That was quick: Judge in case of Devon Archer associate Cooney, who turned over emails to journos, is spouse of Mueller prosecutor

That was quick: Judge in case of Devon Archer associate Cooney, who turned over emails to journos, is spouse of Mueller prosecutor
Hunter Biden and Devon Archer (Burisma via Social media); Bevan Cooney (Devon Archer court filing via Daily Caller News Foundation)

We have not yet begun to plumb the depths of what’s been going on with the Biden-Ukraine saga.

But there seems to be a lot of there there, starting with this extraordinary information.  On Friday, it was reported that a man named Bevan Cooney, who was linked with the tribal bonds fraud on which Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca partner Devon Archer was convicted in 2018, had turned over “access to his Gmail account” to journalists Matthew Tyrmand and Peter Schweizer.  Cooney was also convicted in the tribal bonds case.

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This is producing revelations from the Coney email account about Hunter Biden’s activities.

The timing is interesting.  Cooney reached out to Schweizer and Tyrmand in 2019, according to Schweizer’s account on Friday at Breitbart.

Cooney’s involvement, being highlighted at just this time, throws into strong relief the decision of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals on 7 October 2020 to deny Devon Archer his request for a new trial, in connection with that fraud scheme.

Complete filing history at link in text.

Cooney was sentenced in 2019, and reportedly contacted Schweizer and Tyrmand because he felt he had been made the fall guy for the tribal bonds scheme.  Cooney would presumably have an interest in a new Devon Archer trial.

At any rate, observe that the appeals court decision against Devon Archer was rendered four days before the New York Post says Rudy Giuliani’s attorney gave its reporters access to the information from the alleged Hunter Biden laptop.  NY Post said that access was accorded on Sunday, 11 October.

We can note, in the meantime, that given his conviction in June 2018, the FBI must have had Cooney’s emails since before then.  The first conviction in the tribal bonds scheme was in 2017.  The trove of information in Cooney’s emails on Devon Archer and Hunter Biden is something the FBI has almost certainly had for several years.

Be sure to read the Schweizer article at Breitbart so you can properly contemplate what the FBI was either uninterested in or chose to do nothing with.  The little previewed so far looks detailed and unmistakable, as evidence.

But this post is about something else.

The links on the government side

The new-trial case for Devon Archer was presided over by Judge Ronnie Abrams of the U.S. District Court for the SDNY.  She vacated the judgment against Devon Archer, a jury conviction obtained in her court in June 2018 at the same time as Cooney’s.  She had also sentenced Cooney in 2019 (see the DOJ announcement linked above).  The federal prosecutors for the SDNY appealed Abrams’s decision on Archer, leading to the appeals court reversal this month.

Following the appeals court ruling, Abrams sent Archer on for sentencing on 28 January 2021.

Abrams’s husband is Greg Andres, one of Robert Mueller’s top prosecutors on the special counsel team.  Andres was also a witness for the prosecution in the Paul Manafort trial in T.S. “C’mon man!” Ellis III’s court – the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Virginia – in August 2018.  (The U.S. Attorney for the EDVA prosecuted the Manafort case.)  Andres’s chief role with Mueller was reportedly investigating Manafort.

Moreover, Judge Ronnie Abrams’s brother, Dan Abrams, is the chief legal affairs anchor for ABC News, and hosts The Dan Abrams Show on SiriusXM.

Now, it’s by no means clear that the Abrams ruling on Devon Archer’s request for a new trial was to the benefit of people who might want to stifle the emergence of Bevan Cooney’s Gmail account.  So that, pe se, is not the point.

The point is that the U.S. federal government had every reason to know that associates of Hunter Biden, who himself had obtained a lucrative deal with a Ukrainian gas company, were being prosecuted for a massive fraud scheme – with one participant, Devon Archer, identified in both activities – at the same time the U.S. federal government was probing the partly contemporaneous dealings of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates in Ukraine with an electric cattle prod.

Fox News/Fox 10 Phoenix video, YouTube

The latter probe was explicitly linked by the Mueller team to the U.S. 2016 election – although the actual Manafort and Gates activities taken to court were all from before 2015. No connection with the U.S. 2016 election was ever established.

The links from the tribal bonds participants, in particular Devon Archer’s, to Hunter Biden would have been of greater potential significance to the 2016 election, given the numerous connections during the election campaign among story elements relevant to the the Biden-Ukraine narrative.  Those element include the Democratic Party, Ukraine, scurrilous gossip about candidate Trump, the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, the State Department’s USAID, and U.S. funds in Ukraine overseen by Vice President Joe Biden, as well as the connection with a major donor to the Democratic Party and prominent partner of USAID in Ukraine, George Soros.

