Kevin Morris Is Out of Money
Kevin Morris, a Hollywood entertainment lawyer who has long supported the president’s son, has told associates that he has run out of resources to help fund Biden’s legal defense, according to a person close to Morris who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Whoa, let's parse this one out. First, I live in Hollywood, and I know something about the place. Tinsel Town is built on hype, and Kevin Morris is nothing if not a creature of hype. Here's the standard line as printed in the New York Post as of 2022:
Morris is a successful lawyer and big-money Democratic Party supporter who has become Hunter Biden’s newest fixer and “sugar brother,” allegedly loaning the president’s son $2 million to help pay off his overdue federal taxes. . . . The lawyer, who counts Chris Rock and Matthew McConaughey among his celebrity clients, is also a prolific fiction writer of two novels and a collection of short stories.
But a year later, the Post itself reported he was under an ethics investigation by the California State Bar and in 2020 had left the law firm he founded. He now describes himself as a "retired" attorney and no longer appears to represent former clients like Matthew McConaughey, Chris Rock, Courteney Cox or Minnie Driver.His career as a novelist was brief as well. I looked at this in detail last June.
In 2009, Morris decided to become a writer or something, and he did what every aspiring writer does, he "found a writing space in Santa Monica", one of the most expensive places to rent a space you can imagine. And as a struggling young writer (born in 1963, he was 46 at the time), he tried and failed to get his first novel published.
In fact, it looks as though after 2009 at the latest, he lost interest in his law practice, and I've got to think his former partners were working to push him out of his own firm at least by that time. But although he became a full-time writer in 2009, it took him until 2014 to get anything published, a collection of short stories, White Man's Problems, and then two novels, All Joe Knight (2016) and Gettysburg (2019). After Gettysburg, he seems to have dropped any literary aspirations, and I can't imagine he ever made any money as a writer. As I said last year,
Novelists can't make money off their writing alone. Even if one of their books makes it to the best-seller list, that just gives a spike in income that lasts only a short time, and then they have to write another novel to pay the bills. As a result, in the modern age, they have to get gigs as creative writing professors, which is how they make any sort of steady income.
. . . The only way a writer can get rich off writing is to have a novel made into a Hollywood blockbuster, which is how Steinbeck and Hemingway got rich, more or less, although much of that money went to their ex-wives. But Kevin Morris, despite his wife being one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood, has yet to see any of his stuff made into a movie.
What's interesting here is that in 20l9, the year it must have become clear to him he wasn't going to make it as a writer, he discovered his next big project, Hunter Biden. Exactly how much Morris spent paying Hunter's living expenses and legal bills since then isn't completely clear. According to the Washington Examiner,
Bills of Biden’s paid by Morris have ranged from the desperate — divorce dues owed for Biden’s ex-wife, child support long overdue to Biden’s illegitimate daughter — to the decadent. In an arrangement that reportedly infuriates White House counsel, Morris has paid nearly a million dollars for the amateur Biden’s artwork.
. . . Per the admission of both Morris and Biden, Morris has spent some $6.5 million in direct payments on Biden’s behalf. It is only because of Morris’s payment of Biden’s back taxes that the latter was even considered in good enough standing with the IRS to negotiate the Justice Department’s attempted sweetheart plea deal to keep him out of prison.
. . . It’s clear enough that $6.5 million is the floor, not the ceiling, of what Morris has paid in his pursuit to keep Joe Biden in the White House and his friend Hunter Biden out of prison.
But, in light of Morris's faded legal career and his failure as a novelist, where did he get six million dollars-plus? Well, he's married to one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood, but even powerful agents have credit limits. In January, I concluded,
I think Morris is starting to look like one of Hunter's marks, and I'm just not sure he's all there. I've got to assume Abbe Lowell has got liens on Morris's properties to be sure he gets paid.
When I said "Morris's properties", I of course meant Morris's properties which are probably community property in his marriage, and as I noted in another post from January:
I can't imagine that Mrs Kevin, AKA Gaby Morgerman of the William Morris agency, is thrilled with this, and I suspect that marriage is on borrowed time due to Kevin's involvement with Hunter.
. . . I wouldn't hire Kevin Morris to get me out of a speeding ticket, much less solve my tax, drug, or gun problems.
I can't avoid thinking I was on the right track about this earlier this year. As Stein's Law puts it, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Which brings us to yesterday's news and the Politico link above:
The person close to Morris said that the Hollywood lawyer faces financial constraints that present “a huge problem” and that there are concerns about how Biden will pay for expert witnesses to testify for him at his Delaware trial. It is unclear precisely how much Morris has spent thus far to support Biden, but in a January letter to the House oversight committee, Morris’ lawyer said Morris had loaned Biden more than $6.5 million.
. . . It’s not clear how much Lowell, or the other lawyers working on Biden’s cases, are charging for their services. In other recent cases, Lowell has sought fees of $855 per hour and over $1,500 per hour.
It looks like Mrs Kevin has staged an intervention, and she's cut Kevin off. I doubt if Abbe Lowell will be representing Hunter much longer.