Tag: joe biden

Facebook ‘Content Regulation Manager’ Anna Makanju Advised Joe Biden on Ukraine

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.

Keep reading

Emails: Burisma Adviser Told Hunter Biden His ‘Ultimate Purpose’ Was to ‘Close Down’ Investigations

An adviser to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma suggested in an email in 2015 that Hunter Biden was expected to provide “deliverables” for the company, including the “ultimate purpose” of stopping “cases/pursuits into the company’s founder.

The email, contained in a batch published by Ken LaCorte at the Media Action Network, is reportedly from the same laptop that the New York Post claims is the source for source for a recent series of articles about Hunter Biden’s business dealings. The authenticity of the emails has not been verified.

The batch includes an email in November 2015 from Burisma adviser Vadim Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden’s business partners (on which Hunter Biden was cc’ed), outlining a set of “deliverables.”

The emails make clear that Biden and his partners were expected to arrange meetings with U.S. and Ukrainian officials with the goal of “improving Nikolay’s case and his situation in Ukraine.”

“Nikolay” appears to refer to Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky, according to the Post.

Pozharskyi wrote that the “list of deliverables” included “the ultimate purpose” of stopping “cases/pursuits against Nikolay”:

My only concern is focus to be on the same page re our final goals. With this in mind, I would like to formulate a list of deliverables, including, but not limited to: a concrete course of actions, uncle. meetings/communications resulting in high-ranking US officials in Ukraine (US Ambassador) and in US publicly or in private communication/comment expressing their “positive opinion” and support of Nikolay/Burisma to the highest level of decision makers here in Ukraine :President of Ukraine, president Chief of staff, Prosecutor General, etc

The scope of work should also include organization of a visit of widely recognized and influential current and/or former US policy-makers to Ukraine in November aiming to conduct meetings with and bring positive signal/message and support on Nikolay’s issue to the Ukrainian top officials above with the ultimate purpose to close down for   any cases/pursuits against Nikolay in Ukraine.

Other emails in the trove show a keen awareness of Hunter Biden’s relationship to his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, who was leading U.S. diplomacy with regard to Ukraine.

Keep reading

Hunter Biden Business Associate Flips From Prison, Releases Emails Detailing China Influence-Peddling Operation

Emails from a former Hunter Biden business associate serving time in prison for a 2016 investment scheme reveal that Hunter and his colleagues used their access to the Obama administration to peddle influence to potential Chinese clients and investors – including securing a private, off-the-books meeting with the former Vice President.

The emails, given to investigative journalist Peter Schweizer by former Biden associate Bevan Cooney and published by Breitbart also reveal that in 2011, the younger Biden and his business associates discussed strengthening relations with “China Inc.” as part of a “new push on soft diplomacy for the Chinese.”

As Breitbart notes, these emails are completely unconnected to the Hunter Biden emails released by the New York Post.

Cooney believes he was the “fall guy” for an investment scheme in which Hunter and business associate Devon Archer avoided responsibility. He reached out to Schweizer after the journalist published Secret Empires in 2018. Archer was initially spared jail and handed a second trial, however a federal appeals court reinstated Archer’s fraud conviction in the case last week.

Keep reading

Biden’s son-in-law advises campaign on pandemic while investing in Covid-19 startups

At the same time that Joe Biden’s son-in-law, Howard Krein, has been advising Biden’s campaign on its coronavirus response, Krein’s venture capital business has been running a special initiative to invest in health care startups that offer solutions to the pandemic.

In March, as Covid-19 began spreading in the United States, the investment firm, StartUp Health, unveiled a new coronavirus initiative soliciting pitches from entrepreneurs with products that addressed the outbreak.

Keep reading

Biden Claim of Being ‘Raised’ in Black Church Doesn’t Hold up to Scrutiny

Joe Biden’s disturbing habit of telling audacious lies about his biography took another hit this week when the Washington Free Beacon discovered no one can remember Biden attending a black church he claims to have attended at a teen.

On the campaign trail, Biden has claimed he was “raised” in a black church.

Last year, he said, “I got raised in the black church. We would go sit in Rev. Herring’s church, sit there before we’d go out, and try to change things when I was a kid in college and in high school.”

“I have a lot of black support because that’s where I come from. I was raised in the black church, politically, not a joke,” Biden told the NAACP in January.

The Rev. Herring in the first quote is Rev. Otis Herring, which means the church Biden referred to is the Union Baptist Church in Wilmington, DE. Herring died in 1996, but the Washington Free Beacon reached out to longtime members and they say Biden was not there.

Keep reading

Biden Tries To Gloss Over His Long History of Supporting the Drug War and Draconian Criminal Penalties

During his ABC “town hall” last night, responding to a question from moderator George Stephanopoulos, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden agreed that it was a “mistake” to “support” the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. At the same time, he defended parts of the law, including the Violence Against Women Act, funding to support “community policing” by hiring more officers, and the now-expired federal ban on “assault weapons.” He also implied that the real problem was not so much the law itself but the way that states responded to it. “The mistake came in terms of what the states did locally,” he said.

Both the question and the answer were highly misleading. First, Biden did not merely “support” the 1994 law; he wrote the damned thing, which he has proudly called “the 1994 Biden Crime Bill.” Second, as much as Biden might like to disavow the law’s penalty enhancements now that public opinion on criminal justice has shifted, he was proud of them at the time. Third, the 1994 crime bill is just one piece of legislation in Biden’s long history of supporting mindlessly punitive responses to drugs and crime.

Biden is trying to gloss over a major theme of his political career. “Every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress—every minor crime bill—has had the name of the Democratic senator from Delaware, Joe Biden,” he bragged in 1993. Now he wants us to believe his agenda was limited to domestic violence, community policing, and gun control.

“Things have changed drastically” since 1994, Biden said last night, noting that “the Black Caucus voted” for the crime bill, and “every black mayor supported it.” In other words, now that black politicians and Democrats generally have rejected the idea that criminal penalties can never be too severe, Biden has shifted with the winds of opinion. But as Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) noted during a Democratic presidential debate last year, that does not mean we should forget Biden’s leading role in the disastrous war on drugs and the draconian criminal justice policies that put more and more people in cages for longer and longer periods of time.

Keep reading

Biden sparks confusion after claiming he ‘became a professor’ after leaving the Senate

Former Vice President Joe Biden raised confusion Wednesday during a virtual round table after claiming he became a “professor” when he left the U.S. Senate.

“When I left the United States Senate, I became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,” Biden claimed. “And I’ve spent a lot of time — and the University of Delaware has the Biden School as well, so I’ve spent a lot of time on campus with college students.”

Biden became vice president after leaving the Senate in 2009 and received the title of “Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor” from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. He never taught any classes, according to his own spokesperson at the time.

Biden’s claim immediately drew attention on social media.

“That’s not true,” the Daily Caller’s Greg Price said. “He never taught a class.”

Keep reading