As Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer prepares to testify before Congress about the first son’s overseas business dealings, the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is attempting to have him jailed.
As the New York Post reports, Archer is set to testify on Monday in a closed-door hearing before the House Oversight Committee, where he plans to give further details about his time working with Hunter Biden to secure numerous lucrative business deals with foreign nations and entities.
But on Saturday, federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed a letter demanding that a judge set a date for Archer to begin a one-year prison sentence for an unrelated fraud case. Last Tuesday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Archer’s 2018 conviction of two felony charges stemming from a plot to defraud a Native American tribe.
The letter to Judge Ronnie Abrams said that the DOJ “respectfully requests that the defendant be ordered to surrender, at a date and time determined by the Court, to a facility designated by the Bureau of Prisons to commence his term of imprisonment.”
But on Sunday, Matthew Schwartz, Archer’s attorney, said that his client planned to proceed with the congressional testimony, while disagreeing with the notion that the DOJ’s move was an intimidation tactic against Archer.
“We are aware of speculation that the Department of Justice’s weekend request to have Mr. Archer report to prison is an attempt by the Biden administration to intimidate him in advance of his meeting with the House Oversight Committee,” said Schwartz in a statement. “To be clear, Mr. Archer does not agree with that speculation.”
“In any case, Mr. Archer will do what he has planned to do all along, which is to show up on Monday and to honestly answer the questions that are put to him by the Congressional investigators,” Schwartz added.
Archer was one of three co-founders of the investment and advisory firm Rosemont Seneca Partners in 2009, along with Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz. The firm subsequently took advantage of Hunter’s family name, as his father had just become Vice President of the United States, to secure many overseas deals in exchange for political influence.
In his testimony, Archer is expected to confirm his previous claims that, contradictory to what Joe Biden himself has said, the former Vice President would indeed be phoned in on many of Hunter’s business calls with foreign partners and clients. The elder Biden had previously insisted that he had no knowledge of Hunter’s foreign business deals.