hunter's age and prospects, and taking into consideration his overall lack of talent, could conceivably pay this off as a "loan".

But now we come to the next question: Kevin Morris, as far as anyone can tell, is no longer working as an attorney, and in any case, the time he's spending running Hunter's life and businesses isn't billable. He failed in his attempt at a literary career and no longer seems to be writing. One recent vignette showed him smoking weed from a bong on an upstairs porch, which suggests he's no longer much more than your average stoner. Leaving aside possibly $10-20 million or more he's spent on Hunter since 2020, his lifestyle, which seems to include major residences in Malibu and Manhattan as well as a pied-a-terre in Santa Monica and a private jet, must be financed entirely by his wife.

$10-20 million isn't mad money. Even a powerful Hollywood agent isn't rich enough to cover that family lifestyle plus Hunter. This money has got to be coming from some other source.