Biden donor cited political ‘risk’ of Hunter Biden taxes before paying them off

A donor to President Joe Biden’s campaign and close personal friend to Hunter Biden cited the political threat Hunter Biden’s unpaid taxes posed during the 2020 race, raising questions about whether the money the donor paid to cover his bill at the time represented a violation of campaign finance law.

The email was among dozens of pages of documents published this week by the House Ways and Means Committee, which received them from a pair of IRS agents who spent years working on an investigation of Hunter Biden’s taxes and foreign business dealings.

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In the February 2020 message, entertainment lawyer Kevin Morris pushed the accountants working with Hunter Biden on his tax problems to move quickly.

“We are under considerable risk personally and politically to get the returns in,” Morris wrote to the accountants on Feb. 7, 2020. Morris apologized for putting “pressure” on them during an earlier conversation.

The email appears to corroborate earlier testimony from the IRS whistleblowers about an alleged campaign finance violation that surfaced during the 2020 race.

Federal election laws require strict reporting on donations that benefit a candidate, including contributions to help a candidate that don’t involve direct payments to his or her campaign.

Stephanie Scarbrough/AP

“When a person or entity pays for services on the [campaign] committee’s behalf, the payment is an in-kind contribution,” the Federal Election Commission states on its website. “An expenditure made by any person or entity in cooperation, consultation or concert with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate’s campaign is also considered an in-kind contribution to the candidate.”

Gary Shapley, one of the IRS agents, told Congress in May that agents had raised the concern of a campaign finance allegation to the team investigating Hunter Biden in 2021 but that Lesley Wolf, then a top prosecutor assigned to the case, instructed agents not to look into the allegation.

Shapley’s handwritten notes from the time support his claim that Wolf shut down questions about whether the Morris payments violated the law.

Troy Schmidt, one of the accountants Hunter Biden engaged in 2019 to address years of unfiled taxes, told investigators in a 2021 interview that he was summoned to a “crisis meeting” at Morris’s California home, seemingly sometime in January 2020, alongside at least 10 advisers, according to a document made public this week. Schmidt said Morris was described to him as an adviser to the Biden “family,” not just as a friend of Hunter Biden.

The two-hour meeting did not involve discussion of tax return preparation, Schmidt said, so it was unclear why a Biden family adviser would have summoned an accountant to attend. Schmidt claimed he did not recall what was discussed.

“Morris was not involved in the tax return prep,” Schmidt said.

Joe Biden’s campaign did not list the tax payment from Morris as a contribution, even though Morris’s payment to the IRS on behalf of Hunter Biden appeared specifically geared toward protecting the then-presidential candidate from negative headlines. Morris went on to make more payments to help Hunter Biden try to avoid prosecution after Joe Biden became president.

Indeed, one of the other accountants involved with helping Hunter Biden resolve his tax problems in 2020 told investigators the following year that Morris and Hunter Biden “prioritized” paying off the tax bills likely to result in a penalty that could become public, such as the issuance of a lien, amid concerns “there was going to be media attention,” according to a document the committee made public in September.

Other pieces of evidence suggest Morris’s tax payments went beyond a kind gesture to a friend.

FBI and IRS agents questioned Joe Biden’s brother James as to why he had sent Morris a message thanking him for his help “on behalf of the family” just weeks after Morris paid off some of Hunter Biden’s taxes during an election year, a memo of the September 2022 interview with James Biden showed.

James Biden told investigators he could not recall specifically why he said that.

Morris is a major donor to Democratic candidates and contributed significant sums toward Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, giving $25,000 to American Bridge 21st Century, a liberal political action committee, $10,000 to the Lincoln Project, a group created to help defeat Joe Biden’s rival Donald Trump, and the maximum allowable contribution to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, according to OpenSecrets.

Congressional Republicans, including House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), have spent more than a year attempting to get Morris to answer questions about whether Morris has been giving Joe Biden in-kind contributions by attempting to minimize the political liability posed by his son.

Much of the money Morris has given to Hunter Biden since 2020 — as much as $4.9 million, IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler told lawmakers on Tuesday — has been labeled as a loan.

While Morris appeared, according to the newly released documents, to begin paying off Hunter Biden’s tax bills in 2020, he and Hunter Biden did not appear to enter into a loan agreement until October 2021, Ziegler testified in May.

For example, Morris paid $160,000 in January 2020 to settle a 2015 tax debt that had become a point of contention with Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, who, Ziegler said this week, was struggling at the time to obtain a new passport because of her ex-husband’s tax debts.

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The loan agreement from 2021 prevented Hunter Biden from owing taxes on any of the money he received from Morris, whom Hunter Biden described as a “personal friend” in a note attached to his 2020 tax return, Ziegler said. The agreement also shielded Hunter Biden from any obligation to repay the loans until 2025, which will be after his father’s reelection campaign is over.

Neither Morris nor Hunter Biden’s lawyer responded to requests for comment.