Legal analyst and attorney Jonathan Turley warned on Saturday of a critical “problem” within the complicated relationship between Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, and his lawyer Kevin Morris.
Hunter Biden has been on Republicans’ radar amid a House impeachment inquiry into President Biden. GOP members on the House Oversight Committee have claimed that the president has been involved in and benefited from his son’s foreign business dealings. The White House has repeatedly denied that the president had any involvement in his son’s dealings. President Biden, meanwhile, has called the inquiry a “baseless political stunt.”
On Thursday, House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican leading the inquiry against President Biden, issued a statement following a transcribed interview with Morris, a Hollywood entertainment lawyer, which occurred earlier in the day.
“Kevin Morris’s massive financial support to Hunter Biden raises ethical and campaign finance concerns for President Joe Biden,” Comer said in his statement. “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.”
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Comer claimed that Morris admitted during the interview that he had loaned “at least $5 million” to Hunter. Morris’ lawyer, Bryan Sullivan, said Comer’s statement had “cherry‐picked, out of context and totally misleading descriptions of what Mr. Morris said.”
Newsweek reached out to Sullivan and Hunter Biden’s lead counsel Abbe Lowell via email for comment.
Meanwhile, Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote an opinion piece for The Hill on Saturday explaining the relationship between Hunter and Morris, and how it can spell trouble.
Turley cited a statement Sullivan gave to CBS News earlier this month, in which he said: “Hunter is not only a client of Kevin’s, he is his friend and there is no prohibition against helping a friend in need, despite the inability of these Republican chairmen and their allies to imagine such a thing.”
It is unclear when Morris gave the reported loans to Hunter and when he acted as Hunter’s lawyer.
“The statement captures the problem for Morris,” Turley wrote. “It is increasingly hard to determine what Morris was at any given moment: Democratic donor, lawyer, friend. Indeed, that is precisely the problem that some of us have raised for months.”
Mentioning Morris’ reported loans to Hunter, Turley added, “Morris insists that it was all standard ‘loan’ stuff. Except he is not a bank, and Hunter was routinely called his ‘client.'”
Turley explained to Newsweek via email on Saturday how the complex relationship between Hunter and Morris could potentially harm President Biden in his impeachment inquiry.
“It is not clear when Morris was acting as a democratic donor, a lawyer, or a friend. The specific role can have bearing on questions such as whether payments to Hunter were de facto campaign contributions for his father,” Turley said. “If Morris was acting to protect the campaign from what he referenced as political liabilities, it has legal implications.”
He continued: “The greatest impact may be to Morris himself. Legal ethical rules are designed to avoid this blurring of relational and representative roles. Some of the details on these different roles may become clearer with the release of the transcript and underlying documents.”
In his Saturday opinion piece, Turley also pointed out a complaint to the California Bar that conservative legal group America First Legal (AFL) filed earlier this week. AFL is headed by Stephen Miller who served as a senior adviser in the Trump administration.
AFL claimed Morris, a member of the California Bar, is in violation of the state’s Rules of Professional Conduct.
The compliant states that “if Mr. Morris has provided personal funds to an individual who has now been confirmed to be a client – or who would reasonably believe himself to be Mr. Morris’s client – Mr. Morris would have violated both the text of the Rules of Professional Conduct and the well-established norms of the legal profession.”
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.