President Joe Biden was in contact with his son’s business partners on at least 24 occasions, a former associate of Hunter Biden will testify — contradicting the president’s repeated claims on the campaign trail that he never spoke of Hunter’s overseas dealings with him “or with anyone else.”
Devon Archer, one of Hunter Biden’s former associates and close colleagues, is expected to tell the House Oversight Committee how the president was often dialed in on speakerphone as Hunter conducted lucrative business deals. According to the New York Post on Sunday, Joe Biden attended meetings either in person or by speakerphone at least two dozen times. Such meetings often featured introductions with foreign businessmen or potential investors.
“One such meeting was in Dubai late in the evening of Friday, Dec. 4, 2015, after a board meeting of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was paying Hunter $83,000 a month as a director,” the Post’s Miranda Devine reported. Hunter Biden’s payout was far above comparable board compensation, especially for someone with no prior experience in the industry.
“Archer, who also was a director, is expected to testify that, after dinner with the Burisma board at the Burj Al Arab Hotel, he and Hunter traveled six miles north to the Four Seasons Resort Dubai at Jumeirah Beach to have a drink with one of Hunter’s friends,” Devine added. “While they were sitting outside at the bar, Vadym Pozharskyi, a senior Burisma executive, phoned to ask where they were because Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, needed to speak to Hunter urgently.”
Pozharskyi soon reached Hunter and had the then-vice president’s son ring his father on speakerphone in Zlochevsky’s presence.
Archer, 48, is facing federal charges in a $60 million bond fraud case. In June, he lost an appeal to dodge his one-year prison sentence handed down by a Manhattan judge last year.
Archer’s testimony could shed further light on revelations in an FD-1023 document housed by the FBI that was made public by GOP Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley last week. The document implicates President Biden in a $10 million bribery scheme with Zlochevsky, the Burisma executive. According to the FD-1023, Pozharskyi told an FBI confidential human source that Hunter Biden’s hiring was meant to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”
In 2018, Joe Biden bragged about bribing Ukraine to fire the country’s top prosecutor, who was investigating Burisma.
President Biden vehemently denied any involvement in his son’s business dealings throughout the 2020 election. When a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that contained evidence to the contrary surfaced, the Democrat candidate smeared the discovery as an instrument of Russian disinformation. Emails on the laptop, obtained by the New York Post, indicated that Hunter introduced his father to Pozharskyi while Joe Biden was serving as the “public face” of White House policy on Ukraine.
A year before the bombshell reporting from the Post, Biden even fat-shamed an Iowa voter who mentioned his son’s role on a Ukranian company’s board. Meanwhile, Democrats launched an impeachment against Trump as a preemptive strike to protect their prospective nominee.
After the FD-1023 was created in 2020, then-Attorney General Bill Barr referred the allegations made in it to Delaware prosecutors to review in the course of the Justice Department’s investigation of the Biden family. According to whistleblowers at the Internal Revenue Service, however, DOJ officials concealed the document from federal tax investigators, whose investigation into Hunter Biden for tax crimes led them to recommend the younger Biden be charged with multiple felonies.
“I still think that a special counsel is necessary for this investigation,” IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler told lawmakers at a House Oversight hearing last week.
