Hunter Biden’s former close friend and business partner, Devon Archer, will soon testify before the House Oversight Committee and is expected to detail a number of instances in which President Biden was involved in his son’s business dealings, even though the president has consistently denied knowing anything about such affairs. This comes as the younger Mr. Biden hopes to have his plea agreement affirmed by a federal judge despite calls by Republican lawmakers denouncing the agreement as “a sweetheart deal.”

Archer will testify that on multiple occasions, the president called into his son’s business meetings to interact with potential partners, often during his time as vice president. “We are looking forward very much to hearing from Devon Archer about all the times he has witnessed Joe Biden meeting with Hunter Biden’s overseas business partners when he was vice president, including on speakerphone,” the chairman of the Oversight Committee, Congressman James Comer, told the New York Post’s Miranda Devine, who first broke the news of Archer’s testimony. 

Archer’s testimony will directly refute the president’s repeated claims that he had no knowledge of or participation in his troubled son’s business dealings. During the 2019 presidential Democratic primary debate, Mr. Biden insisted, “I never discussed a single thing with my son about anything having to do with Ukraine. No one has indicated I have.” 

Yet “in at least a dozen instances, the younger Mr. Biden put his father, then vice president, on speakerphone with his overseas business partners,” the committee said on Twitter. “In one instance with Biden associate Devon Archer, two Burisma executives explicitly asked Hunter, ‘Can you ring your dad?’”

Burisma is the Ukrainian energy company that employed the younger Mr. Biden and Archer, paying the first son about $80,000 a month before his father left the vice presidency in 2017, at which point his salary fell significantly. 

A committee source confirmed to the Sun that it has not yet set a date for Archer’s testimony, but said it is “actively working with his attorney” to schedule the meeting. Congress is due to be out of session for the entire month of August, so Archer’s testimony may not come until September or later. 

One such instance of the president phoning his son’s associates allegedly came about in late 2015, when the first son and Archer were meeting with Burisma executives at Dubai. During an after-dinner cocktail, one Burisma executive, Vadym Pozharskyi, explicitly asked the younger Mr. Biden to call his father. 

The introduction of the president and Burisma executives — which Archer confirmed to the committee was brief, polite, and involved no discussion of business matters — came about after the founder and president of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, demanded a call with the then-vice president. Three days after the phone call at Dubai, the elder Mr. Biden traveled to Ukraine. 

Archer is expected to testify that on at least two dozen occasions, the younger Mr. Biden took out his phone to call his father as a “party trick” to impress not only friends but potential investors and would-be business partners as well. 

According to other disclosures made by the House Ways and Means Committee, the younger Mr. Biden also invoked his father to pressure associates. During one 2017 WhatsApp interaction with a counterpart in Communist China disclosed by the committee, the first son threatened to forever “hold a grudge” if he did not receive the money he demanded

“I am sitting here with my father and would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” Mr. Biden wrote in a July 2017 message to a business partner, Henry Zhao.

Archer is also likely to be asked about the allegation that the two Biden men each received $5 million as part of a “bribery scheme” that would have allowed Burisma to break into the American energy sector. Based on an unclassified FBI memo that detailed allegations of the bribe, Mr. Zlochevsky was reportedly pressured into paying the bribe, even though he thought the younger Mr. Biden was more “stupid” than his own dog. 

According to a new report by the Federalist, the FBI field office at Pittsburgh — which investigated the bribery allegations before they sent the complaint to Delaware — informed prosecutors at Wilmington that many details in the memo had already been corroborated. 

The memo, known as an FD-1023, detailed one confidential human source’s involvement with Burisma executives, including Mr. Zlochevsky. The source, who remains anonymous but has been used by FBI officials for the last decade and is considered to be “highly credible,” traveled to Europe on multiple occasions to meet with Burisma’s senior leadership, where they disclosed the alleged bribe. When the Pittsburgh FBI field office investigated these allegations, it found that the source had, in fact, been in Europe at the same time he claimed to have been. 

The June 12 subpoena that was sent to Archer from the Oversight Committee states that the panel views him “as possessing information relevant to its investigation” into the alleged bribe. 

This potentially damning testimony likely will not come before the younger Mr. Biden has his plea deal either affirmed or denied by a jurist at Wilmington. The judge, Maryellen Noreika, must approve or reject Mr. Biden’s deal during the hearing on Wednesday.

Judge Noreika was nominated to her position by President Trump but was supported by Delaware’s two Democratic senators. She, like the Bidens, has deep ties to the Delaware legal establishment as a decades-long partner at one of the state’s most powerful law firms.