Devon Archer traces his elite upbringing—Yale lacrosse player, Citibank’s Vietnam post-Doi Moi reforms, and Emmy-winning documentary producer—before co-founding Rosemont Capital, where Hunter Biden joined in 2009 as a non-investing advisor. Their Burisma board partnership, brokered by Vadim Pozharski and former Polish President Kwaśniewski, tied Hunter’s $83K/month role to geopolitical influence, culminating in Joe Biden’s 2016 call to oust prosecutor Shokin after Archer’s 2014 entry. Archer’s exit in 2019 left Burisma vulnerable without Hunter’s regulatory leverage, while the laptop leak reignited scrutiny of his eight-year legal and personal fallout from the deal. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, and so for the first three years we were together on the same street.
I'm a year older, so her mom used to babysit me when I used to eat Cheerios off the floor where she was pregnant with her, which was a pretty funny story.
And I moved to Rosin Harbor, which was a mile away.
And then we went to nursery school together, ended up in the North Shore school districts.
My mom was the art teacher at Glenwood Landing School and went to North Shore High School.
We were, you know, prom.
Prom dates, senior year, and then dated for a bit in college, and then reunited after college some years later.
I actually went, she was my art teacher, K through 6. Wow.
Yeah, so that was a very normal, very middle class, you know, three-sport athlete, you know, lacrosse, winter track, football, very kind of, even though it's Long Island and close to the city, it's kind of very Americana.
Just, you know, it was, I got to school and, you know, there were, I don't, you know, without naming names, there was, I was, you know, at the first week at a school, I wasn't in New Haven, but out in the Cape with, you know, folks that the, you know, highways in New York were named after and, you know, large condiments and tires and stuff like that.
It was definitely, it was a big culture shock, but I, you know, adapted.
Pretty quickly from an academic standpoint, the academic rigor was certainly from a public high school in Long Island relative to Taft or Exeter or Andover.
There was a quick learning curve, but it was attainable.
And then socially, I think I did a fine job as well, too.
So, ended up at Yale.
Went through four years.
We had a successful lacrosse career there, which was an absolutely incredible experience.
Kept you in line, kept you in shape.
Less distracted from everything.
And graduated.
A quick stint into your world.
Ended up working on the Olympics for NBC for Bob Costas.
I kind of orchestrated it through an uncle that had a relationship at CitiBank.
And yeah, I ended up getting a management associate job there.
They'd just opened.
Doi Moi was kind of underway, which was not necessarily the privatization, but the opening of Vietnam post the war, the conflict, the war of American aggression.
That's what I've been coached to say if you live in Vietnam for some time.
So I went there as a management associate.
I was in Hanoi for a year and then a couple years in Ho Chi Minh City.
And ended up at CityCorp Asia Capital Limited, where I was in private equity.
After Vietnam, there was a non-profit that had come through to produce a film about Vietnam, which involved a bike ride on mountain bikes from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City.
It was an 18-day ride, 1,200 miles, and we had a production team actually video it.
They asked me at Citibank to sponsor it, so I wrote a letter to New York and said, can we sponsor this amazing event?
We've got 100 NVA disabled soldiers, and we've got 100 American veterans, primarily disabled, and we got on bicycles and hand cycles.
I piloted a blind veteran that had been shot near Quezon.
And spent 18 days on a bike going over those memories.
And then, actually, this is how I left Citibank.
I got a call.
So this is an amazing experience, yada, yada.
But I'm sitting at my desk at Citibank in Ho Chi Minh City, or I don't know, I forget what office I was in.
Got a call and said, you know, we had such a great time with you riding on the bike.
Would you come back and be a co-executive producer on this film?
And you could get a job.
One of the benefactors of the charity was a Goldman guy.
One was at Equitable Financial at the time.
And they were both the CEOs or senior partners.
And they were like, we'll give you a job.
You have the training at Citi.
Just produce the movie for us.
And so I went back and we ended up selling.
I worked very closely with a great colleague down in Charlotte.
We sold the film to NBC. Title sponsor.
We sold it to Reebok as a title sponsor.
Got Dick Enberg to do the intro.
Got Bruce Springsteen to donate a song.
Yeah, shut out the light.
And it was a great success.
We won the Emmy in 99. So, daytime outstanding program achievement.
Yep, we're without a job, and I team up with a partner, and we start Rosemont.
We start Rosemont Capital.
And Rosemount Capital starts really in the private equity world in something called a fundless sponsor.
So when you're out and in private equity early, you go out as a fundless sponsor.
And what that means is you don't have a pool of capital to kind of draw on, but you look for an asset.
You identify an asset you think is going to be a good private asset that you can either take public or sell to another strategic buyer.
So that's always kind of like the infancy of a private equity firm.
