Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, provided hours of testimony to the House Oversight Committee on a narrow scope of topics that his attorneys negotiated, the transcript of his closed-door interview showed.
The Oversight Committee released the transcript on Thursday amid competing summaries of Archer’s answers put forward by both Republicans and Democrats.
The transcript painted a more complicated picture of what Archer said about then-Vice President Joe Biden’s alleged involvement in his son’s business and why a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, wanted to hire Hunter Biden in the first place.
Here are some key takeaways.
BIDEN ATTORNEYS INTERVENED
Before the interview began in earnest, Archer’s attorney, Matthew Schwartz, informed lawmakers and congressional staff that he’d received a warning from “Mr. Biden’s attorney” over the weekend preceding the Monday interview.
Which Biden family member’s attorney sent the message was unclear, but Schwartz said the Biden attorney warned about “Mazars-type issues in the questioning” that Archer would face.
He appeared to be referring to a Supreme Court case involving then-President Donald Trump in which Trump’s team challenged the legislative purpose for congressional document requests he faced and successfully established that the president should receive special protections from congressional oversight.
Schwartz said he would have to interject if questions strayed from the narrow agreement Archer’s legal team had struck with House Oversight Committee lawyers, and the fact that he cited “Mr. Biden’s lawyer” as the catalyst for that warning was notable.
Archer’s attorney did indeed object to lines of questioning during the interview, including when the subject of Elena Baturina, an unsanctioned Russian oligarch who paid millions of dollars to Hunter Biden’s company around the time Joe Biden reportedly met with her and Hunter Biden at a dinner in 2014, came up in questioning.
Schwartz also instructed Archer not to answer questions about Gabriel Popoviciu, a Romanian businessman for whom Hunter Biden and his partners were doing work.
‘PRETTY OBVIOUS IF YOU’RE THE SON OF A VICE PRESIDENT’
Archer told congressional investigators that Hunter Biden’s value to Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company on whose board both Archer and Hunter Biden served, was his powerful family connections.
“It's pretty obvious if you're, you know, you're the son of a Vice President,” Archer said of why Burisma would be interested in hiring Hunter Biden.
Archer also discussed emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in which Hunter Biden suggested to his business partners that they attempt to convince Burisma they had personally arranged for Joe Biden to make an official government visit to Ukraine as vice president.
Archer said the intention was to take credit for the trip, which he did not think Hunter Biden actually arranged, and said the ability to tout the Biden “brand” helped him and Hunter Biden earn more through their joint venture, Rosemont Seneca.
Burisma’s “designs” on Hunter Biden as a shield from scrutiny appeared to work, as it's believed the energy corporation would likely have gone out of business without the vice president’s son.
“People would be intimidated to mess with them …legally” if Hunter Biden was on the company’s board, Archer said.
UNREGISTERED FOREIGN LOBBYING CLAIMS
Hunter Biden has faced scrutiny for, among other things, failing to register his work for Burisma and other foreign companies under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Archer appeared to fuel claims of illegal foreign lobbying by noting that that was precisely what Hunter Biden was doing with Burisma.
“Why do you think they were asking Mr. Biden for D.C. help if they had — I'm assuming what you're saying is they might have had some kind of lobbying group on retainer, perhaps?” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) asked Archer about Burisma, according to the transcript.
“He was a lobbyist and an expert,” Archer said. “And obviously he carried, you know, a very powerful name. So, I think it was — that's what they were asking for.”
Archer also discussed several other actions Hunter Biden took on behalf of Burisma that appeared to be lobbying efforts, including an apparent push to help Burisma’s chief executive secure a visa using government relationships.
SHIFTING ANSWERS ON KEY UKRAINE CALL
Archer gave conflicting answers about a key phone call that took place between Hunter Biden, Burisma executives, and possibly then-Vice President Joe Biden just days before Joe Biden was set to travel to Ukraine on official business.
Facing pressure at the time to help Burisma avoid legal trouble, Hunter Biden stepped physically away from Archer at a Dubai hotel in December 2015 to make a phone call alongside two Burisma executives.
“Listen, I did not hear this phone call, but he — he called his dad,” Archer initially said.
“How do you know that?” a congressional investigator asked.
“Because he — because I think Vadym [Pozharsky] told me,” Archer said, referring to Burisma’s corporate secretary.
But later in the interview, after the committee took a break, Archer returned with a different answer.
His attorney asked to begin the interview again with a clarification, and proceeded to step Archer through questions that walked back his claim to have known Hunter Biden and Burisma executives had called Joe Biden on the eve of his vice presidential trip to Ukraine.
“Did anyone ever tell you that that call was to Vice President Biden?” Archer’s attorney asked.
“No, they did not tell me that,” Archer said.
“Do you know to whom they made the phone call?” Archer’s attorney asked.
“I don't know who they made the phone call to,” Archer replied.
The apparent tension over whether Archer could confidently say Joe Biden was on the receiving end of the call is significant because the conversation appeared to involve the substantive business of Burisma’s legal problems, which would contradict everything Joe Biden has said about his lack of participation in Hunter Biden’s businesses.
Joe Biden’s decision to demand the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma when he came to Ukraine five days after the phone call, if he was in fact on the call, would also receive more scrutiny if it emerged that he had personally conferred with the Ukrainian business.
