• Researchers found seeing someone yawn makes people more vigilant to threats 
• Previous study found seeing yawns increased people’s ability to detect snakes

By Sophie Freeman

Published: 17:41 EDT, 19 September 2023 | Updated: 19:34 EDT, 19 September 2023

Peso Pluma faces drug cartel threats not to perform at Tijuana’s Caliente Stadium: ‘It will be your last show’

• Three banners found in Tijuana with warnings to singer initialed by cartel 
• The warning read, ‘Refrain from presenting yourself on October 14’ 
• The singer, 24, performed at the MTV Video Music Awards Tuesday  

By Dailymail.com Reporter

Published: 21:45 EDT, 13 September 2023 | Updated: 02:30 EDT, 14 September 2023

Top Republicans say Hunter Biden‘s business partner Devon Archer’s damning testimony shines a ‘new light’ on the plea deal that fell apart in court last week, and reveals that Joe was directly ‘implicated’ in his son’s dealings.

Archer told Congress in bombshell testimony Monday the ‘Biden brand’ helped keep Ukrainian firm Burisma from going bankrupt. He also revealed Joe was on the phone or present in-person at least 20 times while his son who called him ‘my guy’ was talking with foreign associates.

Following Archer’s testimony, Republicans are now saying they may have enough evidence to begin an impeachment inquiry into the president for lying about his involvement in Hunter’s businesses. The White House has maintained that Joe ‘has never been in business’ with his son.

‘The evidence continues to mount and today we saw Joe Biden has lied to the American people. He knew who his son was getting those dollars from and he spoke to them and spoke to them often,’ House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., told Fox News’ Sean Hannity hours after the testimony concluded. 

Archer’s revelations to Congress provided evidence to help Republicans take a ‘huge step towards implicating Joe Biden in these crimes,’ continued Comer. ‘We heard from someone on the inside that it was influence peddling. Joe Biden himself talked to every person that has wired money to the Bidens.’

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan added that Archer’s testimony shone a ‘new light’ on Hunter’s ‘sweetheart’ plea deal, which fell apart in federal court last week. 

‘Now we have more light on that deal they tried to put together and the judge asks questions and it is no longer going to happen,’ Jordan said.

Hunter appeared in federal court last week prepared to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and walk away with just a slap on the wrist and no prison time, which Republicans slammed as a ‘sweetheart deal’ that Biden’s Department of Justice put together to protect the president’s son.

However, after Judge Maryellen Noreika questioned the ‘diversion agreement’ of Hunter’s plea deal – a clause that gave him blanket immunity for a wide range of other potential charges, including illegal foreign lobbying – the deal blew up spectacularly.

On Monday, Jordan along with committee chairs James Comer and Jason Smith launched an investigation into the ‘unusual’ plea deal and pretrial diversion agreement that they say raises ‘serious concerns’ about ‘preferential treatment’ toward Hunter.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said Monday that the information that came out of Archer’s testimony could ‘really push’ many Republicans to get to a ‘yes’ vote on impeachment for Joe Biden down the road.

Greene, Rep. Andy Biggs and Ronny Jackson immediately called for an impeachment inquiry into the president following Archer’s testimony.

‘I 100% SUPPORT an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden! What we’ve learned now is just the tip of the iceberg. His career of corruption knows no bounds. Biden has been a TRAITOR to our country for decades!!’ tweeted Jackson. 

But most Republicans say that there needs to be additional evidence compiled first before going down the impeachment path. 

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio, said Tuesday on Fox & Friends that Joe Biden’s ‘lies are piling up.’

He said the GOP will continue to collect evidence, and did not rule out a future impeachment inquiry.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said last week that President Biden has ‘lied to the American public’ about son Hunter’s business deals – and is ‘hiding info’ like former President Richard Nixon – who was impeached in 1973 and resigned from office. 

He threatened opening an impeachment inquiry of Biden if he does not get full cooperation from federal agencies in the House investigations of Biden family business deals.

Republicans claim Archer’s testimony added to mounting evidence that the then-Vice President was involved in Hunter’s overseas deals that raked in millions from nations including China and Romania. 

However, Democrats say that the phone calls were innocent and did not involve business. 

Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., confirmed Archer told the House Oversight Committee that Joe had been on speakerphone multiple times while his son was talking with business partners – but insisted they were talking about ‘niceties’ like talking about ‘the weather, ‘what’s going on?”

Republican Rep. Andy Biggs then said that, according to Archer, Hunter was on the Ukrainian energy firm board because of his family ‘brand’ – and Joe added ‘value’ and may have helped take down a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the company.

In addition, Archer revealed that Hunter referred to Joe as ‘my guy,’ according to a statement put out by Oversight Republicans. 

Goldman – lead counsel on the first Trump impeachment and the only Democrat present in the room of the testimony – told reporters that Archer ‘indicated that Hunter spoke to his father every day, and approximately 20 times over the course of a 10 year relationship, Hunter may have put his father on the phone with any number of different people, and they never once spoke about any business dealings.’

