NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE W hether Kevin Morris is pulling on a bong on the balcony of his California home while his guest, Hunter Biden — the president’s son with his infamous history of drug abuse — lounges inside, or whether Morris is walking into the Delaware federal courthouse to support Hunter at what turned out to be a failed guilty plea over $2.8 million in taxes Morris paid on Hunter’s behalf, it is clear that the Hollywood lawyer-turned-novelist is backing his “sugar bro” to the hilt.
Morris, it is said, is even a purchaser of Hunter’s artistic oeuvre. It’s hard to confirm that, thanks to the Bidenesque opacity of the sales records. But it must be a good investment: making like Ukrainian energy oligarchs, deep-pocketed Democrats have reportedly poured $1.3 million into the prodigy’s coffers. Even if he’s not the next Rembrandt, surely there will always be a place for Hunter at Sherwin-Williams or Home Depot. After all, his father was once the next . . . um . . . Neil Kinnock.
In light of the millions Morris has doled out, a friend asked me whether there weren’t gift-tax consequences for Hunter. Well, no, I explained; such taxes have to be paid by the giver, not the recipient.
That raises a question, though: Are such taxes just another heavy bill for Morris to bear in support of the president’s son? Well, that all depends on whether the ostensible largesse is really a gift, doesn’t it?
What if Hunter had something of great value — something that, reluctantly, he needed to get rid of because it was embarrassing his father, and something Morris may have been willing to take off his hands?
The questions bring us back a decade. That’s when Hunter hitched a ride to Beijing with his then-vice-president dad. There, after of course not discussing the matter at all with his father during the 15-hour flight, Hunter went into business with the Chinese Communist Party — a business relationship cemented with an introduction of his main partner, Jonathan Li, to then–Vice President Biden shortly after Air Force Two touched down. The elder Biden, at the request of Hunter and his partners, would later write a letter of recommendation to try to get Li’s son into an American Ivy League school. But trust them: Joe and his son never once discussed Hunter’s lucrative partnership with components of Xi Jinping’s regime, cross their hearts!
The business was an investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (Bohai), registered in Shanghai and backed by both the Bank of China and the Chinese Development Bank, among other powerhouse financial institutions. It was a coup for the Bidens — if you’re going to try to do business in a monstrous totalitarian state, it’s good to be aligned with the monstrous totalitarians, right?
On paper, the investment fund was originally capitalized with $4.2 million. In reality, given the might of its backers and the opportunities uniquely available to it, Bohai was surely worth much more than that.
For example, as the New York Times reported, in 2016 Bohai helped a Chinese conglomerate purchase a $3.8 billion cobalt mine in the Republic of Congo. Cobalt, it should be noted, is essential to the manufacture of batteries for those electric cars that President Biden wants us driving. The Biden-backed Bohai also helped Xi Jinping’s state-owned defense conglomerate, AVIC (Aviation Industry Corporation of China) acquire Henniges Automotive, the world’s leading designer of anti-vibration technology (which has significant military uses). As Peter Schweizer has reported, AVIC has been accused of stealing U.S. technology related to both the Air Force’s F-35 stealth fighter (tech that has been incorporated into China’s own stealth fighter, the J-31) and American drone systems (tech that has been used to produce China’s own drones).
Bohai, and derivatively Hunter Biden, had another coup in 2016 when the fund made a $15.3 million investment in CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology, Ltd.), China’s top battery manufacturer. With that valuable asset in hand, Bohai in 2017 invited Hunter to become a 10 percent owner of the investment fund.
Absurdly, the price tag for this valuable stake was commensurate with Bohai’s original on-paper capitalization of $4.2 million. That is, because Hunter was allowed to acquire this 10-percent-equity share under the fiction that Bohai had not become far more valuable since its 2013 inception, he had to pay only $420,000. And as things naturally seem to go in the Biden influence-peddling racket, Hunter didn’t even have to ante up that relatively paltry sum.
Instead, $150,000 of it was loaned to him by his Chinese partners. The 10 percent Bohai stake was held by a business entity called Skaneateles, LLC, in which Hunter partnered with longtime Biden associate Eric Scherwin. (The LLC is named after a town in upstate New York, the area where the family of Hunter’s late mother is from.) So originally, in 2017, Skaneateles received the $150,000 loan from Li and Bohai. The following year, Hunter and Scherwin had a falling out and dissolved their partnership, with Hunter taking over Skaneateles and the full 10 percent Bohai stake. In a 2018 amendment to the loan, the identity of the lender was identified as Xin Wang – she is Bohai managing partner and a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer.
With its insider position as an investment fund tied to the Xi regime, Bohai got a windfall when China allowed CATL to go public in 2018. As the Wall Street Journal has reported, Bohai’s shares zoomed up 44 percent at the initial public offering and kept climbing. A Financial Times analysis concluded that when Bohai sold its CATL investment in 2018, the fund pocketed $30.1 million, nearly doubling its investment. Hunter was thus able to pay off the $150,000 loan from his Chinese partners with his share of the profits. As Scherwin told him in a late 2018 email — when they were dividing assets in the dissolution of their partnership — the Bohai stake would generate significant income for Hunter in the coming years.
Nevertheless, Hunter’s Bohai stake became a headache when Joe Biden decided to run for president. To draw a sharp distinction between himself and then-President Donald Trump, whose family business has significant overseas holdings and dealings, Biden said that no one in his family would have foreign business arrangements if he were elected president. That seems precious when we look back on it now, through the prism of revelations that the Biden family influence-peddling enterprise is dependent on millions of dollars in payouts from foreign actors tied to corrupt and anti-American regimes.
Because of Biden’s no-foreign-business comments, the White House and Hunter Biden’s representatives were dogged through the first months of the Biden administration by questions about Hunter’s Bohai stake. The administration grudgingly acknowledged that Hunter had not yet divested — but he was working on it.
The reason for the delay was clear: Hunter did not want to embarrass his father, but neither did he want to part with a valuable asset (and neither, obviously, did his father want to pressure Hunter to part with an asset that could generate lots of money). As Schweizer has pointed out, relying on University of Chicago finance researcher Steven Kaplan, 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.
In late 2021, Hunter’s lawyers began insisting that he had divested his Bohai stake. Yet Chinese business records continued to maintain that the 10 percent share was still held by Skaneateles, LLC. Hunter’s flacks countered that he no longer held any interest in Skaneateles, either. They refused to say, however, to whom he had transferred the Bohai stake and who now controlled Skaneateles.
Turns out — surprise! — it is none other than Kevin Morris.
It is unclear exactly when Hunter transferred Skaneateles to Morris, but he is now listed in formal legal documents as the LLC’s managing member. Moreover, as the Washington Free Beacon and Washington Examiner have reported, about three months ago (on April 20), a Bohai executive named Heng-Yin Zhang emailed Hunter’s longtime partner James Bulger with “signing instructions” for a contract stipulating that Morris now controls Hunter’s 10 percent Bohai share.
Bulger runs the Boston-based Thornton Group, which is the “T” in Bohai Harvest RST — the “RS” stands for Rosemont Seneca, the partnership formed by Hunter Biden and Devon Archer (as well as former secretary of state John Kerry’s stepson, Chris Heinz, but he left the partnership in 2014.) Bulger is both the son of Democratic powerhouse William “Billy” Bulger, who used to run the Massachusetts state senate, and the nephew of the notorious mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger, who was killed in federal prison in 2018.
The amended joint-venture contract for Bohai lists Morris as the managing member of Skaneateles, whose address is given as Morris’s business address in Beverly Hills.
If you’re Hunter Biden, it’s good to have friends . . . whether in Beijing or Hollywood.