In the weeks before the 2020 election, Devon Archer was on the precipice of publicly turning against the Bidens after years of remaining silent.
He held previously unreported phone calls with a well-connected ally of President Trump. The ally suggested that the Trump administration might be able to make fraud charges against Mr. Archer go away if he spoke out ahead of the election about his longtime business partner Hunter Biden, the son of Joseph R. Biden Jr., according to three people familiar with the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal private discussions.
Unsure whether the offer was solid, Mr. Archer stayed quiet. He told people he knew that he hoped a pardon would come if the elder Mr. Biden became president.
But after Mr. Biden took office, Mr. Archer was largely frozen out by the family, according to three associates of the Bidens who did not have permission to discuss the relationship publicly.
Over the subsequent months and years, as Mr. Archer protested his innocence while his case pin-balled through the courts, he began quietly making inroads with Mr. Trump and his allies. He cooperated with investigations examining the millions of dollars that Hunter Biden reaped from foreign businesses, and how those dealings overlapped with his father’s work as vice president. He provided information to prosecutors, journalists and Republican congressional investigators.
On Tuesday afternoon, that journey from Biden insider to Trump devotee was completed. Mr. Trump applied the choppy marker strokes of his signature to a full and unconditional pardon for Mr. Archer, wiping away his conviction in a scheme to defraud investors and a Native American tribal entity of tens of millions of dollars.
Mr. Archer, 50, in a phone interview expressed gratitude and loyalty to Mr. Trump.
“I’m full MAGA now,” he said. “They’re more my people.”
His story underscores Mr. Trump’s embrace of clemency as a political tool, and illustrates how that approach is being harnessed by allies. It also hints at the increasingly blurry line between politics and criminal justice, as partisans encourage the prosecution of their rivals and bemoan that of their allies.
For Mr. Trump, pardoning Mr. Archer checked a number of the boxes that have come to define his increasingly aggressive approach to clemency. It jabbed an enemy (the Bidens), rewarded an ally (Mr. Archer) and highlighted his grievances about what he describes as the political weaponization of the justice system.
For the defrauded tribal entity — as well as the prosecutors who brought the case — it was a blow.
For Mr. Archer, his wife and their three adolescent children, it was a huge relief. It freed him from having to serve any part of his prison sentence of one year and one day, and from having to pay nearly $60 million in forfeitures and restitution.
His path to a second chance went straight to Mr. Trump, bypassing the Justice Department system set up to identify and vet worthy pardon candidates. That system is based on apolitical criteria that generally require offenders to have served their sentences and demonstrated good behavior afterward.
At the beginning of Mr. Trump’s term, more than 1,600 pardon petitions were pending before the Justice Department.
Mr. Archer has told associates that he is interested in serving in Mr. Trump’s administration or for his political operation at some point. In the meantime, he intends to work on a book and documentary about his experiences, as well as a cryptocurrency-adjacent business project.
It is a future that would have been hard to predict when Mr. Archer first partnered with Hunter Biden in 2009.
A former Ralph Lauren model who played on the Yale lacrosse team, Mr. Archer had been an up-and-coming fund-raiser for John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004. He met Hunter Biden through Mr. Kerry’s stepson Christopher Heinz.
With a background in international finance, Mr. Archer helped to arrange introductions to foreign business interests that saw Hunter Biden’s political connections as a selling point.
In 2014, Mr. Archer and Mr. Biden joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, which some in the Obama administration viewed as a conflict of interest for the Bidens. At the time, the elder Mr. Biden’s portfolio as vice president included prodding Ukrainian leaders to clean up the corruption that plagued their government and energy industry.
Mr. Archer left the board and started severing his business connections with Hunter Biden after being charged in 2016 in the securities fraud scheme. It involved a financial firm for which Mr. Archer was the chairman and Mr. Biden was listed as the vice chairman, according to documents introduced at trial.
Hunter Biden was not charged in the case, and his lawyers have said he was not involved.
