Based on testimony from an IRS whistleblower, the New York Post reports that Hunter Biden received $4.9 million from his “sugar bro,” Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, between 2020 and 2022. While the paper rightly describes this sum as “staggering,” I don’t think it’s all that surprising.
As I detailed during the summer, at some point the president’s son quietly transferred to Morris his stake in the lucrative investment partnership he had formed with agents of the Chinese government in 2013 — after he flew with then–vice president Joe Biden on Air Force 2 to Beijing, where he negotiated the arrangement with his principal partner, Jonathan Li (for whose son Joe Biden later wrote a letter to help the younger Li get into an American Ivy League school).
Hunter eventually acquired a 10 percent stake in that venture, known as Bohai Harvest RST. “Bohai” refers to the Chinese end; “RST” refers to (a) Rosemont Seneca, the partnership Hunter Biden former with his friend and business partner Devon Archer, and (b) the Thornton Group, a Boston-based investment firm run by James (Jim) Bulger — the son of the Democratic Party powerhouse William (Billy) Bulger (longtime president of the Massachusetts state senate) and nephew of James (Whitey) Bulger, the infamous mobster, who was killed in federal prison in 2018.
For public consumption, the value of Hunter’s stake has been estimated at $420,000 — 10 percent of the original capitalization of Bohai, long before Hunter acquired the stake. As I explained in the column, the stake is undoubtedly worth many times that amount.
Because of its close connections to the Xi Jinping regime and the Chinese Communist Party, Bohai has the inside track on opportunities not available to ordinary investors. And with the American heft of the “Biden brand,” it has scored big deals that Americans would find alarming if the media covered them as they would nonstop if Republicans were involved – e.g., a $3.8 billion cobalt mine in Africa (cobalt being essential for the batteries of the electric vehicles the Biden administration is trying to make us all drive), as well as the purchase of Henniges Automotive, which enabled the military forces of America’s most challenging geopolitical foe to acquire valuable anti-vibration technology. Moreover, Bohai made a killing when it sold its investment in China’s top battery manufacturer (Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd., or CATL) for $30.1 million — nearly twice what Bohai had paid for it two years earlier.
Based on reporting by Peter Schweizer (who was relying on analysis by University of Chicago finance expert Steven Kaplan), I related in the column:
A private-equity fund such as Bohai, with over $2 billion under management, will typically generate hundreds of millions of dollars in fees over its lifespan. Consequently, a 10 percent stake in it could be worth several million dollars — it is impossible to say exactly how much because such assets are ultimately worth whatever a buyer is willing to pay in an arms-length sale.
Hunter was forced to part with his stake because his continued retention of it proved awkward for his father. Joe Biden had promised in the 2020 campaign that his family members would refrain from foreign business arrangements. (Aside: I’ve always wondered how that conversation went, since Biden also claimed that he never discussed business with his son, nor with Jim Biden, Hunter’s oft-time partner in the enterprise of monetizing Joe’s political influence.)
The president’s son continued to hold his stake in the China venture through the first months of the Biden administration. It was sufficiently valuable that he didn’t want to part with it, despite the embarrassment caused by the breaking of his father’s campaign promise. It was a matter about which the administration was tight-lipped until finally, in late 2021, Hunter’s lawyers represented that he had divested his Bohai stake — as well as any interest in the corporate vehicle by which he’d held it, an LLC called Skaneateles.
The Biden camp declined to say to whom the stake had been transferred. But as digging by the Washington Free Beacon and Washington Examiner determined, it was transferred to Kevin Morris.
Last night’s reporting from the Post pertains to testimony that IRS investigator Joseph Ziegler provided to the House Ways and Means Committee. Ziegler spent five years as the lead investigator in the tax case the IRS was building against Hunter. He became a whistleblower after he and others on his team were removed from the investigation following their internal complaints that the Biden Justice Department was giving the president’s son preferential treatment. In fact, the lead prosecutor, Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss, tried — but failed — to disappear the case through a sweetheart plea deal, only after dragging his feet so long that the statute of limitations expired on some of the most significant potential charges.
Prior to Ziegler’s latest testimony, it had been known that Morris paid Hunter’s tax arrears and purchased some of the latent prodigy’s dazzling paintings. The agent’s new revelations indicate that Morris’s outlays for Hunter, at close to $5 million, have been about twice as large as previously reported.
The transcript of Ziegler’s testimony has not yet become available. It is thus unclear whether there was any discussion of Hunter Biden’s Bohai stake, its estimated value, the circumstances of its transfer to Morris, and what if any connection there is between that transfer and the lawyer’s startling generosity toward the president’s son.