President Donald Trump intends on pardoning Hunter Biden’s former business partner and close friend Devon Archer, who came forward in 2023 with explosive congressional testimony about their business dealings.
“He’s getting a full pardon,” Trump told New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, who has reported extensively on the Biden family’s business dealings.
“He was screwed by the Bidens. They destroyed him like they tried to destroy a lot of people.”
Trump met Archer over the weekend at the NCAA wrestling championships, an encounter arranged by Tony Bobulinski, another former Biden associate turned whistleblower.
Archer was prosecuted in Manhattan for participating in a fraudulent bond issuance scheme involving a native American tribe in 2015. He was sentenced to a year and a day in prison in 2022 after an appeal, and has fought the sentence ever since.
“I want to extend my deepest thanks to President Trump,” Archer said to the Post. “I am grateful to the president for recognizing that I was the victim of a convoluted lawfare effort intended to destroy and silence me.”
Archer accused the Biden family of being behind the Southern District of New York’s prosecution for the bond issuances, a $60 million scam that saw Biden associate Jason Galanis get an extended prison sentence. Hunter Biden went untouched during Archer’s prosecution despite his involvement in the bond issuances and close ties to Archer.
“Like so many people, my life was devastated by the Biden family’s selfish disregard for the truth and for the peace of mind and happiness of others. The Bidens talk about justice, but they don’t mean it,” Archer added. “I am grateful that the American people are now well aware of this reality.”
Trump has already intervened in the SDNY’s affairs by controversially ordering the famously independent office to throw out its federal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D). He also pardoned 1,500 January 6th defendants and 23 jailed pro-life activists at the beginning of his second term.
Archer testified before the House Oversight Committee in summer 2023 for the congressional GOP’s investigation into Joe Biden’s role in his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings. A key witness, Archer worked with Hunter Biden on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings and investment firm Rosemont Seneca Partners. The pair also became close friends as they traveled the world and worked on multi-million dollar business opportunities.
Most notably, Archer recalled Joe Biden’s presence at two business dinners at Cafe Milano, a swanky Washington, D.C., eatery, the first with Russian oligarch Elena Baturina in 2014 and the second with Burisma executive Vadim Pozharskyi in 2015. Archer also estimated that Hunter Biden put his father on speakerphone with his business partners 20 times over the course of their business dealings.
Archer’s testimony played a pivotal role in the House GOP’s impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden role in his son’s foreign business dealings and IRS whistleblower allegations of misconduct during the Hunter Biden tax investigation. The high-profile inquiry uncovered $27 million of payments from foreign sources to Hunter Biden and his business associates during and after his father’s vice presidency, mostly from Ukraine, China, and Romania.
When he testified last year, Hunter Biden defended putting his father on speakerphone and confirmed Joe Biden’s attendance at the 2015 dinner. The younger Biden struggled to remember the details, but he remembered Pozharskyi’s attendance at one of the dinners. An April 2015 email on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop archive indicates Pozharskyi met Joe Biden the night before, the New York Post first reported ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Initially, Biden and Archer used a holding company called Rosemont Seneca Bohai to receive payments from Burisma exceeding $80,000 per month, bank records show. Documents revealed by IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler indicate that Biden was aware of the arrangement and listed as the “acting corporate secretary” of Rosemont Seneca Bohai, contradicting his congressional testimony.
Burisma significantly lowered Hunter Biden’s salary after Joe Biden’s vice presidency concluded, cutting it down from $1 million a year to half that amount in 2017, according to the tax-evasion indictment against Hunter Biden in December 2o23.
Eventually, Hunter Biden was prosecuted on the federal tax-evasion charges in California, where he plead guilty in September 2023 rather than going to trial. In June, he was separately convicted in Delaware on the gun charges for purchasing a firearm while being addicted to crack cocaine and lying about it on gun paperwork.
Joe Biden pardoned his son in December with only weeks to go in his presidency after repeatedly insisting he would not intervene, a move that many Republicans and some Democrats strongly criticized. On the last day of Biden’s term, he pardoned other family members potentially exposed to prosecution from the Trump administration.