Mr. Archer was found guilty by a jury in 2018, despite arguing that he was deceived by a partner whom the district court trial judge called “the admitted mastermind of the conspiracy and a serial fraudster.” Later that year, the judge set aside the verdict and ordered a new trial, citing concerns “that Archer lacked the requisite intent and is thus innocent of the crimes charged in this indictment.”
As he awaited trial, he texted Hunter Biden despondently, in an exchange that was included in a cache of files on a laptop that Mr. Biden left at a Delaware repair shop.
“Why did your dad’s administration appointees arrest me and try and put me in jail,” Mr. Archer wrote early one morning in March 2019, as the elder Mr. Biden was preparing to begin his presidential campaign. “Why would they try and ruin my family and destroy my kids and no one from your family’s side step in and at least try to help me. I don’t get it. And I’m depressed.”
Hunter Biden struck an academic tone, texting back that his father had no control over the Justice Department while he was vice president, and that “it’s unfair at times but in the end the system of justice usually works and like you we are redeemed and the truth prevails.”
Two Biden family associates said there was never any serious discussion about the possibility that the elder Mr. Biden, if elected, would pardon Mr. Archer.
Hunter Biden did not respond to a request for comment, nor did a spokeswoman for former President Biden.
About one month before the 2020 election, an appeals court reversed the district court judge in Mr. Archer’s case, reinstating the jury verdict. After that, Mr. Archer had his initial phone conversation with the Trump ally.
Weeks after President Biden took the oath of office, Mr. Archer participated in an hourslong interview with prosecutors pursuing a wide-ranging examination of Hunter Biden’s tax affairs and international business dealings.
In 2023, his relationship with the Bidens was thrust into the political spotlight when he testified in a Republican-led congressional investigation into Hunter Biden’s business and the ways in which it intersected with his father’s public service.
Mr. Archer’s testimony was fairly dispassionate. He said he was not aware of any wrongdoing by the elder Mr. Biden, while also detailing ways in which the Hunter Biden and his foreign business partners leveraged the Biden family “brand” to boost their interests.
The investigation did not lead to the impeachment of President Biden, as some Republicans hoped, but it earned Mr. Archer new fans on the pro-Trump right.
Within days, he was expounding further on the ways that the Bidens engaged in “abuse of soft power” during a long interview with Tucker Carlson, the Trump-allied pundit with whom Mr. Archer would become close.
He also forged a bond with Tony Bobulinski, another jilted former Biden business partner, accompanying him at the Republican National Convention and events for Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign. Backstage at a campaign rally, Mr. Archer and one of his sons posed for a photo with Mr. Trump.
When Mr. Trump won, Mr. Archer started consulting with a lawyer with close ties to the incoming president, who helped sketch out a plan for pursuing a pardon. Mr. Archer drafted an application tailored to Mr. Trump’s sensibilities, which the lawyer provided to Mr. Trump’s team.
Featuring photos of Mr. Archer with various Trump influencers, as well damaging news reports about the Bidens that relied on his disclosures, the application listed a number of “key character witnesses” close to the president, including Mr. Carlson; Matt Gaetz, the former Florida representative; and Marla Maples, Mr. Trump’s second wife.
The application recounted that Mr. Archer’s uncle was Ms. Maples’s manager in the early 1990s, giving occasion for a few brief encounters between a teenage Mr. Archer and Mr. Trump.
The application led with a letter to Mr. Trump in which Mr. Archer expressed regret for not more carefully vetting the business partners involved in the fraud scheme, but also cast himself as “a victim of financial fraud.” He detailed the emotional toll on him and his family of the court case and of his speaking out about the Bidens, concluding by quoting Mr. Trump’s words after being shot in the ear during an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in rural Pennsylvania: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Last week, while attending a college wrestling championship in Philadelphia, Mr. Trump reportedly summoned Mr. Archer from across the arena and promised the pardon, telling The New York Post afterward that Mr. Archer “was screwed by the Bidens.”
Days later in the White House, as he signed the pardon, Mr. Trump echoed Mr. Archer’s application, telling the assembled cameras: “I looked at the record, studied the records and he was a victim of a crime, as far as I’m concerned. So we’re going to undo that.”
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