The plot around President Joe Biden’s son in the midst of the election campaign is complicated. In the last few hours a former business partner of Hunter Biden said that in 2015 – when his father was vice president of Barack Obama – a Ukrainian energy company called Washington DC to arrest a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating them. The main focus of the Republicans in their investigation against Hunter is Devon Archerwho testified before the House Oversight Committee on Monday that the president’s son, who along with Archer served on the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, “called DC” at the time to get the Obama administration to put pressure on Ukraine and fire the attorney Victor Shokin.
Archer claimed in his testimony that Hunter phoned his father at least 20 times in an attempt to sell “the brand,” i.e. the family name. After the explosive statements, the chain Fox News said a source familiar with the case said Archer told the Committee that Burisma officials “they constantly pressured Hunter for help from DC” to slow down Shokin’s investigation. However, it’s unclear who in Washington took the call. Archer said days after the call, Biden, then the vice president, gave a speech in Ukraine on the need to reform Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office. “This is the most revealing aspect of Archer’s testimony and perhaps the most important in our entire investigation thus far,” said Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio.
The Chairman of the Supervisory Committee of the Chamber, James Comerfrom Kentucky, explained that the testimony of Archer “confirms that Joe Biden has lied to the American people when he said he had no knowledge of his son’s affairs and was not involved”.
The assumptions behind the testimony were devastating for Hunter. “Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ that his son sold around the world to enrich his family”Comer affirmed. And he pointed out that “when Biden was vice president of the United States, he attended Hunter business dinners with his foreign business associates in person or by telephone more than 20 times.”
In addition to Burisma-related testimony, Comer testified that Archer told the Committee that a call would have linked Joe Biden to Jonathan Li, the chief executive officer of BHR, a company formed by Hunter Biden and Chinese associates. Archer acknowledged that Joe Biden had coffee with BHR CEO Jonathan Li in Beijing. The then-vice president even wrote a letter of recommendation for Li’s daughter for college,” Comer’s statement read, adding that Archer noted that, in the spring of 2014, “then-vice president Biden attended a business dinner with his son, Hunter, and their associates at Café Milano in Washington, DC. The person in question Elena Baturina, is a reputed Russian oligarch and widow of a former mayor of Moscow. The latter could not be independently confirmed by anyone associated with the investigation.
The White House wanted to tone down the statements by not paying much attention to them. The story comes when there seemed to be a push in the polls for Bidenthe only rival with options to win his party’s nomination, likely to face Donald Trump, in a fight in 2024, a repeat photograph of the 2020 election.