Then-Vice President Joe Biden joined phone meetings his son Hunter had with his foreign business contacts at least two dozen times, a former partner of the first son is set to tell Congress.
Devon Archer is scheduled to testify to the House Oversight Committee "about meetings he witnessed that were attended by Joe Biden either in person or via speakerphone when Hunter would call his father and introduce him to foreign business partners or prospective investors," Miranda Devine reported for the New York Post on Sunday.
Archer is expected to testify that “Big Guy” was a nickname used by Hunter Biden’s business partners to refer to Joe Biden. Another former Hunter Biden business associate, Tony Bobulinski, also said Joe Biden was referred to as the “Big Guy.”
Joe Biden has long claimed that he had no knowledge of his son's foreign business dealings.
One of the meetings that Archer identified, Devine reported, took place in Dubai late in the evening of Friday, Dec. 4, 2015, after a board meeting of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was paying Hunter $83,000 a month as a director.
Archer, who also was a Burisma director, is expected to tell the Oversight Committee that, after dinner with the Burisma board at the Burj Al Arab Hotel, he and Hunter traveled six miles north to the Four Seasons Resort Dubai at Jumeirah Beach to have a drink with one of Hunter’s friends.
While they were sitting outside at the bar, Vadym Pozharskyi, a senior Burisma executive, phoned to ask where they were because Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, needed to speak to Hunter urgently.
Soon afterward, the two Ukrainians joined Hunter and Archer at the Four Seasons bar and Pozharskyi asked Hunter: “Can you ring your dad?” At the time it was early afternoon Friday in Washington, D.C. Hunter then called his father, put him on speaker, placed the phone on the table, and introduced the Ukrainians to Joe Biden by name as “Nikolai and Vadym.”
He also said words to the effect that the Burisma bigwigs “need our support.”
VP Biden greeted the Ukrainians but spoke only in vague pleasantries during the short call, and in other such interactions with Hunter’s overseas business partners, Archer is expected to testify.
At the time, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin had been investigating Burisma for corruption. On Feb. 2, 2016, investigators seized four houses in Kyiv, two plots of land, and a Rolls-Royce belonging to Zlochevsky, who was living in exile in Dubai.
A month later, Shokin was fired, after Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine.
“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’ ” Biden would brag to the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
Emails from Hunter Biden's infamous laptop from hell show that, as Shokin’s investigation gathered speed at the end of 2015, Pozharskyi ratcheted up the pressure on Hunter.
In an email to Hunter and Archer on Nov. 2, 2015, one month before the speakerphone call, Pozharskyi explicitly demanded that they use their influence to “close down” the criminal investigation against Burisma.
"Archer also is expected to detail other speakerphone meetings in his testimony, including a dinner at a restaurant in Paris where Hunter whipped out his phone and put his father on speaker to impress prospective investors," Devine wrote. "Hunter performed the same party trick as many as two dozen times in Archer’s presence."
Oversight chair Rep. James Comer of Kentucky said: “We are looking forward very much to hearing from Devon Archer about all the times he has witnessed Joe Biden meeting with Hunter Biden’s overseas business partners when he was vice president, including on speakerphone.”
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