Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, pushed back on claims by Democrats that President Joe Biden was never involved in his son’s foreign businesses in any way.
“That’s categorically false,” Archer told Tucker Carlson in a lengthy interview published Friday. “He was aware of Hunter’s business. He met with Hunter’s business partners.”
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Democrats attempted to claim Archer’s testimony this week to the House Oversight Committee was consistent with Joe Biden’s previous statements about the foreign contracts Hunter Biden landed while his father was in office. Until recently, Joe Biden had long claimed he never discussed business with his son.
Archer, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company alongside Hunter Biden, had said he did not hear Joe Biden discuss specific business matters during the approximately 20 times the then-vice president was placed on speakerphone during meetings, nor did substantive business matters arise during the dinners and meetings Joe Biden attended.
“I don’t think Joe Biden’s looked at a balance sheet or … any financial documents,” Archer said during the hourlong interview, the second part of one published earlier this week.
But Archer said the mere presence of Joe Biden at those meetings, and the perceived ability to get him on the phone anytime, was the core of Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals — and that Joe Biden knowingly participated.
Joe Biden’s interactions with his son’s foreign business partners, Archer said, was “prize enough” to earn Hunter Biden large paychecks from companies looking for legitimacy through proximity to the then-vice president.
Archer’s appearance before the House Oversight Committee on Monday prompted rounds of spinning from both parties, with Democrats painting the interview as an exoneration of Joe Biden and Republicans claiming Archer had effectively implicated Joe Biden in his son’s business.
Archer exited the business partnership he had with Hunter Biden in 2016 after facing an indictment on an unrelated fraud case. He also resigned from the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, where he’d worked since 2014.
But Hunter Biden remained on the board of Burisma and continued earning substantial income from the company until his father left office.
After that, Archer confirmed, Hunter Biden’s compensation from Burisma dropped.
Joe Biden has said little about the situation in the days since his son appeared in court on two misdemeanor tax charges related to his foreign business work.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware had offered Hunter Biden a plea deal so lenient, and so unusually structured, that a judge refused to approve it, leaving the president’s son in legal limbo while his lawyers and prosecutors seek a new solution.
Archer’s attorney revealed during the transcribed interview with the House Oversight Committee that Archer received immunity to testify before a grand jury in Delaware.
How or whether prosecutors plan to use Archer’s testimony remains unclear.
Although Hunter Biden’s extensive foreign business relationships were laid out in the documents filed in his tax case, he so far faces no charges for failing to register as a foreign lobbyist, one of several areas in which investigators were interested during the course of the five-year investigation of Hunter Biden.
Archer told Carlson that having Hunter Biden on the board of Burisma helped protect the Ukrainian company from deeper scrutiny because, in a country often mired by corruption, the “signals” sent by the Biden affiliation were enough to deter Ukrainian officials.
Archer also addressed the confusion Democrats have tried to create around the role of Viktor Shokin, then the prosecutor general of Ukraine. Shokin was investigating Burisma at the time, Archer confirmed.
Democrats have tried in recent days to claim that Shokin was not investigating the company, and therefore Joe Biden’s successful efforts to get Shokin fired could not have been intended to help his son’s company.
“Shokin was considered a threat to the business,” Archer said during the interview.
“Shokin was taking a close look at Burisma,” he said. “He was a threat. He ended up seizing assets of Nikolai [Zlochevsky].”
Archer was referring to the head of Burisma, who faced legal peril at the time.
“Then he was fired, and then somehow, Burisma was let off the hook,” Archer said. “I mean, that’s what the story was.”
But Archer said that “the narrative that was fed to the board” was effectively the opposite: that Shokin posed no threat because he’d been privately persuaded to leave Burisma alone and that the appointment of a new prosecutor would only deepen Burisma’s legal troubles.
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Archer did not say whether he believed that narrative, and the events that followed don’t necessarily support it.
Still, Archer said, he was not involved in any conversations that involved a direct ask from Hunter Biden or Burisma executives to Joe Biden regarding Shokin’s removal.