What did Hunter Biden's ex-business partner tell lawmakers?

During the first hearing Thursday of the GOP impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, House Republicans repeatedly insisted that what Hunter Biden's former business partner, Devon Archer, recently told lawmakers behind closed doors went to the heart of why the inquiry was warranted.On Thursday, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, called Archer's testimony "the most telling evidence" of the president's potential involvement in an "influence-peddling scheme." 

But a review of Archer's testimony, detailed in a publicly-released transcript, shows that Jordan left out key parts of Archer's testimony and potentially mischaracterized other parts of it that undermine some key elements of Republicans' impeachment inquiry.In 2016, when Biden was vice president, he threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine if their leaders did not remove the country's chief prosecutor, Victor Shokin, who was widely perceived by Western governments and institutions as corrupt. Securing Shokin's ouster was then the U.S.

But in his earlier testimony, Archer said Shokin specifically wasn't even "on my radar" at the time, and the "pressure" that Burisma's executive wanted relief from was "Ukrainian government investigations" more generally and the freezing of assets in the United Kingdom. "You know, basically the request is like, 'can D.C. help?' But ... it wasn't like -- there weren't specific, you know, 'can the big guy help?'"

Democrats on the committee, including Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking minority member, have reiterated that the Justice Department investigated the Burisma claim when Donald Trump was president and closed the matter after eight months, finding "insufficient evidence" that it was true. Democrats have also highlighted the transcript of an interview with Mykola Zlochevsky, Burisma's co-founder, in which he denied having any contact with Joe Biden while Hunter Biden worked for the company.

Shokin was ultimately fired, and as Jordan said on Thursday, Joe Biden "leveraged $1 billion of American tax money" to make that happen -- a move Biden later chronicled in public as evidence of his anti-corruption efforts as vice president.Jordan was referring to an exchange during Archer's testimony in June, when Archer told lawmakers about a request that Hunter Biden received from Burisma's top executive, Mykola Zlochevsky, during a dinner years earlier.