As Hunter Biden faces a potential criminal indictment this week, his former best friend Devon Archer will make his last bid to avoid jail Tuesday when his appeal is heard in a courtroom in Lower Manhattan.
As he grows increasingly despondent, friends with knowledge of Hunter’s thinking are telling Archer to accept that the Bidens have thrown him under the bus and that a last-minute presidential pardon has been ruled out.
They have urged him to save himself by using the only currency he has left — his knowledge of the Biden family influence-peddling scheme, for which he had a front-row seat for four years during Joe Biden’s vice presidency.
WH meet-and-greet
Archer was present at meetings Hunter arranged for his foreign business partners to meet with his father or talk to him on the phone.
He famously was photographed meeting the VP in his White House office weeks before Archer and Hunter joined the board of the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
The appointment of Judge Richard Sullivan on the three-judge panel in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals hearing the case Tuesday is a cruel blow, says a source close to Archer, because the Trump-appointed judge reinstated his fraud conviction after it had been overturned by District Judge Ronnie Abrams, an Obama appointee who declared “an unwavering concern that Archer is innocent.”
Archer is “caught between two presidents” is how friends perceive his predicament.
The irony is that Archer has a family connection to former President Donald Trump going back three decades and is on good terms with him.
Back in January, Archer coincidentally found himself sitting next to the former president at the clubhouse of his West Palm Beach golf course after Trump had played a round of golf with Kid Rock.
Trump remarked on Archer’s colorful golf attire and the pair exchanged light banter before Archer reminded him that they had met before.
When Archer was 17, back in the summer of 1991, he and his family on Long Island played a role in helping Trump hide his affair with his then-mistress, 26-year-old model-actress Marla Maples, who married Trump two years later and is the mother of their daughter, Tiffany Trump.
Maples’ manager at the time was Archer’s uncle, the late legendary CAA executive Charles Melniker. Whenever Maples came to the Melnikers’ Roslyn home, teenage Archer was assigned to keep her busy by playing tennis with her at Gerlich’s Inn in Glen Head, and driving her around in his Jeep.
Call me ‘Donald’
He also rode in Trump’s limousine three times and was on such familiar terms with the then-real estate developer, he called him “Donald.”
“She was lovely,” recalls Melniker’s widow, Deanie Melniker, Archer’s aunt. “She stayed with us out on Long Island … We were spending the time with Marla because she didn’t have a gig and to keep her out of the crosshairs of reporters and people who were harassing her.
“People didn’t think of her favorably as [the Trump] marriage was breaking down, but we were close to her and had a lot of exposure to Donald. He was very supportive and friendly and kind [even] as his fortunes were waning.”
At the time, Melniker says, her father was dying and “Donald flew my dad down to Mar-a-Lago to see Jackie Mason. He was very generous and kind to my family, and appreciated what we were doing for Marla.”
When Archer bumped into Trump after golf in January, he phoned his aunt straightaway to tell her that the former president remembered her late husband fondly.
“Devon is like a son to me,” she says. “He was the most natural suburban kid with zero privilege. He was the lifeguard, athlete, and a hard worker. He worked whatever job he could.”
Archer, a former Abercrombie & Fitch model, the son of a teacher and a Vietnam veteran from Long Island, won a lacrosse scholarship to Yale. There he befriended John Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz and Hunter, with whom he launched an investment firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners.
Four years later, Archer’s association with the sons of privilege landed him a one-year, one-month sentence and a $43 million restitution bill over the bonds fraud that he says he did not know was being committed by his co-accused.
He regards himself as a victim of the fraud because he lost his life savings.
That clinking feeling
Still, unless Judge Sullivan has a change of heart or is outvoted by fellow appeals Judges William J. Nardini, a Trump appointee, and Myrna Pérez, a Biden appointee, Archer, a father of two, will be heading for the big house.
Hunter, who was listed as vice president for Burnham Financial Group, the company through which the fraudulent bonds were issued — and was paid $155,000 in 2015, according to documents on his laptop — never was considered a suspect in the case and has distanced himself from Archer through his legal travails.
In 2019, after Archer complained to Hunter about his legal woes, Hunter assured him he would not be abandoned by the Biden family.
“Every great family is persecuted … you are part of a great family — not a sideshow, not deserted by them even in your darkest moments. That’s the way Bidens are different, and you are a Biden.”
But any presidential pardon forthcoming from the White House is likely to be applied only to Hunter, potentially in the lame-duck period of Joe’s presidency, by which point it will be too late for Archer.
