On July 31, 2023, Devon Archer sat for a transcribed interview with the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability in the O’Neill House Office Building. The committee released the transcript on August 3. Archer is the former business partner of Hunter Biden. Both men sat on the board of Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company.
Counsel asked who Vadym Pozharskyi was. Archer said he was “the corporate secretary.” “He was not the CFO.” That is Archer’s title for him. The Associated Press, in 2019, called him an adviser to the board of directors of Burisma Group. A Wikimedia Commons photograph dated May 29, 2014, captions him the same way, standing with former Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski.
Counsel then asked about a spring 2015 dinner at Café Milano in Washington. Archer said then-Vice President Joe Biden attended. Who else: “Vadym, Hunter, Joe, myself, Karim Massimov, a Greek Orthodox priest, maybe someone from World Food Programme.” Earlier in the same interview he said, “At that diner, it was Vadym, Karim Massimov — so Vadym P. from Burisma.” That is the documented meeting of Pozharskyi and the Vice President in Archer’s testimony. It is a restaurant dinner. It is not a finding that Pozharskyi sat in the Vice President’s office or ran the White House.
Archer also described his own visit. In April 2014, around the time he joined the Burisma board, he “met with Vice President — then-Vice President Biden in the office next to the White House, the Vice President’s office, like that formal office.” He said he brought his son. He said Hunter joined for some portion. He did not place Pozharskyi in that office on that day.
On the Dubai board meeting in December 2015, Archer said Mykola Zlochevsky and Vadym asked Hunter Biden to make phone calls. The request, he said, was “can D.C. help?” — “government pressure from Ukrainian Government investigations into Mykola.” He said he “was not party to that phone call.” He said it “wasn’t like — there weren’t specific, you know, can the big guy help? It was — it’s always this amorphous, can we get help in D.C.?” That is the transcript. A request for D.C. help is not, by itself, a crime finding. It is not a finding that Joe Biden took an official act for Burisma.
The same evening, July 31, 2023, at 20:21 UTC, the House Oversight majority account @GOPoversight posted: “In December 2015, Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and Vadym Pozharski, an executive of Burisma, placed constant pressure on Hunter Biden to get help from D.C. regarding the Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. Shokin was investigating Burisma for corruption.” Chairman James Comer’s written statement that day used the same paragraph and added that Hunter, Zlochevsky, and Pozharskyi “called D.C.” and “stepped away to make the call.” That is the committee’s write-up of the interview. Archer’s own words, quoted above, stay next to it. Readers can open both.
Mae Laffarezzo, Pepe’s Grandma, and Giorgia Salvagni posted the same episode on X within two days. Their punch lines stay on the rail. They are their posts. They are not a court.