Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris faced questions during a closed-door interview with Congress about the millions of dollars he gave to help Hunter Biden with his financial troubles in 2020, according to lawmakers and sources familiar with the interview.
Morris appeared Thursday on Capitol Hill and told the House Judiciary and Oversight committees that he has loaned Hunter Biden $5 million, Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said.
“The terms of the loans, Kevin Morris wasn’t exactly clear, which I find that unusual because he knew that’s what this deposition was going to be about,” Comer said after the interview.
Comer said that Morris indicated that he was confident Hunter Biden would pay the money back.
Comer also emphasized Morris’s access to President Joe Biden, a point that comes as Republicans lead an impeachment inquiry into whether Joe Biden abused his political power to help his family members profit.
“He’s been to the White House three times,” Comer said. “[Morris] said he’s spoken to Joe Biden three times at least.”
The full transcript of the roughly five-hour interview is not yet available, but Comer plans to release it once it is, according to an Oversight spokesperson.
Ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) also spoke to reporters roughly two hours into the interview and blasted Republicans for fixating on “whether or not a friend can loan a friend a lot of money.”
“[Morris] seems like a very generous and loving friend, so really, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what we were doing in there,” Raskin said.
Republicans have pointed to the fact that Joe Biden was in the heat of a presidential campaign in 2020 when Morris began helping his son pay off his debts. Hunter Biden has since been charged with nine tax crimes for allegedly failing to pay taxes for four years — until Morris entered the scene. The first son has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
GOP lawmakers have raised ethics questions about whether the payments could have amounted to an illegal campaign donation, particularly after they obtained an email from 2020 in which Morris said that Hunter Biden’s taxes needed to be handled quickly because “we are under considerable risk personally and politically.”
A source with direct knowledge of the interview shut down any notion that Morris’s loans were not aboveboard.
“Morris made clear that he loaned money to Hunter when he needed help and never asked, expected, or received anything from the White House, the Administration, the Biden family, nor the President in exchange for his representation, loans, and friendship with Hunter,” the source said.
Morris did not take questions leaving the interview, but his attorney later criticized Comer in a letter obtained by the Washington Examiner, accusing the chairman of giving “cherry-picked, out of context” information to the public.
“You did not treat Mr. Morris fairly and engaged in your standard practice of partially and inaccurately leaking a witness’s statements,” the attorney wrote Thursday evening.
The attorney pointed to a press release Comer sent out after the interview and laid out additional context about Morris’s interactions with Joe Biden. He said they were “cursory communications” at large events and “hardly the impression that [Comer] intended” with his “false and misleading” descriptions of the encounters.
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“We do not have to have this dueling rendition of what Mr. Morris actually said. Just release the full transcript,” Morris’s attorney wrote.
A spokesperson for the committee responded that the transcript, which the committee has vowed to release once available, “would affirm Chairman Comer’s readout of the interview.”