Hunter Biden's former lead partner and long-time close friend Devon Archer's closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee appeared to add and corroborate a mountain of evidence that Joe Biden not only knew about his son's lucrative foreign influence peddling businesses, but actively facilitated and financially benefited from them.
Whereas the full text of the hearing has yet to be released, we have learned that Joe was plugged into more than 20 telephone conversations between Hunter and his various foreign business associates in many countries during the time he served as our nation's vice president between 2009 and 2017.
There was some uncertain speculation regarding whether Archer would agree to testify given his likely worries that doing so might further tighten Biden scandal protection DOJ screws on him in connection with an unrelated conviction for swindling a native North American tribe out of $60 million in bonds.
The recently failed attempt to float a sweetheart deal allowing Hunter blanket immunity from felonies including violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) supported reasonable suspicions.
Much of Archer's testimony apparently emphasized details regarding Biden family deals with Burisma Holdings, a corrupt Ukraine energy company where he and Hunter served on the board.
Particular inquiry interest presumably centered on a previously known Dec. 6, 2015, phone call involving Hunter, Joe and senior Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi at the Four Seasons Resort in Dubai following a dinner with two Ukrainian board members at the Burj Al Arab hotel.
Pozharskyi reportedly called Hunter, urgently asking, "Can I ring your dad?"
According to Miranda Devine at the New York Post, Hunter then called his father in Washington, D.C., introduced the Ukrainians by their first names, and emphasized that they "need our support."
Three days after that conversation, then V.P. Biden — the Obama administration point guy on Ukrainian issues — flew to Kyiv to address their parliament.
This was also a time when Burisma's owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, was being investigated by Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin for corruption and subsequently had four of his houses, two plots of land, and his Rolls-Royce seized.
In January 2016, a month after the seizure, Vice President Biden bragged before the Council on Foreign Relations about threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. Ukraine aid unless Shokin was fired.
Biden said: "I looked at them and said, 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.' Well, he got fired."
Then in February 2016, roughly two months after Biden's trip and two months before Shokin's firing, Hunter Biden thanked Zlochevsky in an email for "the beautiful birthday gifts," which he described as "far too extravagant."
According to a highly credible FBI informant in the presence of a supporting witness, Alexandr Ostapenko, Zlochevsky didn't necessarily reward Hunter and his dad out of the goodness of his heart.
A redacted FD-1023 form released by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, shows that during a 2016 meeting at a Vienna, Austria, coffee shop Zlochevsky claimed to have been "coerced" into paying Hunter and Joe $10 million; "5 [million] to pay one Biden, and 5 [million] to another Biden."
The June 2020 document also revealed that "Zlochevsky made some comment that although Hunter Biden 'was stupid, and his (Zlochevsky's) dog was smarter,' Zlochevsky needed to keep Hunter Biden (on Burisma's board) 'so everything will be okay.'"
Zlochevsky apparently had an insurance policy in the form of 17 recordings of conversations with the Bidens — two of which involved Joe — as well as "many text messages" and two documents that the informant "understood to be" financial records of "payment(s) to the Bidens."
The informant, according to the FBI's confidential human source (CHS), said that rather than send suspicious wire transfers directly to the "Big Guy" (which the FBI understood to be Joe Biden), Zlochevsky used numerous companies/bank accounts that "would take them (Investigators) 10 years to find the records."
Recall that former President Donald Trump was impeached for merely asking incoming Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to look into evidence of Biden Ukraine influence peddling corruption which the media has obligingly and persistently ignored.
Ukraine is but one of numerous profitable markets for what Archer has reportedly described as "selling the Biden Brand."
Current estimates of Biden family payments channeled through more than 20 foreign shell companies run in many tens of millions of dollars ... according to Peter Schweizer of the New York Post, $31 million from Chinese Communist Party-connected organizations alone.
Meanwhile, although Joe Biden has repeatedly and emphatically claimed total ignorance of Hunter's foreign business deals, that defense has recently morphed to one that impotently attempts to distance himself from any direct ties and accountabilities.
This will become increasingly difficult for him as more incriminating witness reports, bank records and demons in Hunter's laptop from hell are exposed to harsh daylight by ongoing House hearings.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.