Fundless sponsors succeed.
A lot of fundless sponsors fall by the wayside, and a lot of managers at fundless sponsors just give up.
But if you have some early successes, you can end up establishing a firm.
And we ended up establishing a multi-asset class boutique firm that was fairly successful.
Most of our success was in real estate.
We ended up buying a real estate management company, and that was called Rosemont Realty.
We renamed it Rosemont Realty, it was called.
BGK or some acronym.
And we ended up putting the Rosemont brand on that after, I would say, five years in business at Rosemont Capital.
And that business was sold later in 2015. But at our peak, we probably had $3 billion of assets under management, which is kind of like your scorecard as a private equity manager.
A piece of Rosemont ended up being Rosemont Realty, which was this acquisition of BGK. So it sounds like you've got a perfectly self-sustaining business, $3 billion under management.
So we had this lunch, and a mutual friend, or it wasn't even, I don't know how it was, but an attorney of Hunter's, another attorney of Hunter's, an attorney as well.
Had introduced us, and we had a lunch, and we always, you know, you're always looking for kind of an edge or an advantage as being a boutique, and certainly $3 billion was good as an AUM number, a scorecard, but in real estate, it's kind of a levered number, so it's a little exaggerated.
If you're Blackstone 4 and you have $3 billion, you have $3 billion of dry powder.
If you have a small private equity fund with...
You know, $3 billion under management.
A lot of it's real estate.
It's actually not the actual number you have in dry powder.
What we really hoped for was introductions to capital, to raise more capital in deal flow.
So the things that make a private equity fund successful, whether it's in real estate or asset-backed securities, or just going out and looking for operating assets, it's finding unique deals, and then finding the capital to actually invest in those deals and make them worth more money.
So I think in the back of our minds, The initial strategy was, okay, we can expand our network exponentially.
Hunter and his strategic team know, you know, tons of folks, and it's a whole new world of, you know, of high net worth individuals, family offices, you know, institutional pension funds, which was a huge one that we thought that we could crack that never materialized.
And yes, so that was the genesis.
But on paper, what, you know, what...
We looked at, it was like, okay, why are you kind of teaming up?
There was no investment in it.
It was a, you know, Rosemont Seneca Partners was kind of a dovetail concept.
It's not like we didn't fund it, nor did they fund it.
We just said they had their strategic advisory business, we had our private equity business.
Let's combine forces, expand our network, and maybe get some help.
Or maybe when we talk to a strategic asset that's, you know, selling...
We had a company that sold body armor, for instance.
Maybe we could get a military contract because someone in D.C. knew the Pentagon people.
I mean, it's just simple kind of connecting the dots.
But, like, the idea that a pension fund would make an investment decision based on political calculations is, like, the definition of corruption, isn't it?
But it seemed like an opportunity to just broaden our network, broaden our...
You know, competitive advantage on the deal side by having this, you know, access or regulatory understanding of D.C. is how we properly say it.
And maybe expanding our, you know, and getting lucky with a pension fund introduction or another, you know, large family, you know, maybe there's a political donor that's a billion dollar family office on the West Coast that Hunter has a relationship with.
So I thought that that would be, that was enough reason to kind of...
Not invest in a new company, but just, you know, flirt with a joint venture at the end of the day.
Again, you're always expanding your network in raising capital and private equity and work with this group, Tri-Global Group, which...
Famously also worked with Mayor Giuliani, which was another one of their clients, which we found out later, but it was kind of interesting.
They had had, on their fundraising list, had Nikolai and Vadim, who were the CEO and the CEO owner and corporate secretary of Burisma, and they'd come through New York.
And they're taken through and, you know, the Tri-Global Group says we're working on, you know, these things.
One of the funds that we're marketing is Rosemont Real Estate Acquisition Fund 1, Reef.
And they show it to them.
And that's probably, you know, I'll probably get the dates wrong, but that's maybe in the early, you know, the 2012 range.
Okay, so that's the first context.
We've got a placement agent.
Working on Rosemont, they're on commission business with Rosemont Real Estate Acquisition Fund.
They meet Vadim and Burisma.
I don't know if they've known each other before, but there's this mini-gark, as we call it.
And then a mini-gark and Vadim, who's the corporate secretary, they come through, they give them the deck.
I don't know if they spent any time on it.
The deck being the marketing presentation for Reap.
And nothing happens.
They don't come in as an investor, but they...
TriGlobal was successful in identifying some investors for us.
Not Burisma.
Cut to 2014, and I'm in the midst of a trip to Europe, and we're doing a strategic deal with a large bank there, and I get there late February, early March, and it happens to be the day that Putin invaded Crimea.
A peaceful invasion of Crimea, as they say.