But Archer’s attorney ensured that the recipient of the key phone call remained unclear.
ARCHER WAS INTENTIONALLY OUT OF LOOP
Archer said repeatedly that Hunter Biden and Burisma business partners purposefully avoided sharing the extent of some conversations apparently involving Joe Biden and other U.S. government officials, which limited his ability to offer insight into the full scope of Joe Biden’s alleged participation.
“I was left out of everything,” Archer said at one point.
“I think that it's even more reason that I was left out of these, you know, black box D.C. types of conversations. I was working on the ground to build the business,” he said at another.
That context is relevant because Democrats have worked to portray Archer’s description of phone calls between Joe Biden and business associates that he allegedly did overhear — involving mainly small talk, Archer said — as the last word in how Joe Biden may have interacted with the business.
His claim to have been intentionally left out of the loop on such calls suggests that deeper interactions may have indeed taken place, but that he is not the best witness to speak about them.
JOE BIDEN JOINING THE BUSINESS?
In one interesting exchange with Biggs, Archer did not dispute a question about whether he and Hunter Biden discussed the possibility of Joe Biden joining one of their Chinese ventures as a paid adviser upon leaving office.
“Did Hunter ever indicate to you that the Chinese anticipated that after his father was out of office, he might join their company with — one of their companies as a paid advisor?” Biggs asked.
“I don't recall, but potentially,” Archer replied.
“You don't recall, but it's not new to you, is what you're saying,” Biggs clarified.
“It's not new to me,” Archer said.
The admission is significant because it leaves the door open to the possibility that, prior to his 2020 presidential run, Joe Biden was eyeing a role in Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings after his second term as vice president ended.
One of the pieces of evidence most frequently cited by Republicans is an email from Hunter Biden’s laptop describing the breakdown of payments from a potential Chinese business deal that included a reference to $10 million to be set aside “for the big guy,” which another Hunter Biden business associate, Rob Walker, told the FBI referred to Joe Biden.
Walker told the FBI in 2020 that the proposal was made with an eye toward Joe Biden’s time out of office and had been, at that point, purely hypothetical, depending on whether Joe Biden sought office again or retired from politics.
SCRUTINY MADE HUNTER BIDEN LEAVE A CHINESE VENTURE
Hunter Biden left a board position for a Chinese investment vehicle he briefly held after Peter Schweizer, a conservative author, wrote a book exposing the role.
Archer, who also served on the board for the Chinese venture, BHR, said the publication of Secret Empires by Schweizer was, to his knowledge, the “catalyst” for Hunter Biden leaving the job.
The tidbit suggests Hunter Biden did take the public image of his foreign business dealings into account when making decisions, but only took steps to address a potentially problematic entanglement after it had been exposed publicly.
BRIBERY ALLEGATION ADDRESSED
Archer discussed an allegation provided to the FBI that Hunter Biden and his father received payments from Burisma in exchange for their work protecting its chief executive from prosecution and growing the business.
Archer said he assumed Mykola Zlochevsky, the head of Burisma, was referring to Hunter Biden and himself, not Joe Biden, when he discussed the payments he allegedly made.
“I would assume he's probably talking about me and Hunter, but I don't know,” Archer said of the FD-1023 form on which the FBI memorialized the allegation.
And when asked if he found the allegation credible, Archer suggested that he did.
“I think it's — the agent explains it pretty well on the bottom,” Archer said of the FD-1023 document when asked about its credibility. “And it's similar to, you know, Hunter Biden taking credit for his dad's visit. It's like sending a signal.”
Archer said he was not aware of specific $5 million payments to both Bidens, but he did not rule out the possibility that Hunter Biden could have received money from Burisma through channels he did not know about.
“I can only speak for myself,” Archer said earlier in the interview of the payment structures surrounding their work for Burisma.
Archer acknowledged that, due to his own legal troubles — Archer was indicted in an unrelated case in 2016 — Hunter Biden began to collect Burisma payments in a different account.
Rather than dispute the idea that a bribe to Hunter Biden occurred, Archer said the Ukrainian officials were likely bragging. He disputed that Joe Biden directly received a bribe.
“And in Ukraine, in Russia they brag about how much — they brag about bigger bribes than they actually give,” Archer said. “So, it's pretty kind of similar symbiosis there.”
And some of the things Archer discussed were consistent with the details of the bribery allegation memorialized by the FBI in a now-published document.
For example, the FD-1023 document claims that Burisma’s chief executive paid the Biden family in part to help Burisma identify an American energy company that Burisma could purchase and use to gain access to the American market. Archer confirmed this was indeed Burisma’s aim.
“I think the initial idea was expansion into the U.S. by a small U.S. company,” he said.
DEVON ARCHER RECEIVED IMMUNITY
Schwartz, Archer’s attorney, revealed that Archer testified to a grand jury in Delaware after receiving a subpoena in December 2020 and “testified pursuant to an immunity order in the grand jury.”
That means the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware agreed to shield Archer from prosecution for illegal activity if he testified about Hunter Biden’s business affairs.
The revelation helps explain why no one involved in the foreign business dealings has faced charges related to foreign lobbying violations or other alleged crimes.