Hunter Biden’s $6.5 Million Patron, Kevin Morris, Draws Fire

He found a house for Hunter Biden’s new family, paid divorce costs to Mr. Biden’s ex-wife and helped resolve a paternity lawsuit from a third woman. He footed the bill for Mr. Biden’s security, back taxes and car payments, facilitated the publication of a memoir and the launch of an art career, and provided emotional support as Mr. Biden dealt with scrutiny from prosecutors and political adversaries.

In recent years, no one has been more influential in helping Hunter Biden rebuild his life after a devastating battle with addiction than the Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris.

But Mr. Morris’s role has now become a flashpoint of its own.

His influence in shaping an aggressive legal and public relations defense for the president’s son against criminal indictments and Republican attacks has rankled President Biden’s advisers inside and outside the White House.

While they see the relationship as helping the president’s son avoid relapse, they also grumble that Mr. Morris’s generous financial backing, confrontational counsel and conspiracy theorizing has only drawn attention to Hunter and the impeachment push against his father by allies of former President Donald J. Trump.

“I’m not very popular at the White House,” Mr. Morris said in congressional testimony last month.

Although Mr. Morris says he has never had more than a few brief interactions with President Biden, his involvement has stoked investigations by House Republicans. They have been asking whether Mr. Morris is using the relationship with Hunter to further his own interests or provide backdoor financial help to the Biden 2024 re-election campaign.

The story of Mr. Morris’s support for the president’s son, as laid out in new detail in interviews, documents and congressional testimony, is a tangle of good intentions, deep pockets, family tragedy and legal and ethical issues. It comes amid scrutiny of payments that Hunter Biden received from previous wealthy patrons who could have benefited from access to his father or just the perception of it.

Mr. Morris has undoubtedly helped stabilize Hunter Biden’s life. But the defiant legal and public relations defense he shaped has so far failed to resolve Mr. Biden’s problems, and in some ways has called more attention to them.

As his father battles for re-election, Hunter Biden faces federal tax and gun charges to which he has pleaded not guilty, a congressional deposition later this month, mounting debt and the prospect of continuing to be a punching bag until at least Election Day.

Mr. Morris, who earned a fortune representing screenwriters and actors, has been visited by federal agents, received a grand jury subpoena, been referenced in the indictment of Mr. Biden and testified for hours before congressional committees. He has also been the subject of a bar complaint, death threats, cyberstalking and paparazzi photos of him smoking a bong on his balcony.

He has in some ways courted the spectacle. A documentary film crew from a production company he owns with five partners has trailed him and Mr. Biden in public, including recent surprise appearances at the Capitol, lending a reality television aura to the scenes.

Mr. Morris has spent more than $6.5 million to help Hunter Biden, money that both men now consider loans, including $1.2 million that was added to the tab just weeks ago, according to a letter from Mr. Morris’s lawyer. He has paid for the documentary filming and has agreed to pay nearly $900,000 for Mr. Biden’s art in an arrangement that appears to flout ethics policies endorsed by the White House.

Mr. Morris has not been accused of wrongdoing by the authorities, or of seeking favor from the Biden family. Nor has President Biden been accused of taking any action to benefit Mr. Morris.

Still, the question of what’s in it for Mr. Morris has only loomed larger as the attention on him has intensified.

But there also appears to be a genuine human element to the relationship, with the two men professing a deep fraternal affection.

Mr. Morris filled some small part of a vacuum created by the death of Mr. Biden’s beloved brother, Beau, in 2015; his divorce; and the fraying of personal relationships during his drug-fueled descent. And he has been a loyal confidant in a period in which Hunter’s foreign business entanglements and behavior during his addiction have been examined by prosecutors and exploited by Republicans.

‘Hunter, Kevin’

It started with a fleeting encounter at a fund-raiser in Los Angeles for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in the fall of 2019.

Mr. Morris — who had made his only donation on record to the Biden campaign around the time of the fund-raiser — was heading for the exit when he bumped into Hunter Biden.

The host, a film and music video producer named Lanette Phillips, made the briefest of introductions — “Hunter, Kevin” — Mr. Morris recalled in congressional testimony. Ms. Phillips followed up days later, arranging a meeting for Mr. Morris at Hunter Biden’s rental home overlooking the San Fernando Valley, ostensibly to view his art and to discuss some entertainment-related issues.

“We hit it off right away,” Mr. Morris, now 60, testified of Mr. Biden, 54.

While Mr. Morris’s family once relied on food stamps while he was growing up, he saw parallels between his life and that of the privileged son of a powerful politician.

Mr. Morris and Hunter Biden were both lawyers, art lovers and recovering addicts who grew up in large Irish Catholic families in the Philadelphia suburbs. They cheered for the Phillies and harbored nostalgia for hometown delicacies like Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets and cheesesteaks.

Their meeting stretched to four or five hours as Mr. Biden described the toll of years of drug and alcohol abuse. Newly sober, he was trying to pull his life together to provide for his new wife and the baby they were expecting.

But he was facing serious financial, political and potentially criminal repercussions from his years of reckless living, lavish spending and big paydays from foreign interests accused of corruption.

