Revisiting a case in which Archer faces imprisonment and heavy financial penalties but in which Biden, though featured in the proof, was not charged.
I have a column up on the homepage describing the latest, potentially explosive developments in the Biden-Burisma saga I related in my weekend column. These deal with the anticipated congressional testimony later this week of Devon Archer, Hunter’s longtime friend, business partner, and fellow Burisma board member. Archer was also the vice chairman of finance for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.
Although I’ve described Archer’s 2022 fraud conviction in the past, I mistakenly typed that it had been in connection with a $60 billion scheme, when it was actually $60 million.
In correcting the error, I remembered that I’d done a post in the days just before the 2020 election, based on a recording found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which discussed — among other things — Archer’s case. This recording was one of the reasons it was obviously absurd to suggest that the laptop data might be phony — part of a “Russian disinformation” operation. Hunter’s recorded assertions could easily have been corroborated, supporting their authenticity.
As I noted at the time, Hunter stated on the recording:
And I am receiving calls from the Southern District of New York from the U.S. attorney himself. My best friend in business Devon has named me as a witness without telling me in a criminal case and my father without telling me.
I then provided some background:
Devon Archer was convicted in the Southern District of New York in a $60 million fraud scheme. Another Hunter Biden business associate, Bevan Cooney, also was convicted. The Biden name featured in the evidence, but Hunter was not charged in the case.
I suspect that the recording, if it is authentic, probably occurred in approximately May of 2018. Biden mentions that Archer named Hunter and Joe Biden as witnesses in a criminal case. Archer’s trial began in mid-May 2018. It is a common practice in the Southern District of New York for the court, in criminal cases, to direct the parties to exchange witness lists shortly before trials commence. Such lists are not for public consumption. Attorneys exchange them in order to prevent delay during the trial (otherwise, each side would have to ask for continuances in order to do some investigation before challenging an unnoticed witness’s testimony on cross-examination). The lists are often over-inclusive (because the failure to give notice of a potential witness can result in delay or in the court’s refusal to permit the testimony), and there is no requirement that people named in the list actually be called as witnesses. It is thus not uncommon that people named on such a list are not told about it.
If Hunter was, in fact, getting calls from the U.S. attorney, or at least from an assistant U.S. attorney, it would likely have been because prosecutors were seeking an interview in order to prepare for his potential testimony. It appears that Hunter Biden was not called as a witness at the fraud trial (see this Wall Street Journal report).
As explained in the Journal report I linked at the end of that post, the $60 million fraud scheme, which took place in the 2014–16 time frame, involved over $60 million in bonds issued by an economic-development company affiliated with a Native American tribe in South Dakota. The main player in the scheme was a man named Jason Galanis, a shady character who had a history of having been disciplined by the SEC. In this scheme, the proceeds of the bonds were supposed to be used for building projects benefitting the tribe; however, Galanis and his co-conspirators instead used them for their own purposes — specifically, to buy up various financial firms and merge them (or “roll them up”) into a larger one called Burnham Financial Group.
One of Galanis’s partners in the scheme was Archer. To market the bond scheme to potential investors, the Burnham Group generated a consultant’s report that listed Archer as the chairman and Hunter Biden as vice chairman of what would become the combined financial firm. At the time, Joe Biden was vice president of the United States.
Moreover, when some trustees of a group of mutual funds affiliated with the Burnham Group raised questions about the involvement of Galanis in light of his dodgy history, Archer tried to allay their concerns by invoking Hunter’s name and role in the enterprise. An attorney for the trustees recalled Archer’s explaining that Hunter had joined a Burnham entity in 2015 but wasn’t being paid a salary while he was working to drum up business for the firm.
In his defense at the 2018 criminal trial, Archer’s lawyer argued that Hunter Biden “was part of this deal.”
It is not clear whether Justice Department prosecutors did much to investigate the younger Biden’s involvement — just as DOJ seems to have been remarkably uninterested in Biden’s tax case, his gun case, and his complicity in the family business of cashing in on his father’s political influence.
Suffice it to say, as the Journal reported, that the government never alleged that Hunter was aware of the scheme. A lawyer for Hunter, George Mesires, picked up that ball and ran with it, publicly stating that the defendants in the case had “invoked Hunter’s name — without his knowledge — to lend their business venture more credibility.” Moreover, Mesires insisted:
As soon as Hunter learned of the illegal conduct, and that his name was being used in this unauthorized and inappropriate manner, Hunter took immediate measures to ensure that his business interests would not be associated with the Burnham group or with any of the defendants.
Of course, Hunter’s business interests were intimately entwined with Archer’s. Given how regularly they consulted on their sundry business dealings, it does not seem plausible that Hunter had no idea that Archer was not only invoking Hunter’s name but listing him as vice chairman with a lawyer’s business promotion role in the venture. Put aside that such a role appears to be completely consistent with how Hunter’s involvement in various schemes with Archer could be described, including those involving multimillion-dollar foreign payoffs. It bears repeating that Archer invoked Hunter’s name to allay concerns raised by a lawyer for Burnham trustees, any one of whom — given the millions at stake — could have been expected to perform due diligence to ensure that Hunter’s involvement was what Archer represented it to be.
It seems more likely that the government did not try very hard to amass evidence of Hunter’s knowledge and that, when he wasn’t charged in the case, his lawyer contended that the investigators’ lack of evidence meant that Hunter lacked knowledge — although these two things are obviously not the same.
In any event, now that Archer’s appeal of his conviction has been rejected and he has apparently begun cooperating with the House Oversight Committee, he no longer has any incentive to minimize his role, or anyone else’s, in the $60 million scheme. It will be interesting to hear what, if anything, he has to say about Hunter’s role in the scheme for which Archer faces imprisonment and hefty financial penalties.