Key Hunter Biden Witness Says James Comer Is Lying About His Testimony

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer “cherry-picked” the testimony of Kevin Morris, a friend of Hunter Biden who sat for a deposition as part of the Republican impeachment inquiry into the president, Morris’s lawyer said.

Morris is a high-powered entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles who met Hunter at a 2019 presidential fundraiser for his father, Joe Biden. Morris has loaned Hunter nearly $5 million in the years since. He testified about his relationship with the embattled first son in a closed-door committee hearing Thursday.

“Not two hours after we left Mr. Morris’ transcribed interview, you issued a press statement with cherry‐picked, out of context and totally misleading descriptions of what Mr. Morris said,” Morris’s lawyer Bryan Sullivan said in a letter to Comer, which was obtained by The New Republic. “I demand you now release the entire transcript of Mr. Morris’ interview.”

Comer, who has led the charge against the president, released a list of paraphrased highlights from Morris’s testimony. Comer claimed that Morris informally loaned Hunter the money and does not expect to be repaid until after the 2024 election—or possibly ever. Comer also said that Morris has enjoyed unfettered access to the president and the White House in exchange for his ongoing financial support.

None of this could be further from the truth, Sullivan said in his late Thursday letter. Morris has only been to the White House or met the president a few times, and all of them were as Hunter’s guest. And the loans are just that: loans, not gifts, that must be repaid.

“Mr. Morris repeatedly testified he actually loaned the money to Mr. Hunter Biden, that these loans were reviewed by lawyers for each of them, that they have proper loan terms such as interest and a term, and that he expected Mr. Hunter Biden to repay these loans,” Sullivan wrote.

“Just release the full transcript. Why would you be reluctant or afraid to do that, other than it will disprove your spin? Let the public see the truth,” Sullivan concluded.

Oversight Committee Democrats have previously accused Comer of misrepresenting witness testimony in his quest to prove the Biden family is guilty of criminal wrongdoing. Comer has for months accused the president of corruption and influence peddling, but he has yet to produce any actual evidence.

Jamie Raskin, the ranking Oversight member, demanded in July that Comer release the complete transcript of a committee interview with a former FBI supervisory special agent. Raskin accused Comer of a “troubling pattern of concealing key evidence in order to advance a false and distorted narrative.”

But it’s clear why Comer is hesitant to release full transcripts. In August, he released the transcript of testimony from Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business partner. Archer undercut every claim Comer has made about the Bidens. Comer has since refused to allow Archer’s testimony to be introduced as evidence.

Florida Representative Matt Gaetz is expanding his horizons for how many people he can piss off with one line, apparently abbreviating the amount of time he can provoke women and minorities to the same breath.

On Wednesday, the MAGA bootlicker argued that even if white women leave the Republican Party as it capitulates to Donald Trump, conservatives actually have no use for women in their elections. Instead, the GOP can fall back on minority support to fill the gap, claimed Gaetz, all the while referring to ethnic groups by racially stereotyped names.

“This is the blue collar realignment of the Republican Party and what I can tell you is for every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement,” Gaetz told Newsmax’s Carl Higbie.

“There is a relentlessness and a persistence in the Trump campaign that I think really emerges out of the candidate himself,” Gaetz said, referring to Trump’s landslide win in Iowa despite the terrible weather conditions.

“Well also, you know, when Trump was president, it was better for all people, not just people of certain races,” Higbie responded, to which Gaetz agreed.

After months of stalled negotiations and short-term funding resolutions, the House of Representatives finally passed a measure on Thursday to keep the federal government funded. The effort received minimal support from Republicans—nearly half of whom, 106 members, actually voted against the initiative.

It passed in a 314–108 vote with near-unanimous support from Democrats, some 207 of whom voted for the measure, compared to just 107 Republicans. The bill is now on its way to President Joe Biden’s desk.

The short-term spending bill was voted on by the House just two hours after the Senate passed it, narrowly bucking a looming two-part shutdown that was set to begin on Friday. The continuing resolution has granted Congress an extra six weeks to coordinate a full spending measure before its next two-part shutdown deadline, slated for March 1 and March 8, when funding for agencies ranging from the Department of Defense to the Food and Drug Administration will finally run dry.

The passage of the stopgap resolution is a win for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who pulled off a bipartisan deal that his predecessor, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, failed to. Facing a momentous countdown on the clock, Johnson cut a deal with other congressional leaders in order to avert the shutdown, despite outsize pressure against it stemming from the House Freedom Caucus.

Johnson has struggled in recent weeks to keep hold of his newfound power since he won the House’s highest seat in a shocking election in October, enduring calls by far-right hard-liners in the House to kick him out just three months into his tenure.

On Wednesday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said she would personally force a vote to oust Johnson if he cut a deal to fund Ukraine, regardless of bipartisan negotiating.

“We can’t fund Ukraine,” she told NBC News, calling it “an absolute no-go—that would be a reason to vacate.”

But Johnson appeared nonplussed by the threat, pointing out that he had “a job to do.”

“We all have to do our jobs,” Johnson said on CNN’s The Source. “Marjorie Taylor Greene is very upset about the lack of oversight over the funding and over the lack of an articulation of a plan, as am I.”

