by John Solomon
House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer has secured the cooperation of one of Hunter Biden’s closest business partners, setting an interview for next week with Devon Archer. Now Congress’ chief investigator is readying a subpoena to compel a New York firm to turn over a tranche of Archer’s documents that have been in storage since the FBI took them years ago.
Comer, R-Ky., told Just the News on Tuesday evening that he was readying the subpoena to Alix Partners LLP to secure the documents that Archer had digitized for his 2018 criminal trial but has been unable to get returned to him. Court records from February show Archer paid a fee to the firm to settle outstanding bills last year, but officials say Archer has not yet had the massive trove of documents returned to him.
You can read that court document here.
The records were seized by the FBI before Archer was convicted on fraud charges related to a tribal bond scheme and include emails, memos, business records and financial transactions chronicling his dealings with Hunter Biden and other partners from across the globe from China to Ukraine.
The documents could potentially be a boon for Comer’s investigative team, capturing real-time conversations and transactions that would substantiate Archer’s account during a transcribed interview currently slated for Monday.
Asked whether he was ready to subpoena the memos to speed up the process, Comer told the Just the News, No Noise television show: “Yes, we want all the evidence that we can have.”
“I said from the very beginning, when we announced this investigation, we were going to provide the American mainstream media with something they weren’t used to, especially over the past four years with Jamie Raskin and Adam Schiff leading investigations. We were going to introduce them to a thing called evidence. So anytime we can get our hands on evidence. We’re going to try to do that even if we have to resort to subpoena,” Comer added.
The chairman said investigators are preparing for next week’s interview with Archer, hoping to gain fresh insights on such critical issues as how Hunter Biden came to be hired by the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holding at a time when it was dealing with corruption issues.
They also want to know whether Joe Biden took actions to help his son’s overseas clients and whether the current president met with Hunter Biden’s business associates.
“We want to know exactly what the Bidens did to receive the money from the foreign nationals in the the countries that Devon Archer was involved with particularly, Ukraine,” Comer explained. “We also want to know what level of involvement Joe Biden had, especially with Burisma. Remember Devon Archerwas on the board of Burisma with Hunter Biden.
“We know that Devon Archer met with and was very close with Joe Biden. So we believe Devon Archer can answer a lot of questions as to whether or not Joe Biden has been truthful with the American people about his knowledge or his involvement with his son’s shady business dealings,” he added.
Just the News first reported on the existence of Archer’s document trove on Monday. Like most legal defense teams in major criminal cases, Archer’s lawyers had the vast tranche of documents the FBI returned to them during trial discovery and digitized memos so they could be quickly searched in trial preparation.
However, the New York firm that did that work still has the documents.
Archer was overdue on paying some of the bills for the storage but months ago made the payments and removed any liens, court records show. But the firm has yet to provide a digital copy of the document collection, according to memos reviewed by Just the News and interviews.
“The cache of documents freezes in time all of the essential communications that Devon was part of, including documents and evidence that weren’t recovered from the Hunter Biden laptop,” a person briefed on the matter told Just the News.
Congressional investigators hope the tranche of documents includes a December 2015 memo from a Democrat firm called Blue Star Strategies that outlines a strategy for helping Burisma after the firm’s members met with Joe Biden’s staff as well as contemporaneous documents about Archer and Hunter Biden’s dealings with Chinese investors for Rosemont Bohai Harvest, details about Burisma board meetings and the efforts to woo a Russian oligarch named Yelena Baturina.
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John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist, author and digital media entrepreneur who serves as Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief of Just the News.