The timeframe of chargeable activities in the tribal bonds case, March 2014 through April 2016, was almost exactly contemporaneous with Hunter Biden’s and Devon Archer’s involvement with Burisma, and eventually Joe Biden’s chat with Petro Poroshenko.

Without accusing Judge Abrams of wrongdoing, our reaction must be, to channel Judge T.S. Ellis: C’mon man.

Judge T.S. Ellis III. (Image via Twitter)

There’s no case to be made – none – that between 2017 and 2020, the DOJ and FBI somehow just didn’t know all the things that had been going on at the same time in 2016.  (See here for a Sharyl Attkisson article in 2019 that lays out how very much reason there was to be well aware of such probabilities, across the board.  But also keep in mind that if the FBI was doing its job, the Bureau should have had plenty of information on Devon Archer, and hence on Hunter Biden, from investigating the tribal bonds scheme.)

It defies credulity that Greg Andres and Ronnie Abrams were without the means to know about both sets of facts by the time the special counsel operation took over Crossfire Hurricane in May 2017.

In fact, Abrams seems to have been careful to recuse herself in August 2017 from a pair of “emoluments clause” cases brought against President Trump in the SDNY, because of her husband’s special counsel appointment.  The awareness was clearly there.  It took a conscious decision, if not a formal one, somewhere in the system to decouple the Archer-Biden-Ukraine connection from the interest of the special counsel and the Manafort-Ukraine connection, to justify keeping both Abrams and Andres on their cases.  I have a problem with considering that to be ops normal – especially in light of the outcome, which was a wirebrushing for Manafort, but a complete pass on the Ukraine-linked evidence against Hunter Biden from materials in the tribal bonds case.

There was prior reason, after all, to be interested in that evidence.  Archer’s connection with Hunter Biden and Ukraine has been known to the media and the U.S. public since May 2014, when Biden and Archer took positions on the Burisma board of directors.  And at the very least, even assuming an ingenuous innocence we have no reason to believe in, officials in the DOJ delegation at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv and at USAID knew of Ukrainian officials’ concerns about Burisma and U.S. aid funds during the U.S. election campaign.

The relevant events with Burisma and the aid funds occurred in 2014 and 2015; 2016 is when Biden had his infamous talk with Petro Poroshenko; it’s when Obama officials now claim they were seeking to have the Ukrainian prosecutor general dismissed because he wasn’t being aggressive enough; and it’s when it was known that the U.S. aid funds were missing.

Judge Abrams’s husband spent two years investigating Paul Manafort and testified for federal prosecutors in Manafort’s case, which was all about Ukraine.  The special counsel pursued allegations about the Trump campaign that came from Ukraine through Democratic operatives like Alexandra Chalupa and Sidney Blumenthal, as well as Christopher Steele – came in 2016, at the same time the Obama administration was aware of the missing funds, Ukrainian concerns about them, and the potential role of Burisma.

Paul Manafort (Image: YouTube screen grab via Today)

The Ukraine-involved network of Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs – personalities well known to the syndicate crime investigators at the DOJ and FBI – was present in both story lines.

Yet we are supposed to accept it as straightforward that afterward, the ephemeral Trump connections were pursued, while the Biden-Archer connections were not.

Apparently, we’re not supposed to turn a hair that a pair of spouses shows up making key government decisions between 2017 and 2020.  We’re to take it on faith that they were disinterested, and unpolluted by any untoward biases or prejudicially-managed knowledge stovepipes.  They, and the DOJ and FBI, both worked cases linked through the tunnel of the Ukraine-Bidens-2016 nexus, and we’re to be satisfied with which connections were pursued (Andres and the Mueller probe) versus which ones weren’t (Abrams and the Biden associates case).

Get real.  Structurally – forget the individual personalities – this has a gaping vulnerability at its core.  We’ve got too many people married and otherwise related to each other, participating in decisions about defendants and political targets that to the reasonable person look linked, and biased in the extreme.  There are good reasons not to trust what’s going on in our federal law enforcement organizations, and the possibility that even some experts in the field may say this is no big deal is one of them.

The presumption cannot possibly be in favor of this spousal link being irrelevant. That one’s going to require rigorous proof, to restore the public’s trust.

C’mon man.

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern California, blogging as The Optimistic Conservative for domestic tranquility and world peace. Her articles have appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The Daily Caller, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.

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