‘Remember, this is when Beau got ill,’ Goldman said, noting that Hunter and Joe spoke on the phone frequently before Beau’s death in 2015. 

But Republicans had a different retelling of Archer’s account. 

Biggs said as he left the room that Archer had testified ‘Burisma would have gone out of business sooner if the Biden brand had not been invoked. People would be intimidated to really mess with Burisma because of the Biden family brand.’ 

He added that Archer had told the committee he did not know anything about the specific bribery claims made in the FBI’s FD-1023 document.

The internal document, which detailed a conversation with a confidential source who had spoken with Burisma CFO Vadim Pojarski in 2015, said that Pojarski had claimed Joe and Hunter had been paid $5 million each when Joe was vice president in exchange for policy outcomes favorable to the company. 

Archer testified Monday that Pozharskyi and CEO Nikola Zlochevsky put ‘constant pressure’ on Hunter in 2015 to get his father to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma.

Hunter Biden, along with Zlochevsky and Pozharski, reportedly ‘called D.C.’ to discuss Shokin. In March 2016, Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid to Ukraine if Shokin was not fired for corruption – which he eventually was.

Separately, in a 2017 email to Hunter, his uncle Jim and other business partners regarding a deal with Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC, business partner James Gilliar made a reference to the ‘big guy’ getting a 10 percent stake in the lucrative deal. 

Another former associate of the first son, U.S. Navy veteran Tony Bobulinski, publicly claimed in October 2020 that ‘big guy’ was a reference to President Biden. 

Oversight member Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told DailyMail.com in an interview Archer testified that ‘the Bidens were in the actual business of influence peddling.’ 

‘It’s extremely damning,’ she said, claiming that the 20 phone conversations Archer referred to were directly about business deals. 

‘We have Devon Archer coming out and telling the truth that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden spoke over 20 times about his business deals, not about the weather, not about what was for lunch, about his business deals,’ she said. 

Goldman explained Archer’s testimony of the phone calls as such: sometimes Hunter would be at dinner with business partners and take a call from his dad who didn’t know who else was at the table and put it on speaker phone. 

‘There was no indication that he had any idea who was at dinner with them. It was just to say, ‘Hello I’m at dinner’ and there was nothing related to his business dealings.’ 

A Democratic source familiar told DailyMail.com that Archer told the committee ‘Hunter Biden was selling the illusion of access to his father.’ 

Judiciary Chairman and Oversight member Jim Jordan, who was in the room for the deposition, told reporters that Archer had provided the committee with new information and called the meeting ‘very productive.’ 

Archer’s attorney Matthew Schwartz said after his client’s testimony: ‘We are aware that all sides are claiming victory following Mr. Archer’s voluntary interview today. But all Devon Archer did was exactly what we said he would: show up and answer the questions put to him honestly and completely.’

Greene, who communicates regularly with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, said she believed Archer’s testimony could be what ‘moves the needle’ on the potential Biden impeachment inquiry. 

She said that at last week’s weekly meeting of the Republican conference, McCarthy told his members: ‘when it’s time to vote for this, I want you to be with me on this one.’ 

‘We have to have 218 Republicans to vote for it,’ Greene said. ‘And there’s been some that just aren’t there yet, but in my opinion, the information that’s coming out today could really push many of them to get to ‘yes.”

Archer was on Burisma’s board with Hunter, who was paid $50,000 a month for his role. He is facing a lengthy prison sentence for defrauding Native Americans out of millions. 

DailyMail.com reported exclusively this week that Archer was ‘in hiding’ after receiving ‘threats’ leading up to his bombshell testimony.

Archer, 48, was subpoenaed on June 12 by the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating Hunter’s businesses and whether he and other members of the Biden family improperly traded on their connections.

The White House has maintained the president was never ‘in business’ with his son, but the GOP have ramped up their investigation with testimonies from whistleblowers and a slew of other evidence.

Archer, 48, and Hunter both graduated from Yale and were friends for decades. Hunter has reportedly described Devon as his ‘best friend in business.’

Together they formed Rosemont Seneca Partners back in 2009, along with Christopher Heinz, the son-in-law of former Sen. John Kerry, kicking off a period of international business deals and jet-setting.

Archer and Hunter Biden each landed lucrative seats on the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, despite Hunter not having particular expertise in the field. The firm brought in a reported $11 million through the arrangement, based on information gleaned from Hunter’s infamous laptop.

They were photographed golfing with then-Vice President Biden back in 2014.

Dr Anthony Fauci has claimed he would have ‘no problem at all’ if the GOP were to go through his records for connections to the Covid lab leak theory.

The White House’s top pandemic adviser said he would be ‘happy to cooperate’ with any probe because he had ‘nothing to hide’.

Republicans are poised to take the House, which will grant them the power to force Dr Fauci to hand over all official emails, letters, and documents involving him in his capacity as a government worker concerning the pandemic.  

Several GOP lawmakers have signaled their intent to probe Dr Fauci’s involvement in the emergence of the pandemic.

