On Monday, one of Hunter Biden‘s former business partners was sentenced to over a year in prison for participating in a scam to defraud a Native American tribe out of about $60 million in bonds. Judge Ronnie Abrams, in a Manhattan court, said that the crime was “too serious” to let him walk.
“There’s no dispute about the harm caused to real people,” Abrams said, referring to the defrauded tribe, the Oglala Sioux, which is one of the poorest in the nation.
Archer will be forced to pay over $15 million in forfeiture on his own and over $43 million in restitution with the other co-defendants.
The convicted swindler associate of Hunter Biden has continued to maintain that he is innocent of the crime and he will appeal his conviction and his sentence, his lawyer Matthew Schwartz said in court on Monday.
Archer told the judge prior to his sentencing that he was taken advantage of by corrupt businessmen who used him as a fall guy in the scheme.
“He came under the influence of a person he trusted too much and didn’t ask enough questions,” the lawyer said.
Archer said the whole thing was “nothing less than surreal” (don’t all convicted criminals say that?) that he was convicted of a crime and was actually facing prison time.
“I was doing too many things at once and not paying enough attention,” Archer said.
“I have deep remorse for the victims of the crime,” he said, and that he was distraught to learn of the pain he caused his friends and family. His lawyer probably told him to say all of that.
“I’m most sorry for my family and what I’ve put them through,” he said.
Archer was Hunter’s good buddy who served on the same board of Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian natural gas company where we know Hunter was paid anywhere from $50,00 to $82,000 a month for a no-show job when he had zero experience in natural gas or the energy industry, and no experience in Ukraine that would have landed him that gig if his father wasn’t the Vice President of the United States at the time and made the point man by President Barack Obama to weed out corruption in the Ukraine government. What a hoot!
Archer is the same cohort that Joe Biden said he never met, that is, until a photograph surfaced of Joe and Hunter Biden posing on a golf course with Devon Archer.
For once, Hunter Biden is in the clear. He had no connection to the Native American fraud scheme that Archer was convicted for, the charges of which were conspiracy to commit securities fraud and securities fraud, by a jury of his peers in 2018.
Prosecutors argued that the defendants purchased over $60 million in bonds from the Oglala Sioux. However, rather than using them for annuity, the fraudsters used them to create “a financial services mega-company.”
In the sentencing memo, prosecutors wrote, “Archer became a key player in the scheme, anticipating that, when the scheme succeeded, he would helm the resulting conglomerate and, ultimately, reap massive profits from its sale.”
Get this. After Archer was convicted, Judge Abrams granted a request for a new trial. However, a federal appeals court overruled her and the conviction stands.
Judge Abrams noted that Archer did not try to obstruct justice like a number of his co-defendants did, and he wasn’t the ringleader of the fraud scheme. She also pointed out that Archer didn’t benefit financially at all from the fraud scheme, and he even lost money from the scheme. She didn’t mention that he is friends with the president’s troubled son.
After the sentencing, Schwartz said in a statement, “Mr. Archer is obviously disappointed with today’s sentence, and intends to appeal. It is unfortunate that the judge, who has previously expressed concern that Mr. Archer is innocent of the crimes charged and reiterated that belief today, felt that she was constrained not to act on her independent assessment of the evidence.”
Rich is a conservative, syndicated opinion writer and owner of MAGA-Chat.com. He writes about politics, culture, liberty, and faith.
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