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MSN.com
excerpt

Hunter Biden has been working with Kevin Morris, his friend and financial benefactor, and a team of researchers. The younger Biden has also hired several other lawyers — Chris Clark, who is handling a federal criminal investigation into his 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 Biden 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 Hunter 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 him 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.”