“Conflict of interest” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Anna Makanju, Facebook’s global policy manager for content regulation, advised Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on Ukraine policy while he served as vice president and defended him against charges of wrongdoing with regard to Ukraine when she spoke to the Washington Post last year.
As Breitbart News notes, Makanju’s current role at Facebook may have given her the opportunity to influence the social-media platform’s decision to suppress a recent story from the New York Post that revealed that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, introduced his then-vice president father to an executive at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
The alleged meeting between Joe Biden and the Burisma executive occurred less than a year before the Democrat pressured the Ukrainian government into firing a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.
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Makanju is also a fellow at the Atlantic Council, which partnered with Facebook in 2018 to promote “election integrity” around the world.
Notably, the Atlantic is an internationalist, globalist think tank that is funded by and works with Burisma. As TNA has previously reported, two staffers from House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) have ties to the Atlantic Council.
Makanju’s profile at the Atlantic Council website reads:
Anna Makanju is a nonresident senior fellow with the Transatlantic Security Initiative. She is a public policy and legal expert working at Facebook, where she leads efforts to ensure election integrity on the platform. Previously, she was the special policy adviser for Europe and Eurasia to former US Vice President Joe Biden, senior policy adviser to Ambassador Samantha Power at the United States Mission to the United Nations, director for Russia at the National Security Council, and the chief of staff for European and NATO Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
A 2019 article by the Washington Post notes that Makanju defended Biden, her former boss, from allegations that he acted unethically in his dealings with Ukraine.
According to the article, Makanju was Biden’s senior policy advisor for Ukraine. The piece reads:
Anna Makanju, Biden’s senior policy adviser for Ukraine at the time, also listened to the calls and said release of the transcripts would only strengthen Biden’s case that he acted properly. She helped Biden prepare for the conversations and said they operated at a high level, with Biden using language such as Poroshenko’s government being “nation builders for a transformation of Ukraine.”
A reference to a private company such as Burisma would be “too fine a level of granularity” for a call between Biden and the president of another country, Makanju told The Fact Checker. Instead, she said, the conversation focused on reforms demanded by the International Monetary Fund, methods to tackle corruption and military assistance. An investigation of “Burisma was just not significant enough” to mention, she said.
The resurfacing of Makanju’s statement and her ties to the Burisma-funded Atlantic Council come after the Facebook and Twitter censored the New York Post article detailing the smoking-gun correspondence between Hunter Biden and a Burisma executive, as found on a laptop that Hunter left at a repair shop and never picked up.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” wrote Burisma advisor Vadym Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden, in direct contradiction of Joe Biden’s claims that he never spoke to his son about the latter’s business in Ukraine.
Trump attorney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani called the bombshell the “biggest cover-up I have ever seen.” It was Giuliani who was given the e-mails from the computer repair shop owner and in turn gave it to the Post. The store owner had previously given this evidence to the FBI, which sat on it for a year — even through the impeachment of President Trump, which centered around Biden and Burisma.
Shortly after the Post’s story was published, Facebook limited the spread of the story on its platform.
“While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said on Twitter. “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”
Twitter followed suit, though it walked back its stance after a storm of outrage. The actions of the social-media giants added to complaints from many who believe they are biased and that their selective censorship amounts to election interference.
Now we have a good idea of why Facebook is so pro-Biden: They have at least one high-level former Biden staffer (Makanju) leading their content regulation team.