And so our deal falls through because there's all these, you know, basically it's like this huge paradigm shift, obviously, after Mindana.
And, you know, everything changed in Europe and it became this, you know, there's this new inflection point of Ukraine and that really started there on those days.
So needless to say, our strategic deal with the bank.
Falls through for Rosemount Real Estate Acquisition Fund.
So we're quickly pivoting because at the same time we're raising for Rosemount Real Estate Acquisition Fund too.
So I happen to be at a meeting and TriGulliwell says, well, are you still trying to raise capital?
So would you like to meet with Nikolai Zolchefsky to pitch your wares?
I bring the deck to him.
We go through the presentation and he says, You know, interestingly enough, he knows, you know, obviously he's calculating.
He had made some moves earlier, which I'll tell you about, you know, thinking about Ukraine and the former position that he had.
So we pitched him back.
He kind of looks through it.
And, you know, I remembered he had some, like, crazy watch with, like, a, you know, it was like a Ulysses Nardau with, like, an oil.
Like, a thing that was ticking.
Like, the second hand was like one of those oil wells, like, cranking like this.
Little I know, it was a natural gas rig.
But it was hard to decipher.
Anyway, it was quite an impression.
And I, yeah, so I, so they, he, again, you know, for the second time, kind of ignored the real estate pitch.
And mentioned in the meeting, he didn't, I mean, he was very...
But he was obviously not interested in that.
But, you know, mentioned, he said, you know, President Kwasniewski of Poland has joined my board a couple months ago.
And do you mind if he gives you a call?
That was kind of like our departure.
And I said, yeah, wonderful.
You know, please follow up and, you know, write a $100 million check into Rosemont Real Estate Acquisition Month 2. So we never had another discussion about that.
And, you know, the next day...
Maybe 48 hours later, Kwasniewski and Vadim, who's the corporate secretary, was not at the first meeting, but he was in New York a couple years back.
Kwasniewski calls me, says, you want to come to Warsaw?
It was coordinated by Vadim, but yes, eventually we somehow got connected on WhatsApp.
And yes, calls me, invites me to Poland.
I was on a lot flight from, or whatever the airline, what the airline's called, I think it's a lot, from JFK within a couple days.
And I flew directly to Warsaw for 36 hours, sat down with Kwasniewski, and he said, listen, we've got a great opportunity, energy independence for Ukraine.
This company, Barisma, I joined the board.
We've looked at your profile.
I know you've got Rosemont.
And the idea was to raise outside capital for Burisma.
So they were like, come join the board.
It's a very high-paying opportunity.
We didn't talk details on that in that particular meeting, but he's like, trust me, and there's a chance to build an equity position in this business, and this could be...
You know, the next Exxon of Ukraine or whatever.
I think there's some discovery emails that talk about that.
So it was, as you go on with the progression of the story, so I, he's obviously a partner, and we're always looking to, you know, incent each other and include each other in each of our opportunities.
And what happened was I came back, I joined the board, or I started the process of joining the board.
I did join the board.
I think I was on the board in...
In March of that year, 2014 was probably my first month there.
And then I came back and Hunter was of counsel.
And so what I did is I brought him on board as counsel to legally represent the company and help them basically have a firm in D.C. that would look out for their best interests.
So what happened was we quickly developed, there was a team from Burisma that came in to D.C., did some meetings.
There was kind of a lead practitioner on the law side that was brought in to be like the, you know, Hunter was a relationship manager, and then there was like a lead for what things that needed to be done.
It was gorgeous, gorgeous weather, and it was May of 2014. And so, you know, that trip to D.C., Vadim had been on that trip.
I've heard of his other executives there meeting at the law firm in the conference center.
We're a large conference room and got a lot done and, you know, seemed to be off to a good start.
They visited us, Vadim and Nikolai visited us at the Villa d'Este at this economic conference.
And they struck, and Hunter, you know, was of, you know, the relationship manager at the time of council.
And they, you know, kind of struck up a conversation and Kwasniewski was not there, but on WhatsApp and kind of in the conversation.
And I think...
As opposed to me being a mark in an orchestrated effort to get Hunter on board, I think they all of a sudden saw the relationship that I brought by doing this and thought, wait, we can go a step further.
We've got the president of Poland.
We've got a couple of finance guys on the board.
We've got a couple of Ukrainians and Cypriots for regulatory reasons in those domiciles.
And we can get the son of the vice president on the board.
They saw that opportunity and they made the offer.
So what's so interesting, so here's this letter that I referred to at the Como Lake.
It is May 12, 2014, 8, 29 a.m., and this is from Vadim Pozharski.
To you and Hunter, and he goes on, and it's kind of complicated about what, he's talking about corruption in Ukraine, but he gets here, he says, we urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message, signal, et cetera, to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions, et cetera.
