Just in case it wasn’t clear what Hunter Biden was doing when he put his dad, then-Vice President Joe Biden, on the speakerphone during business meetings, even Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer calls it an “abuse of soft power.”
According to designated Democratic apologist Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), Joe Biden had no idea who was on the speakerphone in Paris or Dubai or Lake Como, or wherever it was that Hunter introduced his father to shady foreigners who were showering him with millions of dollars and lavish gifts like a $50,000 Hublot watch, which Archer says Hunter got from the Ukrainians.
No, the VP would just talk about “the weather” after Hunter introduced him to “Vadym” or “Nikolai” or whoever. He wasn’t talking about balance sheets or where to place the oil rigs, so that makes it quite OK.
Seriously, whom does Goldman think he’s kidding?
Archer was careful choosing his words to the Oversight Committee on Monday and in a subsequent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Facing a one-year prison sentence over a fraud conviction, Archer has been bombarded with death threats since news broke that he was cooperating with congressional investigators. The father of three has tried to tell the truth while trying to survive at the center of a brutal tug-of-war between Congress and the White House.
But no matter how desperately Democrats and their media handmaidens try to spin Archer’s testimony, he has changed the game.
Prez had a role
As he told Carlson, it’s “categorically false” that Joe Biden had no role in his son’s business or knowledge of it: “He was aware of Hunter’s business. He met with Hunter’s business partners.”
Now Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s influence operation is undeniable, despite his nearly three-year litany of lies.
Even while being scrupulously careful, Archer’s testimony was damning.
He described how Joe was “the brand” of his family “business” and was used to send “signals” of power, access and influence, whether on speakerphone or meeting in person. There were dinners at Café Milano in Washington, DC, with Hunter’s benefactors from Ukraine, Russia and China, breakfasts at the vice presidential residence in DC, handshakes on the sidelines of Beijing meetings. Ultimately, it was this access to VP Biden that sent millions of dollars flowing into Biden family coffers.
Goldman tried to make hay over the word “weather” in Archer’s response to a question about what Joe Biden talked about in those 20 speakerphone calls with Hunter’s foreign business associates.
“I think that the calls were, that’s what it was,” Archer said Monday, according to a source familiar with his testimony. “They were calls to talk about the weather, and that was signal enough to be powerful.”
It wasn’t the content of the calls, in other words, but the fact that they were made. That was the “signal.”
The call was “enough,” Archer told Carlson in an interview to be released Thursday on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, after a teaser was aired Wednesday. “In the rearview, it’s an abuse of soft power …
“That’s the … second-most powerful man in the world … The prize of being able to have, whether it’s on speakerphone or in person, to have that person in direct contact with, [whether] you’re talking about weather or politics or what have you, that that’s the important [thing] … There’s no relevance in asking the vice president about the gas, you know, revenues or anything. [The call is] enough and the prize is that contact and that access.”
Archer states the obvious, that Hunter’s value to corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was paying him and Hunter $83,000 a month apiece, was his access to his father, the VP.
He was asked by Carlson about an urgent email sent to him and Hunter on May 12, 2014, from Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi demanding to know “how you could use your influence to convey a message, signal, etc., to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions.” At the time, Burisma was aggressively being investigated by Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
Archer explained what “signal” means in a corrupt country like Ukraine. “It’s almost like, you know, the shakedown … they’re using a common term to them and sending back here to us and say, ‘I hope we’re protected’ kind of thing …
‘Shokin a threat’
“So Shokin is taking a close look … at Burisma. There were allegations that some of the … deposits or some of the reserves were not, you know, authentically acquired … Shokin was considered a threat to the business … You’ve got to get the signals to the government. I think anyone in government is always a threat and always trying to shake down these businesses that were highly successful.”
Archer hedged by saying that he was told by Burisma executives that Shokin himself was corrupt and “there was a big push by European leaders, the Atlantic Council, etc., to fire Shokin because he was corrupt … It certainly wasn’t made clear to us at the board level … that that was a favor to be done … I wasn’t involved in Shokin or any of this.”
But ultimately, Archer concluded, Shokin “was a threat. He ended up seizing assets of Nikolai [Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky], a house, some cars, a couple of properties. And Nikolai actually never went back to Ukraine after Shokin seized all of these assets …
“And then [Shokin] was fired and then somehow Burisma was let off the hook.”
Asked if Burisma executives were trying to leverage Hunter’s relationship with his powerful father, Archer said, “Yes, there was constant pressure to send signals to leverage all of his, you know, his dad included.
But the Biden brand, the DC insider relationships to help Burisma survive …
“It was that ability to help on the geopolitical stage, keep them out of trouble, keep them out of investigations, unfreeze assets [and] unsuccessfully, you know, unfreeze visas.”
That brings us to the speakerphone call in Dubai late in the evening of Friday, Dec. 4, 2015, in the middle of Shokin’s aggressive investigations when, after a Burisma board meeting and dinner, Hunter and Archer went to the Four Seasons Resort Dubai at Jumeirah Beach for a drink. While there, Pozharskyi phoned to say he and Zlochevsky needed to speak to Hunter urgently. When they arrived at the bar, they asked Hunter to call his dad.
In Archer’s testimony, he said he did not hear the call that night because Hunter and the Ukrainians moved away from the table, so he could not say if they called Joe, just “DC.” But he was told by Pozharskyi that it was Joe they called in DC. Despite attempts by Democrats to confuse the issue, it is obvious that the one powerful person in DC whom Hunter phoned directly at any time was his father.
And he told Carlson the Ukrainians regularly asked Hunter to get his dad on the phone.
“I did not listen to a particular call where they spoke. But I know that the request was made by Vadym [Pozharskyi] a lot.”
Ultimately, said Archer, “I do believe that, at the end of the day, Burisma wouldn’t have stayed in business so long if Hunter was not on the board.”
Ain’t that the truth. By Joe Biden’s own admission, he flew to Ukraine a few days after that fateful Dubai speakerphone call, and threatened the Ukrainian government that he would withhold $1 billion in US aid unless Shokin was fired. Three months later, Shokin was gone, and as Archer said, Burisma was off the hook.
