Devon Archer to Tucker Carlson: Hunter Biden speakerphone calls with father were ‘abuse of soft power’

Devon Archer said in an interview with Tucker Carlson that his former business associate Hunter Biden’s moves to put his father, then the vice president, on speakerphone in front of foreign business associates was an “abuse of soft power.”

The first installment of Archer’s interview with the former Fox News host was released Wednesday, two days after he sat for a closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee and testified that Hunter Biden put on his father on speakerphone with other people about 20 times over the course of a decade.

“I don’t know if it was an orchestrated call-in or not. It certainly was powerful, though, because, you know, if you’re sitting with a foreign business person and you hear the vice president’s voice, that’s prize enough. That’s pretty impactful stuff,” Archer told Carlson.

“In the rearview, it’s an abuse of soft power, I’d say,” Archer said. 

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), who attended Archer’s closed-door interview Monday, said Archer told the committee that “they never once spoke about any business dealings” in those phone conversations.

“As he described it, it was all casual conversation, niceties, the weather, ‘What’s going on?’” Goldman said, adding “there wasn’t a single conversation about any of the business dealings that Hunter had.”

Democrats also stressed there were especially frequent conversations between Hunter Biden and his father after his brother, Beau Biden, died in 2015.

Ian Sams, White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations, said Carlson was “cherry picking.”

“The President was never in business with his son, and even his son’s associates are testifying to Congress that the President never discussed their business dealings and wasn’t involved in them,” Sams said in a statement. “No amount of Tucker Carlson’s spin and misdirection, cherry picking innocuous niceties to try to mislead people, is going to change that, as much as I’m sure the right wing disinformation machine wishes it could.”

House Republicans, however, are pointing to Archer’s Monday testimony as evidence President Biden lied when he said on the 2020 campaign trail that he had never spoken with his son about his business dealings.

Republicans have also seized on Archer saying Hunter Biden used the “illusion of access” to his father.

Carlson said in the interview that Hunter Biden is “not the only son of a famous government official who’s done this.” 

“What Hunter ran into was like, almost like an Icarus issue,” Archer said in the interview with Carlson. “So he got a little — it was too close to the sun. It was good to be true. And the connections were too close and the scrutiny too much.”

A spokesperson for Archer’s legal counsel did not respond to an inquiry on whether he sat for an interview with Carlson before or after his testimony to the House Oversight Committee — and why he decided to speak to Carlson.

Last year, Archer was sentenced to a year and a day in prison after he was convicted of defrauding a Native American tribe. He has not yet been ordered to report to prison, and a letter from the Department of Justice over the weekend said Archer’s counsel plans to appeal.

Reached for comment about the Archer interview with Carlson, a spokesperson for Hunter Biden referred back to a statement from his legal counsel issued Monday following Archer’s congressional testimony. 

“Mr. Archer confirmed one more time that Hunter Biden did not involve his father in, nor did his father assist him in, his business.  It’s well known that Hunter and his father speak daily, and what Mr. Archer confirmed was that when those calls occurred during Hunter’s business meetings, if there was any interaction between his father and his business associates, it was simply to exchange small talk,” said Abbe Lowell, counsel for Hunter Biden. “Like the relatives of Donald Trump, Senators Ron Johnson, and Ted Cruz, Rep. Lauren Boebert, and many others, family members of elected representatives meet people and may get opportunities because of those connections. Congress would be busy investigating many of their own if that’s their idea of an offense.”