As Mr. Biden detailed his problems, Mr. Morris filled a yellow legal pad with plans for how to fix them.

“That was a very profound meeting, and it was, you know, one of the most important meetings of my life,” Mr. Morris later testified. “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.”

‘A client that needed 24/7’

He quickly signed a retainer to serve as a lawyer for Mr. Biden and his wife, Melissa Cohen.

Mr. Morris had represented celebrities with complex legal, financial and public relations needs, including the actors Matthew McConaughey and Minnie Driver, and the “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker. And he had experience helping people struggling with personal problems, including addiction.

He began talking to Mr. Biden almost daily.

“It was, you know, a client that needed 24/7,” Mr. Morris testified.

“People were coming up to his door with cameras, saying, ‘We just want to talk to him.’ People were yelling from outside of the bushes, ‘Hunter Biden, come out. Hunter Biden, come out,’” he added.

Mr. Morris, who during his congressional testimony suggested that he had assets of more than $100 million, helped Mr. Biden and Ms. Cohen move into a house on a canal in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, closer to Mr. Morris’s home in Pacific Palisades with expansive views of the ocean.

Mr. Morris paid the $17,500 monthly rent for nearly a year, and began footing the bill for security. He paid off $11,000 in past-due payments on a Porsche that Mr. Biden wanted to return. He flew Mr. Biden on his private jet to attend to various obligations around the country.

He helped renegotiate Mr. Biden’s contract to push back the release of his memoir, and he bought two pieces of Mr. Biden’s art for $40,000.

He acquired Mr. Biden’s stake in a Chinese private equity fund that had proved politically toxic but difficult to unload, assuming the $157,000 in debt that Mr. Biden had incurred to purchase it.

Within weeks of meeting Hunter Biden, Mr. Morris convened a crisis meeting in what he called “a war room” in his home.

About 10 people who had varying roles in Mr. Biden’s nascent resurrection gathered with Mr. Biden and Ms. Cohen around a long table in an open living room with views of a lush backyard and swimming pool.

Mr. Morris delivered a pep talk and began offering the broad contours of plans to restore Mr. Biden’s finances and counter his critics.

‘I want the money back’

Days later, a court filing indicated that Mr. Biden had agreed to pay child support to an Arkansas woman with whom he had a daughter. Mr. Morris fronted the cash.

Shortly after that, Mr. Morris emailed a tax accountant and others who were at the crisis meeting about finishing Mr. Biden’s overdue tax returns.

“We are under considerable risk personally and politically to get the returns in,” Mr. Morris wrote. He was concerned Republicans might seize on the tax issues if they succeeded in calling Hunter Biden to testify in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, which was unfolding at the time, Mr. Morris later explained during his congressional testimony.

Mr. Morris paid millions of dollars to settle Mr. Biden’s tax bill.

It wasn’t until October 2021 — nearly two years after Mr. Morris started footing bills for Mr. Biden — that they formalized an agreement under which the money would be treated as a loan. While unsecured, the loan agreement includes a 5 percent interest rate and calls for Mr. Biden to start making payments in October 2025.

It was the first of five similar loan agreements between Mr. Morris and Mr. Biden.

“Hunter wouldn’t accept it as a gift, and I want the money back,” Mr. Morris told the congressional committees, though he conceded he could forgive the debt or find ways to reduce it, including by deducting the cost of purchases of Mr. Biden’s art.

Helping Mr. Biden began consuming more of Mr. Morris’s time and money. He left the law firm he had started, partly to focus on Mr. Biden and partly to build a documentary production company he had co-founded. The endeavors would quickly intertwine. For Mr. Morris, who had separated from his wife in 2018, life came to revolve around Mr. Biden.

In an interview, Mr. Morris said that others “were afraid to help Hunter not just because of what he was accused of, but because of fear of political violence, the threat of physical retaliation against them and their families.”

That, he said, “only intensified my commitment to him,” adding “that fear cannot be accepted in any way if America is going to stay America.”

Mr. Morris’s patronage seemed in one instance to defy ethics guidelines created partly by Mr. Biden’s initial criminal defense lawyer, Christopher J. Clark, with input from the White House. The guidelines were intended to shield the identities of buyers of Mr. Biden’s art to avoid the perception that their purchases could curry favor with the Biden administration.

Mr. Morris ignored the guidelines, agreeing to buy 11 additional pieces of Mr. Biden’s art for a total of $875,000 through a New York gallerist who was showing the collection, Georges Bergès. Hunter Biden was aware of the purchase.

The White House declined to comment on the relationship or the art purchases.

Mr. Morris, who had previously purchased two other pieces, became the largest buyer of Mr. Biden’s art, Mr. Bergès testified to the House committees.

Mr. Morris told the committees that he bought the pieces because “the art is, in my view as an art collector, very good. I probably have over 200 pieces of art over the years. I take art collecting seriously.”

