by Steven Richards
A new cache of documents from the IRS whistleblowers released Wednesday by the House Ways and Means Committee show how the Central Intelligence Agency directly intervened to prevent the IRS investigators from interviewing Hunter Biden lawyer and benefactor Kevin Morris.
The CIA’s involvement in the case was first suggested in earlier this year when the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees wrote a letter to Director William Burns that revealed impeachment investigators had at least one whistleblower who alleged the spy agency tried to interfere with a witness interview in the case, Just the News previously reported.
“According to the whistleblower, in August 2021, when IRS investigators were preparing to interview Patrick Kevin Morris, an associate of Hunter Biden, the CIA intervened to stop the interview,” Chairmen Jim Jordan and James Comer wrote. “Two DOJ officials were allegedly summoned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia for a briefing regarding Mr. Morris. At that meeting, it was communicated that Mr. Morris could not be a witness during the investigation.”
The new documents show IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler provided documents to the committee detailing the CIA’s intervention.
According to Shapley’s affidavit of the incident, Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf from the Delaware prosecutor’s office in charge of the case and the Department of Justice Tax Division Attorney Jack Morgan were summoned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, for a briefing.
At the meeting, the officials were given a classified briefing and were told by the CIA that the IRS “could no longer pursue” Kevin Morris as a witness in their case. Wolf did not share CIA’s reasoning with the IRS whistleblowers, who then requested their own briefing from the intelligence agency through Wolf.
According to Shapley’s account, Wolf ultimately failed to secure a briefing for the case investigators.
“Although AUSA Wolf initially appeared to be receptive to facilitating a briefing for me on the information, she ignored multiple attempts by me to arrange the briefing. Since obtaining this briefing was outside of my control, eventually I was forced to accept it would not happen,” Shapley wrote in his affidavit. “However, it served as yet another example of deviations from normal investigative processes in this matter.”
You can read Shapley’s affidavit below:
It remains unknown why the CIA intervened in the case, how they became aware that the IRS investigators had targeted Morris (pictured above) as a witness and most importantly, who at the CIA issued the directive.
“We don’t know whether it’s that Kevin Morris has some sort of asset for the CIA, whether he has some sort of target or whether they have other derogatory information about him being a national security threat. But whatever it was, it was enough that Lesley Wolf and the prosecution team said we’re not going to put him on the stand,” Tristan Leavitt, whose organization Empower Oversight is representing Shapley, told the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show on Wednesday.
“And then when Gary Shapley tried to follow up and say I, at least at a bare minimum, need to know the issues involved, they initially told him, okay, we’ll arrange that briefing for you, and then they just let it die,” he added.
“So this, this is one of the many things where he was pushing for answers, and was never able to get anywhere with the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s office. And so ultimately, he never got any further information about exactly what it is that the CIA had on Kevin Morris,” he continued.
Kevin Morris was in many ways a central witness to the investigation into the first son’s tax violations. Morris—a high-powered Hollywood lawyer now nicknamed Hunter’s “sugar brother” —acknowledged to Congress during an impeachment inquiry interview that he has provided millions of dollars in the form of loans to help the first son pay expenses and legal bills.
Documents reviewed and reported by Just the News show that Morris and Hunter Biden agreed to treat the more than $5 million in financial assistance as loans when the cash started flowing in early 2020 and began committing them to writing with promissory notes starting in fall 2021.
The first note was executed on Oct. 13, 2021, in the amount of $1.4 million and included the assistance that Morris had given the first son in calendar year 2020. The note called for an annual interest rate of 5 percent but did not require repayments to begin until October 2025, well after Joe Biden would face his final reelection bid.
Two days later, Hunter Biden and Morris executed a second promissory note totaling $2.6 million that covered Morris’ assistance to the first son in 2021, the lion’s share of which went to pay off tax debts and penalties to the IRS as well as state and local authorities dating to 2016, the memos show.
That agreement carried the same interest rate as the first but stretched out repayments to begin in October 2025 and end by October 2029.
Biden and Morris executed at least two more promissory notes in 2022 covering over $1.32 million in additional assistance from Morris, according to documents and interviews. Interest was again at 5% annual, and repayments are required between October 2025 and October 2028 under those agreements, the documents show.
Morris and Hunter Biden jointly engaged in other transactions tracked bv federal investigators.
In November 2021, Morris acquired the first’s son stake in a joint venture with a Chinese company called BHR, the memos show, In so doing, Morris “assumed” a $250,000 loan Hunter Biden received in summer 2019 from a Chinese business executive named Jonathan Li, the memos also showed.
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Steven Richards joined Just the News in August 2023 after previously working as a Research Analyst for the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) in Tallahassee, Florida. He is a two-time graduate of Florida State University with a Masters in Political Science and a B.S. in International Affairs.
Photo “Kevin Morris” by Kevin Morris.
