New Questions Surround Hunter Biden After Newly Revealed Wall Street Whistleblower Documents | CLIP 2023-09-21 02:01

Hi everyone, and welcome to Truth Over News. Many are aware that Hunter Biden's longtime partner, Devin Archer, was convicted in a 2014 scheme involving a Native American tribal bond offering. Archer, John Galanis, and the five other defendants duped clients into investing more than $43 million in sham bonds issued in 2014 and 2015 by a business affiliate of the Oglala Sioux Nation in South Dakota. The proceeds from the bonds, which included several different offerings, were supposed to be used to build a distribution center and other projects for the tribe, but were instead diverted for the personal use of Galanis, Archer, and the other associates. Galanis and his group also sought to use the proceeds from the bonds to effectuate a strategy that involved buying up small financial firms to merge them into a larger entity called the Burnham Financial Group. We've always wondered why Hunter Biden was never caught up in this scandal, particularly because he was a close partner with Archer and because their broker-dealer firm, Rosemont Seneca, was effectively sold to Burnham Financial as part of the larger deal. We now know that the SEC was alerted to a series of suspicious transactions involving Devin Archer and Rosemont Seneca in late spring 2015 by a Wall Street whistleblower who was employed at Morgan Stanley. It was this notification that exposed the fraudulent bond deal, which ultimately led to Archer's conviction. Indeed, its documents from the whistleblower, which appear to highlight Hunter's involvement, then make it all the more suspicious that it was only Archer who caught the eye of the feds. Archer was originally convicted in June 2018, along with Galanis and Bevin Cooney. But unlike Galanis and Cooney, Archer had his conviction overturned by U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams, an Obama appointee who just so happened to be married to Mueller Special Counsel Prosecutor Greg Andre. At the time, Judge Abrams said she was left with an unwavering concern that Archer is innocent of the crimes charged. Thankfully, Judge Abrams' decision was reversed on appeal, and Archer was sentenced to a year and one day in prison. It looks like that sentence was actually quite lenient. As court documents make clear, the tribal bond scheme was totally constructed and consisted of four parts. One, convincing the Wapomne Lake Community Corporation to issue the tribal bonds. Two, engineering the tribal bond issuances to give Galanis and his associates undisclosed control over the tribal bond proceeds. Three, securing victims to purchase the tribal bonds. And four, misappropriating the tribal bond proceeds for the benefit of Galanis and his associates, including Archer and the other defendants. One of the first steps in their scheme was the purchase of two small asset managers, Hughes Capital Management and Atlantic Asset Management, using a subsidiary of their newly created financial roll-up vehicle, Burnham Financial. The total purchase price was small, just a couple million dollars, but with the purchase came a customer base of managed assets that was large enough to be illegally used to purchase the bond deal. Meanwhile, the Native American Tribal Corporation, the Wapomne Lake Community Corporation, was convinced to issue three tranches of tribal bonds. This was done in part by providing a falsified annuity contract that the tribe believed contained the funds necessary to pay off the bonds at maturity and allow for those new development projects for the tribe. But the annuity was actually worthless. It had been issued by an assetless holding company controlled by Galanis and his associates. It was all a fraud. The proceeds from the bond deal had gone to Galanis, Archer, and his associates, and the annuity had no invested funds. To make matters worse, the issuer of the bonds was directly affiliated with the Wapomne District of the Oglala Sioux Nation, whose members live in one of the poorest regions in the United States. This was not a victimless crime. A quick summation of what happened. Archer and his associates, under the leadership of John Galanis, built a small financial conglomerate known as Burnham Financial Group, in part by using the misappropriated funds from the sale of the Indian tribal bonds. But it was the proceeds of the bonds themselves that were the true prize. If the new financial group proved viable, great. But their true goals were twofold. One, get the tribal issuer of the bonds to accept the small allotment of the proceeds from the sale of their bonds, along with a much larger fictitious annuity contract that the tribe believed held real value. Two, allow Galanis, Archer, and their associates to gain control of the proceeds by placing the worthless bonds with unsuspecting investor accounts, controlled by the newly created Burnham Financial. Instead of the Native American tribe ending up with the proceeds from the bond offering, the cash was now held by Galanis, Archer, and his group. In total, there were three tranches of tribal bonds that were issued. $27 million in August 2014, $20 million in September 2014, and $16 million in April 2015. The first and last issuances directly defrauded the clients of their newly purchased asset manager, who were used as unwitting purchasers of those bonds by Galanis, Archer, and the rest of the group. But Galanis, Archer, and their associates purchased the second offering of $20 million in a process known as recycling, using proceeds from the first bond deal to do so. And as before, they siphoned off the majority of this money too, once again using another fictitious annuity contract. As court documents note, the point of this recycling scheme was to use the bonds as currency in various transactions, including to fraudulently bolster Burnham Securities' net capital, thereby making Burnham appear more financially sound than it was. And remember, on paper, the bonds appeared to be worth at least $20 million, a seemingly real asset that could be sold to other investors. It's here that we return more directly to Archer, Hunter, and the Wall Street whistleblower. Archer used his company, Rosemont Seneca Bohai, or RSB, as a vehicle to purchase that second offering of bonds using proceeds from the first bond issuance to avoid any real capital outlay. And he knowingly lied to his bank to do so. As court documents note, Archer claimed, the funds used to purchase the bonds were from real estate sales through my business, Rosemont Seneca Bohai, a statement Archer knew was untrue when he made it. Archer has publicly played the innocent, claiming he was misled by others and simply wasn't paying attention to what was transpiring. But these court documents show otherwise. Archer appears to be a direct and willing participant in the scheme. But all of this still left Archer and his group with $20 million in worthless bonds on their books. They needed to sell them to another investor before their scheme unraveled. According to an internal Morgan Stanley presentation, their municipal trading desk was approached on or about December 2014 regarding the possible purchase of a sizable tranche of non-rated municipal bonds that were issued only three months earlier on September 12th. This was the second $20 million tranche that Archer purchased through his company, RSB, again using the proceeds from that first bond offering to do so. Morgan Stanley assigned a high-yield credit analyst to analyze the bonds for possible purchase for the trading desk. What they found apparently drew immediate red flags. As a result, Morgan Stanley passed on the purchase of Archer's bonds that same month. But it also appears that they continued to evaluate the structure and unusual genesis of the bonds over the next five months, getting increasingly disconcerted as they did so. It's worth reiterating that Morgan Stanley allowed a lengthy time for a full review of the bonds before going to the SEC. Slides later submitted to the SEC show a date of May 8th, 2015, five months after first being approached by Archer and his associates. As a former high-yield analyst myself, I'm sure immediate alarm bells went off for the Morgan Stanley analyst. This bond offering was a true private placement, so illiquid that the bonds had never even traded to this point. Another notable item was the price at which Archer and his group were carrying the bonds on their books. Archer's company had the bonds marked in RSB's portfolio at $111, a shockingly high valuation for a brand new issue. For perspective, in bond parlance, par value, which is normally also the new issue price, is $100. To have illiquid bonds that had been issued just three months earlier trading at these kinds of lofty levels is simply unheard of.