Hunter Biden allies to go after his accusers
WASHINGTON — Hunter Biden’s friend and lawyer Kevin Morris was blunt in laying out his thoughts at a strategy session last September on an expected onslaught of investigations by House Republicans: It was crucial, he suggested, for Biden’s camp to be more aggressive.
Morris, at the meeting in his California home, described defamation lawsuits the team could pursue against the presidential son’s critics, including Fox News, Eric Trump and Rudy Giuliani. He outlined extensive research on two potential witnesses against Hunter Biden — a spurned business partner named Tony Bobulinski and a computer repairman named John Paul Mac Isaac.
At one point, Biden himself happened to call into the meeting, connecting briefly by video to add his own thoughts.
“They feel that there is a whole counternarrative missing because of the whole Hunter-hater narrative out there,” said liberal activist David Brock, who attended the meeting. “What we really got into was more the meat of it, the meat of what a response would look like.” Brock was planning for a new group, Facts First USA, focused on fighting the looming House GOP investigations. The meeting was a glimpse into a sprawling infrastructure that is rapidly, almost frantically, assembling to combat Republicans’ plans to turn Hunter Biden into a major news story when the GOP takes over the House next year. The risk for Hunter Biden, and possibly for President Biden as well, is that this hodgepodge of efforts is not fully coordinating and does not share a unified approach, according to people involved in the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics.
Hunter Biden has been working with Morris, his friend and sometime financial benefactor, and a team of researchers. Biden has hired several other lawyers — Chris Clark, who is handling a federal criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings and other matters, along with a separate attorney, Joshua A. Levy, to deal directly with the House investigators.
Meanwhile, the White House and the Democratic National Committee have developed their own strategies for dealing with what could be a political firestorm around the president’s son. Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel under President Barack Obama, is set to represent President Biden in a personal capacity should the need arise. And a trio of
Democratic-aligned outside groups has stepped up to provide rapid response and other communications.
But these various efforts are not always coordinating, and several people involved expressed concern about the aggressive tack suggested by Morris, who wants to elevate Hunter Biden’s public role.
Morris, a Hollywood lawyer and novelist who has worked with celebrity clients and the creators of television’s “South Park,” befriended Hunter in 2019, when the president’s son was by his own account recovering from a serious drug addiction. Morris has already attracted the attention of House Republicans, who sent him a letter in June asking about reports that he gave Biden some $2 million to help pay off a tax bill that is a subject of the federal investigation.
Some involved in these efforts argue that Hunter Biden and Morris should stay out of the limelight so Democrats can focus on painting the Republican investigations as a partisan political exercise. “No one thinks this strategy of putting Hunter Biden front and center is smart,” said one Democrat involved in the broader effort, who requested anonymity to describe private conversations. “No one, including the White House, thinks this is a smart strategy.”
The division is in part between associates of Hunter Biden, who tend to favor a more aggressive strategy, and other strategists who want Biden to keep a lower profile. Sources close to Hunter Biden emphasized that they are operating separately from the White House. Brock said his organization also remains independent of Hunter Biden and his team and is following its own strategy.
For the White House, the overriding message is that Hunter Biden is clearly a private citizen and an inappropriate target for Congress to investigate, and that Republicans are more concerned with pursuing conspiracies than solving the country’s problems.
“The president loves his son and is proud that he has overcome his addiction and is moving forward with his life,” said Ian Sams, a White House spokesman handling the upcoming House investigations. “Congressional Republicans’ politically motivated partisan attacks on the president and his family are rooted in nonsensical conspiracy theories and do nothing to address the real issues Americans care about.”
White House officials have previously said they plan to minimize their cooperation with investigations like the Hunter Biden inquiry that they view as politically motivated, while honoring GOP-led probes on more substantive topics like the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan.
In the meantime, Hunter Biden, who has not commented on the inquiries for months while under Justice Department investigation, has been taking on a more prominent public role in recent weeks. He has appeared at a number of White House events, at times with his 2-year-old son Beau.
Hunter Biden recently walked his daughter Naomi down the aisle for her White House wedding, appeared at the Kennedy Center Honors and attended a state dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron. At one point during that dinner, Hunter Biden walked up to a group including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and said hello to McCarthy’s mother, according to people familiar with the exchange who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private interaction.
To some, it seemed a classic Biden-style moment of trying to charm an adversary. A McCarthy spokesman did not respond to a request for comment, but pointed to a statement released this week that included “Hunter Biden” among roughly a dozen areas that Republicans will prioritize for investigations. McCarthy has been nominated by House Republicans to be the next House speaker, though he has not yet secured all the votes he needs.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), who is in line to chair the House Oversight Committee, has outlined a number of investigative steps he wants to take in probing Hunter Biden’s previous business dealings, including a lucrative business arrangement with a Chinese energy conglomerate.
The Washington Post reported in March that the conglomerate, CEFC China Energy, and its executives paid $4.8 million over 14 months to entities controlled by Hunter and his uncle, James Biden. The Post did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details of the transactions.
Bobulinski has alleged that he was part of a previous deal related to CEFC that had involved Joe Biden, although it never came to fruition. The president has denied those claims and maintained his long-standing assertion that he never discussed foreign business dealings with his son.
In an interview, Comer said his investigation will be focused on the president, not his son. “The reason we’re investigating Joe Biden is to determine if this president and this White House are compromised, because of the millions of dollars that his family has received from our adversaries in China, Russia and Ukraine,” Comer said.