Republican Senator Rand Paul said in February during a podcast interview: ‘If I have subpoena power, we’ll go after every one of [Fauci’s] records.’

The Democrats have kept the Senate in the midterm elections, but the Republicans are likely to take the House, meaning they can issue a subpoena to gain documents from Dr Fauci. 

Dr Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAD), which previously funneled money into the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab at the center of the lab leak theory.

The lab was known to be experimenting with Covid’s closest relatives before the pandemic, and a US intelligence report told of several scientists who worked at the lab who fell ill with a mysterious flu-like sickness in November 2019.

Dr Fauci was a staunch critic of lab leak early in pandemic, denouncing it as a conspiracy theory.

But he has changed his tune in recent months as indirect evidence mounts and there is still no sign of animal host to cement the theory that the virus jumped from animals to humans.

Dr Fauci was quizzed about Paul’s warning on Saturday, The Hill reported.

He told reporters at the National Portrait Gallery gala in Washington: ‘I have nothing to hide at all, despite the accusations that I’m hiding something. 

‘I have nothing that I could not explain clearly to the country and justify.’

Asked if the Republicans not winning control of the Senate would be a ‘relief’, Dr Fauci said: ‘It doesn’t matter to me how the elections go.

‘If they have oversight hearings, I’m happy to cooperate. And if they don’t, that’s good, too. I could get on with other things.’

Dr Fauci, 81, announced in August that he would be stepping down from his role as Biden’s medical advisor in December.

He is set to rake in the highest-ever federal government retirement package in US history with his annual payment exceeding $350,000, according to a Forbes estimate.

The GOP is one seat away from taking control of the House, and Republicans there have also voiced their intentions to investigate Dr Fauci, even after he retires from government service.

In August, House Oversight and Reform Committee ranking member James Comer said in a statement: ‘Retirement can’t shield Dr Fauci from congressional oversight.’

In the same month, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted: ‘Dr Fauci lost the trust of the American people when his guidance unnecessarily kept schools closed and businesses shut while obscuring questions about his knowledge on the origins of Covid.

‘He owes the American people answers. A @HouseGOP majority will hold him accountable.’

In a leaked email from 2020, disgraced scientist Dr Peter Daszak appeared to express gratitude to Dr Fauci for downplaying the theory that the Covid-19 was created in a lab.

Some allege that Dr Fauci, whose agency in 2014 issued a $3.7million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, directly contributed to the pandemic spread by providing funds that were used to support gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

EcoHealth issued WIV nearly $600,000 in sub-awards before the National Institutes of Health (NIH) suspended the grant in July 2020 due its controversial work, Vanity Fair reported.

There are multiple theories surrounding the birth of the Covid pandemic, with natural-origin proponents arguing the virus jumped from a bat host to an intermediate species and then infected humans.

Others suspected a lab-related incident from the ‘inadvertent exposure of a scientist during field research to the accidental release of a natural or manipulated strain during laboratory work,’ the magazine claimed.

There is reportedly a ‘lack of concrete evidence’ to support either theory, prompting journalists, scientists and other sleuths to place scrutiny on Dr Daszak, EcoHealth, and WIV researchers for the work in the lab, as well as Dr Fauci for indirectly supplying U.S. government funds to the facility.’

In June 2021, biologist Jesse Bloom – whom colleagues allege wanted to ‘dig deep and discover the truth’ about how Covid evolved – confronted Dr Fauci by providing him with a preprint of a paper he was seeking to have peer reviewed and published.

Dr Bloom’s paper, which was obtained by Vanity Fair, detailed how early genomic sequences of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, had ‘somehow vanished without a trace’.

The biologist claims the genomic sequences were initially published in a Chinese paper but had since been deleted from NIH databases at the ‘request of researchers in Wuhan’.

Dr Bloom, alleging the deleted genomic sequences could be ‘key to tracking when the virus emerged and how it might have evolved,’ believed the disappearance of the sequences ‘raised the possibility’ that the Chinese government was trying to cover-up evidence about the early spread of Covid.

After receiving the preprint of Dr Bloom’s paper, Dr Fauci and his boss, NIH director Francis Collins, allegedly organized a Zoom meeting with the biologist to discuss his findings.

Four additional scientists, biologist Kristian Andersen and virologist Robert Garry, who were invited by the NIH, and biologists Sergei Pond and Rasmus Nielsen, who were invited by Bloom, attended the call.

After he presented his research, Dr Bloom claims Dr Andersen interjected, claiming his preprint was ‘deeply troubling.’

Andersen reportedly told the research that NIH policy entitled the Chinese scientists to delete their sequences from the database if they wanted to and that it was ‘unethical’ for Dr Bloom to analyze them further.

He also allegedly claimed ‘there was nothing unusual about the early genomic sequences in Wuhan,’ prompting a heated argument between Andersen and Nielsen.

‘Fauci then weighed in, objecting to the preprint’s description of Chinese scientists ‘surreptitiously’ deleting the sequences,’ Vanity Fair stated, claiming the immunologist said: ‘The word was loaded and the reason they’d asked for the deletions was unknown.’