So, the Shokin case was, he was taking a look at Burisma, and there was a big push by European leaders, the Atlantic Council, et cetera, et cetera, to fire Shokin because he was corrupt.
Like, it's hard to kind of decipher who's corrupt.
So if Ukraine is actually a country with sovereignty and not just a colony of, say, the neocons in the United States, like, why wouldn't they just let Ukraine deal with their own...
Like, why would...
Why would Western powers even get involved in who the chief prosecutor in Ukraine is?
Again, you've got to get the signals to the government.
I think anyone in government was always a threat and always trying to shake down these businesses that were highly successful and enriching the owners.
The staff and the board.
And so at the end of the day, Shokin was taking a look.
And again, I wasn't involved in Shokin or any of this, but he was a threat.
He ended up seizing assets of Nikolai, a house, some cars, a couple properties.
And Nikolai actually never went back to Ukraine after Shokin seized all of his assets.
And the case was...
I mean, obviously, this is all out there.
The case was that there was all this pressure to fire Shokin from the larger community, and then he was fired, and then somehow Burisma was let off the hook.
I would assume it in a general sense of travel and that kind of thing.
But like I've told a lot of people in the past, there was not business content conversations.
It was the...
The idea of signals and influence, the prize is enough in speaking or hearing or knowing that you have that proximity to power.
No one is so unsophisticated that's been in politics for 50 years that Hunter is going to talk about the last quarter's how many billion cubic meters of gas we pumped out of there.
So it's just, I think a lot of the narrative gets caught up on, you know...
You know, over-speculation of these conspiracy theories that are just not true.
Well, you know, that question, I really only was under the kind of tenure at the Naval Observatory, so I knew the government was paying, we were paying for it.
Yeah, I never, I was at Bo's house, I was at Hunter's house, but those were the houses, so that was not something that I often thought about, put it that way.
Again, they've tried to beat this into my head a million times because it does work on paper as far as the logical steps.
But we were told that Shoken had already been taken care of, that he was under control, and that this is going to be a whole big problem for Burisma now.
So whether or not Hunter convinced his dad to come out against Shokan in their debate, it was very clear that the Burisma guys were hoping to leverage Hunter's relationship with the vice president and his father.
Put earlier, there was constant pressure to send signals, to leverage all of his, you know, his dad included, but the Biden brand, all of the, you know, the DC insider and relationships to help Burisma survive.
I think that's the, you know, at the end of the day, what we're talking about.
It was that ability to help on the geopolitical stage, keep them out of trouble, keep them out of investigations, unfreeze assets, unsuccessfully unfreeze visas.
And the first challenge, which was like there was a 23 million pound account that was released to Burisma because of alleged Non-cooperation by the prosecutor.
Yeah, I think at the end of it, that's the prize or the being able to have, whether it's on speakerphone or in person, to have that person in direct contact, whether you're talking about weather or politics or...
What have you, that that's the important part.
I don't think, you know, there's no relevance in asking, you know, the vice president about, you know, the gas, you know, revenues or anything like that.
It's enough.
It's enough.
And the prize is that contact and that access to power.
I was registered independent, but just for the record.
But I have been treated by, you know.
The treatment seems to be the treatment of just getting out ahead of this and speaking the truth and just retelling my story that a lot of people seem to be interested.
A lot of the negativity seems to come anonymously.
Obviously there's murmurs of...
You know, different folks saying different things.
But, you know, the threats and stuff like that seem to come from whether they're AI bots or, you know, people in a basement in Cleveland.
Not to pick on Cleveland, but it might be.
I don't know.
You know, I can't kind of pinpoint it, but it is definitely a bit of a scary time.
And he really picked up, you know, post my, you know, issues and worked with him, you know, in businesses that he got into in China and Romania, kind of after my tenure with the Rosemont Seneca Partners.
But he was...
I think he probably filled some void of, you know, companionship and, you know, business companionship, you know, in the years after I was, you know, basically sideline.
And I'm not going to offer any reviews of his work, but I just have to ask, in the many years that you spent, in the 10 years you spent with him, did he evidence any interest in painting?
Well, you know, he was, for the initial part of our, you know, the tenure of our relationship and business partnership, it was, he was sober.
So there was no, there wasn't a part of our, you know, it wasn't part of our relationship.
And then I think...
There's some, you know, some tragedy that fell upon him with his brother and, you know, coming from an early past of tragedy, you know, things got hard mentally and he slipped back in and obviously that created, you know, some chaos, but that was, you know, created less effective kind of business decisions.
Now, Burisma was already started, so that...
That moment, that tipping point had already happened at the end of the day, where the downhill spiral started, and I think a lot of those pressures of the media also contributed to it.