Facebook’s global policy manager for content regulation, Anna Makanju, advised Joe Biden on Ukraine policy during his time as Vice President. She also defended Biden from charges of wrongdoing with regards to Ukraine in a comment to the Washington Post last year.
Her position as a senior employee at Facebook handling content regulation may have given her an opportunity to influence the social network’s decision to suppress a New York Post story revealing that Joe Biden’s son Hunter, then on a lucrative contract with the Ukrainian energy giant Burisma, introduced the then-Vice President to an executive at the company.
This occurred less than a year before the then-VP pressured the Ukrainian government into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.
Makanju is also a fellow at the Atlantic Council, which partnered with Facebook in 2018 to promote “election integrity” around the world.
Her profile at the Atlantic Council covers Mananju’s ties to Biden:
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 in the Washington Post notes that Makanju — now in an influential position allowing her to steer Facebook’s content moderation — also specifically defended Biden, her former employer, from allegations of wrongdoing with regards to Ukraine.
The article notes that Makanju was Biden’s senior policy adviser for Ukraine, and that she listened to the former Vice President’s calls with Ukrainian officials.
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.
Breitbart News has reached out to Makanju for comment.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.
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