Valuable footage

Mr. Morris has published three books of literary fiction that received some positive reviews. He produced a critically acclaimed documentary in the late 1990s about contestants vying to win a pickup truck by keeping one hand on it longer than their rivals. His company is working on others, including one about Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican House member from Illinois who became a leading anti-Trump voice.

For about four years, a crew from Mr. Morris’s documentary company has been following Mr. Biden almost everywhere. They filmed as he painted and showed his art, conducted an off-the-record interview and held strategy sessions with Mr. Morris and lawyers. They even flew to Serbia to capture behind-the-scenes footage of the production of a movie that presents a fictionalized depiction of a debauched and corrupt Hunter Biden.

Mr. Morris told congressional investigators that he was considering producing a commercial documentary after Mr. Biden’s legal problems are resolved.

A person familiar with the project said Mr. Morris was exploring options for self-distribution using a combination of online pay-per-view streaming and a limited theatrical release for which Mr. Biden might do publicity. The documentary team envisions a series of episodes building on the redemption story in Mr. Biden’s memoir, and depicting him as the victim of an unprecedented invasion of privacy and a barrage of political attacks.

Mr. Biden would have neither editorial control over the documentary, nor any financial interest in it, the person said. If it does not become a commercial project, the person said, filming expenses could be included among Mr. Biden’s legal costs, and added to the growing tab of debts to Mr. Morris in an effort to keep the footage privileged and protect it from subpoena.

Expanding influence

After the 2020 presidential race, the Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden heated up, with subpoenas issued to associates including Mr. Morris, who was compelled to produce documents to a grand jury.

Mr. Morris also became heavily involved in the pushback against embarrassing disclosures about Mr. Biden drawn from data linked to a laptop Mr. Biden was said to have abandoned in a Delaware computer repair shop.

Mr. Morris retained forensic analysts to study the data. He also quietly pushed a complex theory under which the repair shop was a front and the information had been made public through a cast of characters including a psychiatrist who had treated Mr. Biden’s addiction using ketamine therapy and the Trump-allied operative Roger J. Stone Jr.

Mr. Morris promoted this theory to reporters and others, initially using a rough hand-drawn timeline, and later professional-looking graphics.

Prosecutors subsequently poured cold water on the theory, stating in a court filing that Mr. Biden left the laptop at a computer store, and that its contents “were largely duplicative” of data they had subpoenaed directly from his Apple iCloud account.

Mr. Morris’s unconventional tactics were discouraged by two lawyers recommended to Hunter Biden by his father’s personal attorney, Bob Bauer: Mr. Clark, the criminal lawyer, and Joshua A. Levy, who had been retained to respond to congressional investigations. They consulted with Mr. Bauer about Hunter Biden’s issues.

President Biden’s brother James Biden also questioned Mr. Morris’s political acumen and his motivations for helping Hunter, concluding that it may have been because of “ego,” according to notes of an interview of James Biden by federal agents and prosecutors. The president’s brother reportedly told the agent that Mr. Morris bristled when he felt his advice was being ignored by Hunter Biden’s lawyers.

Mr. Morris urged dispensing with the traditional Washington scandal playbook and embracing tactics like those used in celebrity public relations.

“We’re not going for a tie; we have to win this,” he told others.

Mr. Morris started to gain more control when Mr. Levy parted ways with the team after clashing with him.

To replace him, Mr. Morris facilitated the hiring of the veteran Washington scandal lawyer Abbe Lowell, who is known for bare-knuckle tactics more akin to what Mr. Morris was advocating. Within months, with Mr. Morris fronting the costs, Mr. Lowell had filed suits against the computer repair shop owner, the I.R.S., Rudolph W. Giuliani and others.

After the collapse last summer of a plea deal that would have resolved tax and gun investigations without Hunter Biden serving any prison time, Mr. Clark, who was the last impediment to Mr. Morris’s no-holds-barred approach, resigned from the legal team.

Embracing the spectacle

On the December day that Hunter Biden had been subpoenaed to testify to Republican-led House committees, he instead appeared at a surprise news conference outside the Capitol.

Accompanied by Mr. Morris and Mr. Lowell, who helped plan the appearance, Mr. Biden was defiant. He accused Republicans of pursuing “illegitimate investigations of my family” to “dehumanize me, all to embarrass and damage my father, who has devoted his entire life to service.”

(Mr. Lowell later agreed to have Hunter Biden appear before the investigating committees on Feb. 28.)

Channeling her perception of the sentiment inside the administration, President Biden’s former press secretary, Jen Psaki, said in a television appearance a few days after the news conference: “Please, Hunter Biden, we know your dad loves you. Please stop talking in public.”

Yet, when Republicans convened hearings last month to vote on contempt of Congress charges against Mr. Biden, he and Mr. Morris crashed the session, surprising, among others, President Biden’s advisers.

With the documentary crew in tow, Mr. Biden, Mr. Morris and Mr. Lowell filed into the Oversight Committee’s hearing room and sat in the front row. On one side was Mr. Lowell. On the other was Mr. Morris, whose look — a purple plaid sports jacket by the Italian designer Kiton, over a black shirt sans tie and his long hair slicked back — stood out in a sea of dark-suited Washington conformity.