Deposition transcript lays bare the GOP impeachment spin effort
Right-wing media refuses to scrutinize House Republican claims
Probably no friend has benefited more from that generosity than President Biden’s son Hunter, according to Morris. The attorney paid for Hunter’s California house, bought the younger Biden’s art and helped pay off outstanding tax obligations. For doing so, he was summoned to Washington to participate in a closed-door deposition led by House Republicans eager to find evidence implicating Hunter Biden — or, more important, his father — in wrongdoing.
After the deposition, House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) released a statement suggesting that Morris had offered information that was deeply problematic for the Bidens. It read, in part:
“Kevin Morris’s massive financial support to Hunter Biden raises ethical and campaign finance concerns for President Joe Biden. Shortly after meeting Hunter Biden at a Joe Biden campaign event in 2019, Kevin Morris began paying Hunter Biden’s tax liability to insulate then-presidential candidate Joe Biden from political liability. Kevin Morris admitted he has ‘loaned’ the president’s son at least $5 million. These ‘loans’ don’t have to be repaid until after the next presidential election and the ‘loans’ may ultimately be forgiven. Since Kevin Morris has kept President Biden’s son financially afloat, he’s had access to the Biden White House and has spoken to President Biden. This follows a familiar pattern where Hunter Biden’s associates have access to Joe Biden himself.”
Morris’s lawyer, Bryan Sullivan, quickly sent Comer a letter condemning the legislator for misrepresenting the testimony — a letter that certainly comported with Comer’s past practice but that was hard to evaluate on the merits given that no transcript was available.
On Tuesday, the transcript was made public. And Sullivan’s criticism of Comer was very much proved to be warranted.
The Morris-Hunter Biden relationship is not one that would be familiar to most people. But in his response to questions from House members and committee staff, Morris explained how he came to consider the younger Biden a friend and quickly agreed to similarly serve as his legal counsel.
Both men, Morris said, had experienced addiction. Both came from the same community. Both had Irish Catholic family backgrounds.
“I had a very tribal feeling about Hunter,” Morris told the committee. “He’s a guy. I have brothers. He’s from close. He was in a lot of trouble. … I basically found him like a guy getting the crap beat out of him … by a gang of people. And, you know, where we come from, you don’t let that happen. You get in and you start swinging.”
The two met in late November 2019 at a Biden fundraiser, as Comer noted, but only cursorily. A few weeks later, Morris testified under penalty of perjury, Hunter Biden reached out for legal advice about an unidentified entertainment issue. The two talked for hours, establishing the bond Morris describes above.
“That was a very profound meeting,” he said during the deposition, “and it was, you know, one of the most important meetings of my life.”
A bit later, Morris began loaning Hunter Biden money. In his testimony, he makes clear that this wasn’t simply passing cash to Hunter Biden. He met the president’s son only months into Hunter’s sobriety, and soon after the younger Biden had been pulled by Donald Trump’s Republican allies into Trump’s first impeachment inquiry. This was the period when Trump would demand “Where’s Hunter?” during campaign rallies, with the result that Hunter Biden became the focus of an enormous amount of unwanted attention. Hunter’s wife was pregnant, Morris testified, and his safety was at risk. So Morris did what he testified he often does, pulling together a team to help Hunter Biden move forward. He found a house in a private neighborhood and paid the rent directly. He hired security. He paid off overdue payments on a car so that Hunter could return it.
The payments, Morris testified, were to third parties (including, eventually, the IRS) and were memorialized by separate attorneys in promissory notes. Those notes included interest requirements and payment deadlines beginning in 2025. More than once, Morris and Sullivan rejected the idea that he “gave” Hunter Biden money, and Morris more than once said he expected the president’s son to pay the money back.
Morris did testify that he met President Biden, several times. Those meetings were at White House events at which Morris and Biden spoke only briefly, just as other guests did. Morris was asked explicitly — again, under penalty of perjury — if he made the payments to aid Joe Biden politically (“In helping Hunter Biden, was your intent to help President Biden?” he was asked; “No,” he responded) or whether he’d asked the president (once elected) to take any official action on his behalf. Over and over, he flatly denied having done so.
The idea that the tax payments were intended to aid presidential candidate Joe Biden was tied back to Morris’s urging his team and his attorneys to more rapidly address the outstanding tax payments.
“We are under considerable risk personally and politically to get the returns in,” he wrote in an email on Feb. 7, 2020.
Morris said that, when helping others recovering from addiction in the past, addressing outstanding tax obligations was one of his first recommended steps. Clearing up those pressures, he said, was important to preventing relapse.
Asked to explain the “politically” comment in the deposition, Morris suggested that the pressure stemmed from the impeachment probe. It didn’t; Trump had already been acquitted. But around the same time the email was sent, the New York Times published an article explaining how Senate Republicans were moving forward in investigating Hunter’s finances. Asked whether he was saying that the “political risk had nothing to do with then-candidate Joe Biden,” Morris said he was. Admittedly eyebrow-raising, but all the deposition offers is Morris’s denial.
Now again, consider how Comer framed all of this. That the two met at a fundraiser and then Morris began paying Hunter Biden’s tax bills to insulate Joe Biden. That these were “loans” — implying they weren’t. That this generosity granted Morris dubious access to Joe Biden. None of this is justified by Morris’s testimony; Comer is instead simply trying to frame Morris’s testimony in negative terms.
He does so, presumably, because he knows that his close allies in right-wing media will not read the primary document and because he is signaling how the testimony should be contextualized.
On Wednesday morning, Comer’s closest media ally, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, welcomed Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) to her show.
“It’s incredible to me,” Bartiromo said, “that a guy, Kevin Morris, could meet Hunter Biden and then two weeks later, give him $5 million.” This isn’t at all what happened, but reality has of late not served as much of an encumbrance to Bartiromo.
Donalds took the opportunity to insinuate that everything about Hunter Biden, his businesses and Kevin Morris was suspicious, as you’d expect. Bartiromo asked about Morris buying an LLC formed by Hunter Biden that had a minority stake in a hedge fund run by Chinese investors. Donalds declared that “this stake in the Chinese company stinks to high heaven because Mr. Morris would have never got it if it wasn’t for Hunter Biden,” which, considered by itself, is not a robust argument.
Then Bartiromo followed up.
“Do you think Kevin Morris is working for the Chinese Communist Party?” she asked, with complete earnestness. “Is that why he’s paying all this money and helping Hunter so much?”
Never mind that this is a weird question to pose right after Donalds suggested that Morris was suspicious for gaining access to this Chinese company — the question was also addressed by Morris in the deposition.
“You are not an agent or a lawyer for the Communist Chinese government?” asked Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), Oversight’s top Democrat.
“No,” Morris replied — again under penalty of perjury.
“What is your understanding of why you’re here?” Raskin asked a bit later.
“You know, that’s a good question, Congressman,” Morris replied. “I guess because of my relationship with Hunter and because there’s a financial aspect to it, I guess.”
And that’s exactly right. Sure, the relationship is unusual, but Morris’s full, non-cherry-picked testimony at least offers a rationale for it. But he was deposed and his testimony was reshaped and molded by Comer to seem damaging because Comer and House Republicans are in the habit of doing that with everyone to whom they speak. Morris checked the “Hunter” and “money” boxes, and so, despite what he said, he became a vehicle for talking about “Hunter” and “money” in nefarious terms. And, despite the utter lack of any obvious connection to the president, he somehow became evidence of Joe Biden’s wrongdoing, too.
This is how these investigations have worked from the very beginning.
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