“I’ve talked with her about it personally at great length, and she’s made her position very clear,” he continued. “We have to do our job. We have to continue to ensure that we’re covering all these bases, and we’ll see how this all shakes out. I’m not worried about that. I got a job to do here. And we have to make sure we get the answers that we demanded.”

This story has been updated.

Trump lawyer Alina Habba was reprimanded a whopping 12 times during the former president’s defamation trial on Thursday for her combative and bizarre behavior.

Presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan has already ruled that Donald Trump defamed E. Jean Carroll after she revealed he sexually assaulted her in the mid-1990s. The current trial is just to determine how much Trump owes her in damages. Carroll is seeking at least $10 million.

Habba spent her cross-examination trying to prove that the bulk of Carroll’s emotional harm—in the form of death threats and intimidation—happened in the hours before Trump weighed in, so he shouldn’t be on the hook to financially compensate her. But things started on the wrong foot immediately when Habba referred to the window between when Carroll’s accusation was released and when Trump responded.

“I was asking you about the five-hour gap—” Habba began.

Kaplan cut her off, saying, “Five hours have not been established. You might be well advised to refer to ‘the gap.’”

Soon after, Kaplan admonished Habba multiple times in a row, first for questioning the very premise of the case and then for being “argumentative” with her questions.

As part of her strategy, Habba began reading abusive tweets about Carroll aloud. Kaplan tried to stop her, and when Habba refused, Kaplan had to tell her twice to “move on.” He then said it again when Habba tried to argue that the people who attacked Carroll before Trump’s statement couldn’t have been emulating the former president.

Things got extra testy when Habba asked if Carroll made a “good amount of money” from her writing now. Kaplan pointed out that Habba’s descriptor was vague and subjective.

“This is Evidence 101,” he said.

Habba and Kaplan continued to lock horns for the rest of the morning, including when Habba again questioned established facts. She asked Carroll how many subscribers she had on the subscription-based publication platform Substack, which Kaplan reminded her Carroll had already answered on Wednesday.

When Habba tried to argue that a video Trump made might not really have been about Carroll, Kaplan shut her down again. “He said, ‘Whole thing is made up.’ That’s not about her?” Kaplan said. “We’ll pass over this for now.”

Kaplan also admonished Habba for raising objections that were of “dubious value,” for not listening when he sustained objections against her, and for still trying to read more tweets out loud.

Habba has irritated Kaplan every day of the trial thus far. The two repeatedly butted heads on Wednesday over Habba’s disruptive behavior in the courtroom, resulting in Kaplan admonishing her 14 times. And during opening statements on Tuesday, Habba almost immediately violated the rules Kaplan had set about what Trump’s team can and cannot say.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday rejected the premise of a Palestinian state and promised that Israel will take over the entire region it currently occupies, “from the river to the sea,” according to an English translation on the Israeli news channel i24NEWS.

According to other translations, Netanyahu said that Israel “must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River,” which is basically the same thing.

The prime minister vowed to oppose the creation of any Palestinian state, as Israel continues its horrific military bombardment of Gaza. Israel has killed at least 24,000 Palestinians in Gaza in the last three months, under Netanyahu’s leadership—and the prime minister made it clear that Israel won’t be stopping its war anytime soon.

“For 30 years, I am very consistent and I am saying something very simple: this conflict is not on the lack of a state of Palestinians, but the existence of a state, the Jewish state,” Netanyahu said, according to a translation on i24NEWS. “Every area that we evacuate we receive terrible terror against us. It happened in South Lebanon, in Gaza, and also in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] which we did it.”

“And therefore I clarify that in any other arrangement, in the future, the state of Israel has to control the entire area from the river to the sea.”

The use of the phrase “from the river to the sea” has come under particular scrutiny in the last three months. When Palestinians, or anyone on the left, has used the phrase to demand a free Palestine—as in the popular chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—those on the right have disingenuously argued that it is calling for the death of all Jewish people in Israel.

Representative Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of Congress, was censured by Congress last year for her use of the phrase. Many Democrats joined Republicans in condemning her, minutes after she used a floor speech to condemn both rising Islamophobia and antisemitism in the wake of Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza.

“From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate,” Tlaib wrote in an effort to clarify her language as the bad-faith critics amassed against her. “My work and advocacy is always centered in justice and dignity for all people no matter faith or ethnicity.”

The use of the phrase “from the river to the sea” also became the center of a monthslong news cycle focused on what college kids are saying in campus protests. Fomented by so called “anti-woke” activists and Republicans in Congress, it ultimately ended with the resignations of several university presidents.

Netanyahu, for his part, clearly stated on Thursday that he is not using the phrase “from the river to the sea” in a peaceful manner.

After claiming Israel would take over the entire area from the river to the sea—which would presumably include the West Bank and Gaza, areas recognized as Palestinian territory under international law—Netanyahu went on to directly challenge the Biden administration and its support for the two-state solution.

“This truth I say to our American friends,” Netanyahu said Thursday. “And I also stopped the attempt to impose on us a reality that will jeopardize us. A prime minister in Israel has to be able to say no, even to the best of friends. To say no when you need to and to say yes when you can.”

When people tell you who they are, believe them.

This article has been updated.